There are some Christians in the United States who are convinced that persecution of Christians is a thing in America.
There’s a spectrum, of course. If someone is being beheaded for their religious beliefs, then they are of course being persecuted. Same for prison, torture, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum, if someone flips a middle finger at a Muslim because they don’t like Islam, is that “persecution?” Or makes anti-LGBT comments at a lesbian?
persistent annoyance or harassment.
“his persecution at the hands of other students”
So there is apparently a huge range of actions that may be considered persecution, from teasing to torture. I would consider the threshold to be somewhere between those two, depending on context and on the persistence of the behavior.
It’s not a matter of degree; you can have mild persecution or severe persecution. What is necessary is something systemic and sustained; an isolated incident of poor treatment is not “persecution”. Persecution requires, I think, that people should be actively seeking out you or the group of which you are a member for intentional ill-treatment based on some characteristic of you or your group to which they object.
These Christians define persecution as “we are not allowed to use the government to persecute people we don’t like, such as homosexuals and independent-minded women, and we regard this limitation as persecution of ourselves.”
Naturally this is completely stupid and these people should be roundly mocked and then ignored.
Should. But somehow governments in the US keep getting elected that take these lunatics seriously.
Threshold for what, exactly? Since even you admit it’s a spectrum, it can’t be the threshold for “what is persecution” since they’re all persecution.
So is it the threshold for persecution … :
“… we should do something about as a society”?
“… one can start Straight Dope rants about without being laughed at”?
“… Velocity should give a shit about”?
We usually say that Christians are not persecuted in Western society, even though they claim they are. I think Velocity is asking what the minimum would be for those claims to in fact be considered true.
Because you do get people who flip off Christians and make anti-Christian comments at Christians.
Personally, I think the idea that it needs to be more than isolated incidents is a good one. I don’t agree it needs to be systemic, though.
I addressed that, and the error of asking for a threshold when there’s a spectrum.
And that’s persecution.
Sure, but both examples the OP used for the “light” end of the spectrum were things that are not isolated.
The OP doesn’t ask if it’s the idiosyncratic nature of the targeting that renders it persecution, they ask “how strong”. So I can set out to torture people with tattoos of pug dogs. That’s not persecution, that’s me being a nutbar. Or I can just make rude signs at Christians, and that is persecution.
It’s the fucking gnat-kick of persecution, though. And vastly outweighed by the persecution all other religious groups (And non-theists) encounter in the same Western society.
ISTM the key aspect of it being “persecution” is it being something that leads to denying your free, equal, fair participation in society. By that standard it is to laugh to say that “Christians” or even Evangelicals or Fundamentalists are persecuted in today’s USA as a general social phenomenon.
Yes, an obnoxious bigot who hates your brand of Christianity and wants to harass you into moving away from his street is engaging in persecution, but a private, individual version thereof.
In the past, though, yes, specific local-minority brands of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) or Christian-adjacent New Religions (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses), etc. were subjected to disenfranchisement, violence, restrictions to free exercise. And mind you, that was driven by other putative “Christians” with the civil authority’s aquiescence or even direct support.
A quote that explains the origin of, almost all, modern claims of Christian persecution,
“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?” Padway raised his eyebrows.
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
“You mean you’re persecuted because the heretics and such are not?”
“Certainly, isn’t that obvious? We won’t stand–What’s your religion, by the way?”
L. Sprague De Camp - Lest Darkness Fall
Substitute Goths, Orthodox, Arians, Monophysites, and Nestorians as needed. Jews is usually, sadly, safe.
I have re-read this passage numerous times, and it seems more brilliant each time. This is EXACTLY what Evangelicals mean by “persecution.” There are all these LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, and so on walking around and living their lives unmolested, as if they too were Americans! Evangelicals want to persecute them so bad that they feel persecuted when the law prevents them from taking out their rage and hate against others not like them.
Diary of an Autodidact - Source
“The government is putting restrictions on us, which is persecution.”
But the operative thing there is more that they want to dominate public spaces with Christianity- 10 Commandments at the courthouse, Christian iconography at Christmas, and so forth, and restricting any of that gets labeled as “persecution” even though in most cases, it’s just saying “You can’t have a nativity scene that takes up 3/4 of the courthouse lawn at Christmas, and give the Jews a 3 foot wide menorah over on the back lawn of the courthouse.”
My intuitive sense of what persecution means involves the idea that the group in power (not necessarily the government) is going out of their way to pick on/cause hardship to a specific other group. For example, European governments were not friendly to out groups in centuries past, but they went out of their way to screw the Jews, which would be persecution, versus just garden-variety ill treatment that everyone different got.
