Who is confined?

These days, a reader doesn’t have to get far into the pages of WORLD, both print and digital, before running head-on into another example of secular attempts to intimidate Christians upholding Christian standards.

In the last issue, WORLD ran two stories on the threatened accreditation of Gordon College. In this issue, we cover Christian groups pushed off college campuses in California and elsewhere. On our website we’ve run several stories on how Houston city officials responded to a lawsuit in connection with its recently passed “bathroom ordinance” (allowing humans of either sex their choice of public restrooms)—by issuing subpoenas for the sermons and private correspondence of certain pastors who had nothing to do with the lawsuit.

As I began writing this column, another story strode across the internet: a tale of two pastors in Idaho who conduct weddings in their own chapel. They now face heavy fines or prison time if they refuse to perform same-sex weddings. It certainly feels as if the official pile-ons are coming thick and fast.

And private individuals hostile to Christianity are less prone to keep it to themselves, however irrelevant to the subject under discussion. When the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endured a congressional grilling over his handling of the Ebola threat, former national security spokesman Tommy Vietor tweeted, “Only in America can people who don’t believe in evolution or global warming browbeat actual professionals leading the CDC.” Only in America can a minor official mock believers while exposing his own articles of faith.

On the Slate website, writer Brian Palmer engaged in some hand-wringing over Christian medical missionaries who sacrifice years of their lives, and sometimes their own health, to serve the poorest of the poor on the other side of the world. Palmer expressed concern about a lack of uniform medical standards, but what really gets to him is these people’s motivation. “It’s great that they’re doing the Lord’s work, but why do they have to talk about Him so much?” In other words, why do Christian doctors have to be so, you know, Christian?

‘The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good—one that clashes in some respects with liberalism’s moral creed—is increasingly intolerable.’—Damon Linker

“Why do so many liberals despise Christianity?” asks Damon Linker in The Week. His conclusion is that modern liberalism has cast itself as the arbiter of public good: “The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good—one that clashes in some respects with liberalism’s moral creed—is increasingly intolerable.” Might “somebody, somewhere” have a legitimate alternative? No: In an agnostic democracy, politics is the only savior. To Christians they say, “This town square isn’t big enough for the both of us.” Rather than answer objections point by point, liberalism treats other views as prejudices that don’t deserve a response.

“Why I HATE Christianity” is blogger Cathy Cooper’s take on the subject, posted on DebunkingChristianity.blogspot.com. She doesn’t mess around with mocking Christians but goes straight to their source: the repulsive doctrine that any sin can be canceled by merely believing in Jesus. From this kind of “moral laxity” it’s a straight shot to wife-beating and murder. Her cartoonish view of the faith reflects many liberals’ crayon portraits of the opposition. They seek to confine Christians in the margins of society.

But they are the ones confined, in a walled Jericho of prejudice and contempt. Imagine an updated Saul of Tarsus, blogging daily about his own hatred for the new faith: “foolishness to the Greeks, a stumbling block to the Jews,” the stench of death. Then he shuts down his laptop, grabs his coat, and heads off to an appointment in Damascus. Years later, he writes this: “Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

Such were some of us—mockers and haters, enemies not of Christians but of Christ Himself. Now we march around the walls of hardened secularism, pelting its stones with prayer and pleading in His name, “Be reconciled to God.” It’s a good place to be.

Email jcheaney@wng.org