The Myth of the Persecuted Christian and the Inverted Golden Rule
Brad speaks with Dennison University political scientist Paul Djupe. They discuss Djupe's findings that those Christians who live in homogenous Christian communities are most likely to believe that Democrats, atheists, and others are trying to take their rights away. They also discuss data that shows a large majority of Evangelicals are willing to strip rights from nonbelievers.
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What's up, y'all?
Back again with another episode that we are re-releasing, and that today is with Paul Jupe, who's a sociologist at Denison University, talking about the myth of the persecuted Christian.
We are entering the War on Christmas season, and a lot of people are going to be talking about how certain folks are persecuted in this country.
Paul really lays out just some amazing analysis about Before we get there, I just want to say how much I appreciate all of our patrons.
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them if they could, and you'll be surprised by some of the statistics.
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Here's my interview with Paul Jupe of Denison University.
I am joined today by Paul Jupe, who is a political scientist at Denison University.
Paul has done many things.
He's one of the co-founders of Religion in Public with Ryan Burge, who's been a guest on our show.
He is the editor of a religion and politics series at Temple University Press, has worked with FiveThirtyEight and other outfits, and is here to join us today to talk about his piece on perceived Christian persecution.
So Paul, thanks for being here.
So happy to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
And you wrote in a recent piece about the sort of perceived persecution of Christians.
So Rick Wiles is a kind of Right-wing Christian conspiracy theorist and he's saying that he needs to stockpile ammunition and food and water and medical supplies to defend his family home and church against Democrats.
President Trump has fueled this narrative saying that if he is re-elected Democrats will resist that and that Democrats are coming for the rights of Christians.
Franklin Graham says that demonic forces are pressing for the impeachment of Donald Trump.
This was during the impeachment inquiry.
And so I think we're all familiar with this narrative of Christian persecution, the war on Christmas.
And you would think that that narrative would take shape when Christians are the minority, when they're living in places where there are not that many of them.
When you studied a huge data set, a data set that includes 155,000 interviews, you found something kind of different.
So, could you break down what you found for us?
Yeah, you bet.
So, I was approaching this from the exact same way that you were saying here that, you know, going back to the old finding from Christian Smith that evangelicals are embattled but thriving, that, you know, that form of Persecution or that sense of persecution is really going to bind them together and make them more successful.
But what in fact I found is that the belief that Christians are being discriminated against, which is the nature of the question, actually was much higher in places like Mississippi, where of course there are very many, a vast majority are Christians and most are evangelical Christians.
And that finding was the least, that there was very little discrimination in places like Vermont and Oregon, where there are very few evangelicals.
So it's almost the exact opposite of what you'd expect, right?
People that are living amongst co-religionists, where there are very few people in positions of power to discriminate against Christians, that's where the belief that discrimination is greatest exists.
It's a fascinating finding, and one hypothesis that you put forward in the piece, and this is a piece of Religion in Public and just came out last week, is that it's not from experience that this narrative is taking shape, right?
It's not that people in Mississippi or Georgia or places where there are many Christians are experiencing that on a daily basis at work, at school, and coming home and saying, wow, it's really tough to be a Christian here.
Your hypothesis is that media, leaders, pastors are kind of feeding this narrative into pulpits and living rooms, and that's where people are sort of taking hold of it.
What leads you to that conclusion?
Yeah, well, it's a couple things.
And the first is just the logical conclusion that in a place like Mississippi or Alabama, there really are almost nobody who's an out atheist, for instance.
That owns a local company or is the mayor or governor or what have you that could, you know, impose their values or start to discriminate against against, you know, it's a place where you get asked on as soon as you meet someone.
So what you attend, right?
What are you doing on Wednesday night?
Would you like to come to my house?
Right?
That sort of thing.
So there's there's just no structural opportunity for that kind of discrimination against Christians and like the South for instance.
Um, and then, you know, so you think about a place like, like Vermont, um, you know, maybe there is, but then of course we find almost no evidence that, uh, or no belief, really, that, that, uh, Christians are discriminated against.
So that's, that's the one, one side of it.
The other side is we're starting to build up some more evidence about elites and the kind of communication that they give out.
For instance, I have another data set of thousands and thousands of emails from Christian right organizations.
And so we're starting to mine that data just to find out how much they talk about persecution.
How much of that, you know, whether it's a myth or whether it's true is almost beside the point.
But how much of that communication is getting out And of course, membership in those groups is much more common in places where Christians are in the majority than when they're in the minority.
So that's part of it.
But the other is the lead-in that you gave to this piece, and I gave an overview in that previous piece about the inverted golden rule, as well as this new one at Religion in Public.
I'm just looking at really high-profile folks.
So, you know, you could always find this kind of language that, you know, secular culture is coming for Christians.
You could always find that going back decades, right?
And that's where the war on Christmas kind of notion came up.
It was really a fringe kind of argument that was almost laughable.
But at this point, it's really become mainstream, so much so that you have the President of the United States coming out and saying that Christians' rights are, you know, threatened, that if you let Democrats take over, if you impeach me, they're going to come for you.
It's going to be a civil war.
Ralph Reed said not that long ago that it's going to be open season on Christians.
I mean, really dramatic language from people that have very large audiences.
And so that's mostly where I'm talking about.
It almost can't be experienced, given where people that expose this view are living.
But too, I mean, just really, this kind of language is really prevalent.
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