It's In the Code Ep. 54: Suffering and Persecution
Why do conservative American Christians and Christian nationalists use the rhetoric of being “attacked” and “persecuted”? Why do they perceive themselves to be “suffering” in the contemporary United States, when they experience pronounced social, cultural, and legal privilege? And how do these ideas link up with the broader valorization of “suffering” within some forms of Christian identity? Dan takes on these issues in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Back after a couple-week absence, I had the opportunity to take a small vacation in Greece for a little over a week with my partner.
Never been first kid-free trip since we had kids, which means in almost 14 years, so that was really great.
Cut a lot of pretty funny emails from folks wishing me a good trip.
Really appreciated that.
But glad to be back.
Glad to be back with all of you.
As always, you're the reason that we do this.
We can't do what we do without you, and so we thank you for your support.
Thank you for those of you who are patrons, those of you who donate to us, those of you who listen to the ads and support us in that way.
And as always, I think particularly with this series, those of you who reach out with ideas and topics, please keep those coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I will admit, I did not spend my time reading my Straight white American Jesus emails in great detail while I was gone, but I'm catching up on those now.
As always, I respond to as many as I can, but I do read them, do value them.
All of you continue to have great feedback, great comments, interesting questions, fascinating responses to the material we talk about in this series, so please keep that coming.
Again, Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj.com.
So I'm going to dive into today's episode, and it kind of builds on the previous two.
The previous two episodes, it's been a while, so if you've just listened to those, good for you, but if you're listening weekly, and it's been two or three weeks.
A couple episodes ago, we looked at the idea of having the quote-unquote, a servant's heart, and what that meant, and this notion of a servant's heart.
And following up on that, the next episode looked at the way that this idea of serving links up with the idea of suffering, and the idea that comes from the Bible that Jesus was the quote-unquote suffering servant, and the way that this kind of makes suffering into an ideal, an expectation, even a goal within certain kinds of Christian awareness and Christian thought.
And we talked about that.
What I want to do this week is build again on this with a kind of third conceptual link from the idea of servant's heart to the way that that links up to suffering.
And today I want to look at the way that the idea of suffering becomes mobilized politically and socially to license appeals to Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy.
Okay.
Obviously, Christian nationalism is a topic we talk about a lot on the podcast.
It's kind of what the podcast is really about.
But it also connects this idea, this connection of suffering with the politics of Christian nationalism and culture wars and so forth.
It also connects the questions that I get from all kinds of people.
I get this from individuals who are deconstructing again.
Just to remind folks, I'm a practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I work through that with clients who are trying to navigate their way through issues of religious trauma.
If that's something that feels like it might be relevant to you, I invite you to check out CTRR, Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
But a lot of my clients and people that I bump into more broadly, people that I encounter in the world, people who email me, bring up this issue of how it is the Christian nationalists will talk about suffering or persecution.
I've had discussions with journalists about this.
other scholars about this, just general listeners to the episode, excuse me, not to the episode, to the series, both this series to our weekly roundups, to the interviews that Brad does with so many people, on and on and on.
And here's kind of the question that comes up.
How can conservative and mostly white, we're talking primarily about white Christians, how can conservative white Christians in America, who are a minority of the U.S.
population, How can they claim that they are politically or socially persecuted, given the fact that they enjoy political and social authority and legal protections and influence that far exceed what any other religious minority group in America experiences?
How is it that this culturally and politically dominant group, which is a minority, How can they possibly claim that they are politically or socially persecuted?
And that's what I want to talk about.
Not in full.
It's a hugely complex question with a lot of different contributing factors.
We talk about it all the time.
Brad has written a book on it.
I've written a book that talks about it.
We reference other people.
It's hugely complex.
But what I want us to think about for the next few minutes here is that the valorization of suffering, that is, this idea that suffering is something that Christians ought to experience, that it is even promised by God that authentic Christians will suffer, the valorization of suffering is a part of understanding that rhetoric, and more importantly, I think, the force and energy behind Christian nationalism.
Okay?
And here's how I think part of that happens, okay?
So the idea that Christians are called to suffer.
You have in the New Testament places where Paul says that Christians are going to suffer and Jesus says Christians are going to suffer.
You kind of get a shift from a warning about suffering to the assurance that Christians will suffer.
To the idea that Christians are called to suffer, that is, that suffering is a constitutive part of authentic Christian identity.
If you're not suffering for your faith, quote-unquote, maybe you're not the kind of Christian you should be.
Maybe you can't know that you're an authentic Christian unless you're experiencing suffering.
That's the way that it shifts.
And it can morph one further dimension, which is the idea that Christians are, by default, suffering.
That is, not just, oh, when you experience suffering, you shouldn't be surprised about that.
That's what's going to happen for Christians.
Not just, hey, if you're an authentically living Christian, living out your Christian faith, and so forth, you're going to experience suffering, to, oh, you're a Christian, that means you suffer.
That means you are suffering right now.
Whether you know it or not, you are suffering right now.
And this is particularly pronounced in any context, including our own, including the contemporary United States, where, objectively speaking, religious persecution is simply not an experiential reality.
We don't live in a context where Christians are going to lose their life because they're Christians, where they are going to have property confiscated because they are Christians, where they're going to be unable to get housing or a job because they are Christians, where they're going to be denied citizenship because they are Christians.
Folks, as you probably know, these are all realities that religious minorities of different kinds face around the world today.
Those aren't things that a privileged religious group experiences.
And for most of Western Christian history, that has been Western Christians.
Way back in the time of the Roman Empire, Christianity went from being a persecuted religious minority group That's the kind of group that Paul is talking about.
That's the kind of group that the gospel writers are addressing is a minority religious group.
It becomes the state-sanctioned religion.
And for the next 2000 years, it is the sort of typically official religion of Western societies.
So within that framework, when you start having this notion that Christians undergo suffering for their faith, it can't be the kind of suffering we're describing there.
Suffering, what suffering is, has to be softened, right?
So that anything that kind of makes us uncomfortable, anything that challenges us in some way becomes suffering.
Because real suffering, things that anybody sort of objectively would describe as suffering, it's no longer a reality for Western Christians.
It is for some Christian groups in parts of the world throughout history.
It is for some Christian groups in parts of the world today, but certainly not for white conservative Christians in America.
Okay?
So one of the things that happens is that in the absence of real suffering, suffering becomes softened so that anything that we experience that might make us uncomfortable or cause some consternation, that becomes defined as suffering.
So what happens when we put these ideas together?
What happens when a politically and culturally privileged religious minority, like white conservative Christians in America, what happens when a politically and culturally privileged religious minority nevertheless believes that it is suffering?
That's the first piece.
A group that experiences cultural and social and political privilege, legal privilege, nevertheless believes that it is suffering, and when the idea of suffering, what suffering is, is softened to include basically anything that makes members of that group uncomfortable, what do you get?
You get precisely what we have in this country at present.
You get a religious minority group that perceives something like meaningful equality between themselves and everyone else as persecution, as an attack on them, as evidence that they are undergoing suffering, that they are experiencing suffering.
So this is where we get the coded nature of this language, and this is the part to understand, is that when you hear politicians or others or Uncle Ron at the cookout talk about how Christians in America are under siege, Christians are being persecuted, the religious liberty of Christians is being taken away, you've the religious liberty of Christians is being taken away, you've got to understand the code that is at work there, the coded nature of this language.
Appeals to persecution and suffering are a routine part of the rhetoric that Christian conservatives and nationalists employ in America.
Every Everybody knows this.
All of you listening to this who care about Christian nationalism, who listen to the things we talk about on this podcast, you all know that this is part of how these groups talk.
But here's the thing that I think a lot of people don't get, and I've had this conversation with scholars, I've had this conversation with journalists, I've had this conversation with clients who do recognize it, often with others in their life who have this.
This is the part that a lot of people don't understand.
Those who talk this way often believe that rhetoric.
It feels true for them.
It is not the case for most of them that they recognize that they're not experiencing suffering and they nevertheless talk that way.
They feel that they are persecuted and that they suffer.
The idea that Christians, if they are true and authentic in their faith, experience suffering, it is so much a part of the identity of members of this religious minority that for them it has to be true that they are suffering.
Rather than looking around saying, well, you know what?
I don't know if I suffer.
I mean, I certainly don't feel like, I don't know, Jewish people in Nazi-occupied territories.
I don't feel like the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Maybe I'm not suffering.
Rather, you start looking around to find where the suffering in your existence is.
It must be there.
That's what being a Christian means.
It means you're suffering.
And what that means for them is that given that they and their groups have experienced their historical and political and cultural preeminence in this country, they've experienced that to the detriment of other social groups.
And what we've seen in this country from, you know, really over its history overall, but accelerated since the 1960s up to the present, is other groups Demanding political recognition, demanding political rights, demanding equality.
And the giving political rights to them necessarily diminishes the privilege enjoyed by conservative Christians and Christian nationalists, which they experience as persecution, as suffering.
So here's what all of this means, and stick with me.
I know this could be a little complicated, but here's what brings this all together.
A country in which members of diverse religious groups, and I'm including here the so-called nuns, people who are not affiliated with a religion.
I'm including atheists, as well as people who identify with some religious group.
A country in which members of diverse religious groups are politically and socially and legally equal.
A society marked by equality.
Stick with me here.
A society marked by equality is experienced as a form of suffering by millions of conservative Christians and Christian nationalists.
Equality is, in their experience, an attack on them.
Granting equal rights to somebody else brings suffering on them, in their experience and their understanding.
Equality is a form of persecution, and it results in suffering, which means equality needs to be combated.
Because if equality is a form of persecution, if social and political equality is an experience of suffering, and if suffering is evidence of the authenticity of one's faith, what that means is for these Christians, hey, we're suffering because our preeminence has been taken away.
That means that our preeminence is what we have to fight for.
God wants us to be socially and politically and legally preeminent.
Otherwise, we wouldn't suffer by losing that.
And I want people to hear that.
This is not just the idea that they're seeking, you know, greater rights because they want to have greater rights.
It is for them a divine mandate that God wants them, desires them, indeed commands them to exercise social and political and legal supremacy.
That's the weight of this.
That's what's at work when we hear the language of persecution and suffering and we hear somebody say that their religious freedom is being limited and so forth.
Okay?
So what we encounter in contemporary Christian nationalism in the U.S.
Are the political and social consequences of a kind of persecution complex born out of this valorization of suffering at the heart of so many forms of Christian expression?
Again, there's more to Christian nationalism than just that.
But this is a constitutive feature.
One of the things that interests me about Christian identity and Christian nationalism in the U.S.
is an understanding of how it is experienced by those who participate in that identity.
And this is a constitutive part of that.
And this is what I think lends Christian nationalism the zeal and force that we see in it.
I think it also helps us to understand why Christian nationalists deploy this rhetoric of suffering and persecution, despite the lack of evidence that would be compelling to anyone outside of these groups.
And again, they didn't invent this, this idea that we have to redefine suffering because we're a culturally dominant group that doesn't actually suffer in any objective sense of the term.
That goes back hundreds and in some places thousands of years in Christian experience.
It's not new.
We just live in sort of the latest expression of that, okay?
And I want to drive home one last point, and this is a point I make all the time.
I make it in the podcast.
I make it in my writings.
This is a point that I'm always trying to emphasize.
is that for millions of American Christians, this experience of suffering and persecution, it's real.
They believe that they are experiencing suffering.
They believe that other people's claims to rights are an attack on them.
There's no doubt that for lots of religious political leaders, maybe some church leaders, denomination leaders, that when they deploy the rhetoric of persecution and suffering, it's a political calculation.
It's a tool that they use to motivate others.
But folks, the reason it works as a political motivator is that for millions of American Christians, they think this is real.
They truly believe that they are attacked and that they experience suffering and that this shows the authenticity of their faith, the rightness of what they fight for.
The fact that people oppose their efforts to instill Christian supremacy in this country That is the evidence of the rightness of the Christian supremacy they try to put into place.
That's what makes this so difficult to combat.
That's why I run out of patience with sort of the notion that just fact-checking people will somehow counter this.
I run out of patience talking to those who think that it's just a matter of theology and belief and intellectual arguments.
It runs deeper than that.
Because it is, wait for it, it's in the code.
The language of suffering, the affirmation of suffering, the notion that what we are experiencing is a form of suffering is in the code of Christian consciousness for millions of American Christians.
All right, that was a lot.
I feel like I moved fast.
Would love to talk with you further.
Send me those emails.
Let me know if you've got questions, thoughts on this.
Let me know other topics that open up out of this that you would like to hear about.
And I will keep compiling those and working on those.
I've said for a long time, started this series, had no idea it would go this long, but I'll keep plugging away on it as long as people feel like it's useful, as long as the ideas keep coming.
As long as people continue reaching out with things that we can decode, ways that we can make sense of this kind of complex reality we live in.
Again, Daniel Miller Swage, danielmillerswaj.com I would love to hear from you, and as always, please be well until we meet again.
