ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

PERSECUTION AND REVENGE IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

There is already a lot going on here and I haven’t even started.

Kia Ora Tatou and Welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

My teenage daughter went to a local Baptist youth group for a couple of years. It was a close-knit group, and she enjoyed it. One evening, they played a game where they paired up and ran around the streets pretending to be persecuted Christians. They sneaked around outside the houses hiding in bushes and pretending they would be killed unless they found the safe places where Christians were welcome. It was super fun, pretending your neighbourhood is dangerous, that everyone is out to get you, just the two of you against the world, until you find your safe house. My daughter put her own spin on things, as usual. She pretended she and her friend were persecuted lesbians.

I was generally cool with the youth group, despite their conservatism. They seemed like nice people who cared about each other. I thought the running around the streets in the evening was cool too. What I didn’t know at the time, was that this is a common thing, apparently; it is called “persecution games”. These are common among evangelical Christian youth groups, according to Talia Lavin in her new book “Wild Faith”, which has some harrowing material about Christian parenting. In my daughter’s case, the young people were not expected to identify with persecuted Christians here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are a secular bunch here, for sure, but you’d be hard pressed to find Christians being persecuted. This youth group was learning about Christians in China. However, in the USA, Christians believe they are persecuted at home, and this has ramifications for politics and social policy.

Persecution is baked into Christianity. And persecution is important in the Cosmic War. Persecution is how we know we are on the right side. Persecution is a sign that the end times are upon us. It is also a sign of the degeneracy of the society around us. They hate us because they hate the truth, and they hate what we stand for, what we model, and they hate those things because they are degenerate. Because - and here we go, here we go again - they are evil. They are Satanic, even.

If you went to Sunday School, you were taught that Christians were systematically persecuted throughout the Roman Empire, that the persecution was driven from the top of pagan society, that martyrdom was common, and gory as. Christians were thrown to lions, right, and tortured, and they had to hide in catacombs (I loved that word!) and worship in secret. Becoming a Christian carried great risk. You were throwing in your lot with that small band of virtuous rebels I keep going on about.

Except there is not the evidence to prove that kind of persecution in the early days of the Christian community. Prof. Candida Moss, in her book “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom”, trawls the evidence. As usual, it’s complicated. There was a period of systematic persecution under the Emperor Decius, from 249CE to 251. Decius, as insecure as any Roman emperor, made an edict that everyone in the empire must make a sacrifice for the safety of the empire. This created a crisis of authority among Christians, and many prominent Christians refused and were killed. What is important here is that they were killed not for being Christians, but for refusing to make a sacrifice. Christians were a difficult lot, back then. They would refuse to give even their names in court, saying only that they were Christians. They were at times punished not for being Christians, but for being ornery and secretive and just bloody annoying. This was a time when the penalty for just about everything was death. Pissing off the emperor, or his representatives, most definitely meant death. It seemed as if Christians were being irrational, refusing to do simple things that could exonerate them, almost seeking death. And sometimes they were seeking death. There is a case of a group of Christians turning up at the office of the governor, demanding to be martyred. The governor sent them away, disappointed.

In the New Testament, Matthew 5:10–12 promises blessings to those who are persecuted for righteousness. The verse states, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Revelation 2:10 states “Don't be afraid of what you are going to suffer. Look! The devil is going to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested. For ten days you will undergo suffering. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the victor's crown of life”. (ISV). The New Testament sees persecution as inevitable. To be truly Christian you need to be persecuted. No wonder early Christians sought it out. They knew they were promised the victor’s crown of life.

A couple of centuries later, when there was a lot of conflict among different Christian groups, heretics were considered to be the persecutors of the Church. This is interesting, because now it was the mainstream institution that was claiming to be persecuted, by people who claimed to be Christian but who were heretics. Persecution was happening within Christian society. Also, martyrdom stories were very spicy and interesting. Later martyrdom stories were gorier and more baroque and outrageous than earlier ones. It was a good idea to have a few martyr stories on hand, and even better were some relics, so that people would visit your church. Very few of these stories can even be considered as factual. However, the belief in systematic, violent persecution became embedded into the Christian identity. It is a Story: a part of the founding myth, an explanation for suffering and difficulty – and it leads to another Story, that of revenge fantasy.

Apocalyptic literature is often revenge fantasy. Not all of it, but the bits that predict the future often are. That’ll learn you, king of Babylon! Says Daniel. And especially, that’ll learn you, Nero! Says John of Patmos. The Book of Revelation is punishment for Rome, and also for those in the Church of whom John disapproves. Right from the get-go, right from the seven letters John writes at the beginning of Revelation. John has Jesus speaking to him, the only time Jesus speaks since the resurrection. Jesus threatens a female church leader who has been prophesying. Jesus says he will throw her onto a bed, and those who (presumably) then rape her will be punished, and then he will kill her children. It is hard to read Revelation for lots of reasons, but the sheer violence of John’s retaliation is one of them. So, the Cosmic War ends in a massive revenge fantasy, with everyone dead except the few who are on your side. The only way this can avoid seeming petty, is to provide a rationale of extreme persecution. There is no doubt that John felt persecuted.

Feeling persecuted does not completely map onto being persecuted. The fear of loss can feel like loss. Not having what you expected to have can feel as bad as never having had it in the first place.

Religious extremists, conspiracy theorists, and political extremists can feel persecuted beyond what is actually happening to them. There are examples outside of Christianity, such as Hindutva in India and Islamic jihadists, but for now I want to talk only about conservative and evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States.

Talia Lavin’s book mentioned above describes how conservative evangelical Christianity is a kind of closed world. Everything mainstream is there, but it’s Christian. Movies. Rock music. Art. Therapy. Education. Other ex-Christians I follow, such as Brad Onishi of the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast, Chrissy Stroop of “The Bugbear Dispatch”, and David Farrier of “Webworm” seem to confirm this. It is not exactly a cult, because it is so big, and has some diversity, but it has the high demand of a cult. It must feel like it is all you need. The world outside must be pretty scary, all that sinning and so on. You wouldn’t want to go there. In a previous article I wrote about special knowledge, how it sets up the problem of what to do with people who don’t have the special knowledge you do. In this case, it seems like the people who don’t have the special knowledge are doomed. But meanwhile, you are persecuted.

About 67% of the United States population is Christian. This is a small decline from ten years ago. 48.5% of the population are Protestant. About 26% of Christians are Evangelical. The largest single denomination is Southern Baptist. That is a lot of Christians. Only two congresspeople are not affiliated to a religion. In 2021, 88% of congresspeople were Christian’ higher than the general population. Religious affiliation is highly normative, despite the proud US history of the separation of church and state. I think it is fair to say that the 26% of Evangelical Christians have a fair amount of influence, compared to their size.

“The time has come to prepare ourselves for persecution. Our identity has put us at odds with the culture, which is now going to do everything in its power to punish us. Our commitment to living authentically is going to cost us — perhaps everything — because we refuse to compromise what we believe to be the truth. The dominant voices in our culture hate us, and will stop at nothing to eliminate us. Our jobs, our families, even our lives are now in jeopardy because of who we are.”

This is pastor Derek Penwell, responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015. This is persecution: that LGBT+ rights are one of many existential threats to Christians. Abortion is an existential threat. Liberal culture is an existential threat. The separation of church and state is especially a threat, for Christians who are dominionists, which means they believe Christians should prepare for the return of Christ by taking over all aspects of politics and society. The main threat is thus internal, within American society, from non-Christians, especially Muslims, and from the wrong sorts of Christians, like Mormons and Roman Catholics, and liberal theologians. It has also, relatively recently, been external, as the sense of persecution increased after 9/11 and fear of Muslims became widespread in American society generally.

Let’s go back to the New Testament, that shows us to be Christian is to be persecuted. Remember that these early Christians believed that Christ would return very soon, and the Cosmic War would end. We are always in the end times. Christ is always about to return, and persecution is a sign of his return. T It is a necessary part of being Christian – not for many Christians, but for some, and some of those are the ones with power.

I want to leave the last word to Candida Moss:

The myth of persecution is theologically grounded in the division of the world into two parties, one backed by God and the other by Satan...And everyone knows you cannot reason with the devil. Even when the devil is not explicitly invoked, the rhetoric of persecution suggests that the persecutors are irrational and immoral and the persecuted are innocent and brave. In a world filled with persecution, efforts to negotiate or even reason with one's persecutors are interpreted as collaboration and moral compromise. We should not attempt to understand the other party, because to do so would be to cede ground to injustice and hatred

I think this describes the Cosmic War pretty clearly.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you come back! Ma te wa.

Further exploration:

The “exvangelicals” I mention above are all useful here.

Candida Moss is interviewed by Jacob Berman on History Valley on YouTube if you want to chill to a video instead of all the flat out reading I do