Remember all that talk about conservatives giving up on liberal democracy<\/a>? Conservative commentator David French has been urging conservatives to focus on winning hearts and minds, on persuading people to their point of view, and on working within our system of liberal democracy rather than working to upend it by force. I didn\u2019t realize this was such a controversial viewpoint, but it seems that in some quarters it is<\/a>.<\/p>\n The contrary view is that conservatives should dispense with trying to persuade people or with creating change the electoral system, and instead use the power of the state to enforce conservative political and moral positions on everyone else whether they like it or not. On second thought, I am<\/em> familiar with this viewpoint.<\/p>\n At Vox, Jane Coaston has argued that<\/a> the disagreement is \u201cmore aimed at libertarian influence on conservatism than at French himself.\u201d Should conservatives aim for a sort of live and let live approach, taking aim only at what they see as discrimination against conservatives and attempts to suppress conservatives\u2019 freedom of speech? Or should conservatives work to reinstate a traditional moral order on the population as a whole?<\/p>\n After a flurry of back-and-forth, French waded back in to defend his perspective in a National Review article titled\u00a0Black American History Should Give Evangelicals a Sense of Perspective \u2014 and Hope<\/a>. \u201cThe promise of liberty upon which black Americans called is still true for contemporary Christians in far less trying times,\u201d reads his byline.<\/p>\n French contends that evangelicals shouldn\u2019t give up hope in their ability to create change and achieve fair treatment in the future, even though they are discriminated against and badly treated in the public square today.<\/p>\n He begins as follows:<\/p>\n One of the most striking aspects of modern Evangelical political thinking is its projection of inevitable decline, as if the present trends of secularization and increasing religious intolerance represent the first stages of an irreversible slide. The result is a fearful defensive crouch in the face of challenges to religious liberty that are serious but not grave and workplace discrimination that is troublesome but not crippling.<\/p>\n Another way to frame the challenge is that in parts of American society \u2014 especially in higher education and Silicon Valley \u2014 it\u2019s not easy<\/em> to be a traditional, orthodox Christian any longer. You\u2019ll face threats to your liberty, to your career, and to your social standing. There\u2019s a real (and often justified<\/a>) concern that publicly stating the most basic tenets of your faith could result in suffering very real personal and professional costs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I understand what French is trying to do here. French is worried that evangelicals are giving up on liberal democracy, due to a sense that they have irrevocably lost the culture wars. He worries that evangelicals\u2014and conservatives in general\u2014are turning toward a politics of coercion, a theocracy that no longer cares about winning the culture, about changing hearts and minds, but only about achieving its goals by force.<\/p>\n French, then, is gently reminding evangelicals that, even when things were much worse for African Americans, they never gave up on America, or on liberal democracy.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s put aside the question of support for Donald Trump for a moment. He\u2019s not going to dominate American politics forever. He may not even dominate it two years from now. American Evangelicals \u2014 especially the conservative Evangelicals who feel most culturally embattled \u2014 face questions that will define their public posture potentially for generations.<\/p>\n They would do well to learn some valuable lessons from black Americans, especially the black church \u2014 a community that faced infinitely greater odds, confronted a far more hopeless future, and yet ultimately made extraordinary strides towards securing the blessings of American liberty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Once again,\u00a0I understand what David French is trying to do.\u00a0<\/em>However.<\/p>\n To begin with, I\u2019m not sure French\u2019s history is quite right. The civil rights movement succeeded because the federal government stepped in and forced<\/em> states to give African Americans the vote; forced<\/em> private companies to serve African Americans; and forced<\/em> school districts to oversee desegregation plans. Civil rights activists didn\u2019t entertain much hope that\u00a0white southern racists would change their minds, or be voted out.<\/p>\n Perhaps French is thinking about the role the courts played, and arguing that evangelicals should look to the courts to protect their rights too; perhaps he\u2019s thinking of the many decades of work African Americans put in before<\/em> the federal government and the courts arrived at a point where they were willing to do something.<\/p>\n It is absolutely true that images of civil rights protests in the south and the violence with which they were met\u2014broadcast on TV and in newspapers\u2014changed minds in the north. If these minds hadn\u2019t been changed, the federal government would very likely have left things in the south to go on as they had for nearly a century. (There\u2019s also the little business of these images making the U.S. look bad, in the middle of the Cold War.)<\/p>\n In his article, French explains this change as follows:<\/p>\n [S]everal years ago I had a fascinating conversation with the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an early member of the Congressional Black Caucus. I asked him why the civil-rights movement \u2014 after so many years of subjugation and segregation \u2014 had made such rapid legal gains in the early 1960s. His response was immediate. \u201cAlmighty God and the First Amendment.\u201d The First Amendment gave them a voice, and God softened Americans\u2019 hearts, enabling them to finally hear the message.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n French\u2019s argument seems to be that evangelicals shouldn\u2019t conclude that they have irrevocably lost the culture wars; turn to the government to put force behind their rights or moral code; and give up on the power of the first amendment and the power to persuade people to recognize their rights and the validity of their arguments. He argues that black Americans didn\u2019t give up on their ability to persuade, that even in the darkest hour black Americans believed in the promise of America and in their ability to realize that promise.<\/p>\n I\u2019m still not sure this is quite<\/em> the correct reading of civil rights history. There actually\u00a0were<\/em> some African Americans who gave up on white America\u2019s ability to change; the civil rights movement wasn\u2019t a monolith. Regardless, a piece of this argument is certainly correct: Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the 1619 Project that black Americans have worked for centuries to force America to live up to its promise. \u201cAmerica wasn\u2019t a democracy, until black Americans made it one,\u201d she wrote<\/a>.\u00a0French\u2019s intention, in this article, is to warn evangelicals against giving up on the promise of America, and the American system.<\/p>\n Perhaps I\u2019m letting a focus on French\u2019s history get in the way of addressing a more important point: French\u2019s comparison of evangelicals\u2019 current situation to that of African Americans under Jim Crow. To be sure, he states that evangelicals live in \u201cfar less trying times\u201d than did black Americans during the civil rights era. But the fact that he felt the need to make the comparison at all shows the depth of the evangelical persecution complex.<\/p>\n Just how trying are<\/em> the times, for evangelicals? Certainly, companies like Chick-Fil-A, which fund anti-gay organizations, has come in for heavy criticism among those who are progressive and left-leaning, and the American consensus has swung strongly in favor of gay marriage. But if I may just point this out, there is still<\/em> a Chick-Fil-A on every corner, and LGBTQ youth are still<\/em> being kicked out of their homes by evangelical parents.<\/p>\n I attended a large state college in the Midwest. I got nervous laughter from my classmates when I stated in class that I believed the world was created 6,000 years ago, but I still got an A. And guess what? Campus Crusade for Christ as the biggest organization operating on campus. Whole crowds of students from my dorm would flow out in the direction of the large campus hall where CRU met like clockwork every Thursday just before 7pm.<\/p>\n Evangelicals who cry persecution have never had to live a day as an atheist in rural America, or as a Muslim basically anywhere<\/em> in America. They mistake disagreement<\/em> with discrimination<\/em>.<\/p>\n That French would feel the need to compare evangelicals\u2019 current position in the U.S. to African Americans\u2019 situation under Jim Crow in order to make them listen to his argument\u2014even with all of his caveats about how things aren\u2019t quite<\/em> as bad for evangelicals today as they were for African Americans\u2014demonstrates just how ballywack the evangelical persecution complex has become.\u00a0It really is that bad.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Indeed, French himself seems to know this:<\/p>\n It is truly odd that, in the face of far lesser challenges to liberty and equality, there are conservative Christians who not only despair of the future \u2014 they despair of liberalism itself. They despair of decency and the power of persuasion to alter human minds, and they act often as if God simply doesn\u2019t soften human hearts any longer.<\/p>\n This profound pessimism is, quite frankly, mystifying. I\u2019ve lived and worked in the deepest of deep-blue secular progressive America, and I\u2019ve worshipped and spoken freely. No, this speech hasn\u2019t been unopposed, and there have been challenging times, but Evangelical Christians can and do thrive in every part of American society in a way that black Americans in years past would see as success beyond anything they could reasonably hope to attain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n