Why Can’t Evangelicals Have a Persecution Complex?

Randall Stephens makes a decent case for the origins of the evangelical persecution complex:

Conservative politicians and activists have led a virtual parade of victimhood. Richard Nixon, who could nurse a grudge as few others could, may have been the most adept of the lot, but others picked up where he left off. Presidential candidates Barry Goldwater in 1964, George Wallace in 1968, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 implored and sometimes convinced voters that white, straight Americans were being threatened by an array of enemies.

That sense of being beleaguered and embattled has been basic to many modern white southern notions of religious liberty.

A little over 50 years ago few embodied this position as well as the Tulsa-based head of the Christian Crusade, Billy James Hargis. Fellow Sooners called the anti-communist stalwart a “bawl-and-jump” evangelist. It is not MLK, but Hargis—with his Strangelovian militarism, opposition to civil rights and government intervention on the part of minorities—who is a more fitting precursor to the modern “religious liberty” movement.

Stephens’ point, implicitly, is to discredit evangelicals’ sense of being victimized and show that it infects political conservatism more generally in ways that discredit the religious right:

Recent scholarship in Southern studies is of some help here. Angie Maxwell has observed, for example, that the “southern lexicon has long been rich in” the language of regional inferiority. In her view a “climate of battle” and perceived “public ridicule have significant ramifications for southern white identity.” It began, she contends, in relation to a “black ‘other.’” It would develop into “a comprehensive cosmology defined in opposition to a mounting pantheon of enemies old and new.”

Finally, moving to a national context, historian Rick Perlstein has noted that such defensiveness has unified much of conservatism from the days of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to the present. “Conservative culture was shaped in another era,” Perlstein remarks, “one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered. It enunciated a heady sense of defiance. In a world in which patriotic Americans were hemmed in on every side by an all-encroaching liberal hegemony, raw sex in the classrooms, and totalitarian enemies of the United States beating down our very borders.”

Stephens fails to consider, though, how basic a sense of persecution is to American character more generally. Consider the founders who feared that the United Kingdom was out to “get them.” Does anyone remember the Declaration of Independence (NPR reads it in its entirety every year)?

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

And that’s just a quarter or so of the colonists’ grievances against their kind. Aren’t Americans allowed to complain about their government anymore?

And consider the way that some politicians have used the threat of reducing Social Security benefits to appeal to elderly voters. Consider the tack taken by the “progressives” at the Campaign for America’s Future:

Few political advisers would suggest running on a platform of open hostility toward the elderly. Most families include an older person, after all, and everyone who lives long enough will become older themselves someday.

Seniors vote in greater numbers, too.

That may be why the GOP isn’t openly presenting itself as the anti-elderly party. But how else are we to interpret its deeds and actions? Its leading presidential candidates are pushing cuts to Social Security, while its congressional budgets would end Medicare as we know it.

Most older Americans would lose out under these proposals. But billionaires would make out very well indeed.

Fear mongering is part and parcel of American politics. If Stephens wants to give us a moral calculus for which persecution complex is more realistic than others, that would be a genuine contribution to discussion about groups that feel beleaguered by the government. But it looks selective to highlight only one side in the shouting match of partisan politics.

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