Pam Bondi’s commission of intolerance
Newly-minted attorney general, Trump sycophant and MAGA looney Pam Bondi was just appointed head of the “Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty” by Donald Trump. As with the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” and “Ministry of Love,” the evil hides in the irony of the name. The new ministry is not at all concerned with the liberties of Muslims or Jews. It refers only to the “Religious Liberty” of white Christian nationalists. According to the 6th grade language of the “president,” the commission is going to be a “very big deal.”
The tradition that Christians are persecuted stems from a brief time during the Roman Empire when indeed they were. Yet even that is often exaggerated. Contrary to common understanding among many of today’s practicing Christians, it was never illegal to be a Christian in the Roman world. There was no formal movement within the government to kill Christians. That they occasionally were executed was a mundane hazard of the times. Many people were routinely executed back then.
History shows that Christians have largely been, not persecuted, but persecutors. From the Inquisitions of the Catholic Church to the depredations of Henry VIII’s Protestant reforms, the whip hand of persecution has been Christian far more often than the other way. Government-sanctioned Christian tyranny was once a thing. The first amendment of the Constitution provides a bulwark against it.
When I was an evangelical Christian in my teens and twenties I was taught that Christians were still persecuted, possibly because New Testament writer St Paul asserts that he was persecuted. For my part I found no evidence to suggest that was true. I found plenty of evidence that Christians were in fact the real tyrants.
What Christians actually meant by persecution was an increasing trend away from Christian bigotry. Gay people, women, atheists and others who were sternly disapproved of by Christians were given more and more human rights. Because bigots of all stripes tend to see civil rights as a pie, that is, the more for you the less for me, Christians saw this trend as persecution. It wasn’t.
In fact, the history of Christianity has been written in the blood of non-believers and other so-called heretics. To fail to adhere to the most stringent doctrinal edict was to imperil your life. Of course, that interpretation was whatever the ruling elite said it was at the time.
In America today, of course, Christianity woos its new prospects with happy faces and beguiling messages. We have not only the right but the duty to recall a time, not so long ago, when the Christian authority, Protestant or Catholic, was absolute, and came to us with a sword and an ultimatum to follow or die.
With the establishment of Trump’s “Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty,” if it goes anywhere at all, expect a re-emergence of Inquisition-style methods. It will find no persecution of Christians. What it will find is an opportunity to push outmoded Christian doctrines and insufferable intolerance on others who are merely minding their own business.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.