Jesus warns his followers that when they live as he lived and invite others to inhabit the kingdom of God as he did, they would experience opposition. In the Sermon on the Mount, he encourages them by saying, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.”
American Christianity has horribly twisted Jesus’ teaching.
White evangelicals regularly complain about the persecution they 
face because of their Christian faith. This perception of anti-Christian hostility was a large piece of the cultural backdrop to last Thursday’s Rose Garden ceremony where president Trump issued a Proclamation on the National Day of Prayer and then signed his Executive Order on the Establishment of a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
The church leaders standing beside the president actually thought that he
was doing something to relieve the Christian church of religious oppression in America. Many of these people actually believe that Christians suffer more discrimination than black people in the USA. White evangelicals are “more likely to see discrimination against themselves than against minority groups, [saying] oh, no, we’re the ones being persecuted”(emphasis mine).
Such is the power of spiritual delusion, of suffering with the blindness of white privilege, of embracing the liturgies of American civil religion, and of investing more energy into protecting oneself than into actually living like Jesus.
This white evangelical pity-party might be laughable were it not so spiritually crippling.
I confront this spider web of problems in the following excerpt from chapter 11 of my new book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America. The chapter title, “Blessed Are Those Who Are Persecuted Because of Me,” is lifted from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:11).
“When it comes to the prospects of suffering for the gospel, the American church commits two mistakes that distort a proper understanding of its role in this world: first, Christians wish to occupy a privileged place in society; second,Christians want to live ‘triumphantly’ here and now, immediately possessing all the power and authority exhibited in Christ’s resurrection.
“The first error is most clearly seen in the so-called culture wars supposedly waged between what passes for a Christian worldview and secular humanism. What this obsession with spiritual warfare reveals, however, is not secularism’s efforts to extinguish Christianity, but the church’s assumption that Christianity has a right to unchallenged preeminence in the public square. This cultural conflict is not evidence of a cosmic struggle between light and darkness as the televangelists proclaim. Its roots are much more mundane and secular, for this so-called culture war is actually the last gasp of an antiquated confusion between church and state once referred to as Christendom, that is, the merging of Christianity with a nation’s social, political, and cultural life such that the church and its teachings dominate public affairs, confusing Christian discipleship
with state citizenship. The current cultural combat is not concerned with
a genuine defense of Christian faith, but is fomented by the church’s misplaced desire to assert social and political dominance over society at large. Personally,I cannot blame nonbelievers for resisting these efforts.
“How curious it is, then, to observe that neither Jesus nor Paul (or any of
the other New Testament writers, for that matter) ever expresses the least bit of concern about seeing the church assert control over the social, cultural, or political landscape in their own day and age. The apostle Paul was surrounded by an utterly pagan Greco-Roman society awash in idolatry, immorality, and bloodthirsty political maneuvering; yet he never so much as hints at the need for his communities to devise a strategy for taking over Rome’s politics, social customs, arts, or mores. In this respect, Paul was following his master, for as Christopher Bryan correctly notes, Jesus did not show any interest in changing, much less controlling, the temporal forms of political power in his day either. Instead, Jesus and Paul focused on creating a new, alternative community that would shine as a light to the world, showing the spiritually curious where they might discover the kingdom of God in the midst of this world’s corruption.
“In a pluralistic society such as America’s, why should Christian prayers,
holidays, and ceremonies be prioritized above those of other religions? Why
should displays of the Ten Commandments, crucifixes, and nativity scenes
receive pride of place on state lands and facilities without equal representation from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu symbols? The honest answer is that there is no reason for Christian ceremonies or insignia to receive any state-sponsored preferential treatment. And being denied such prioritized benefits does not constitute discrimination, much less persecution. The fact that many Americans believe otherwise, and are willing to fight tooth and nail over small-minded concerns like manger scenes and Christian prayer in public schools, merely demonstrates how the American church is still trying to capitalize on the historical momentum generated by past centuries of Western Christendom, even as that momentum grinds to a halt. This explains the oddity of a country like the United States, which has never had an established state church and hence never officially participated in Christendom, nevertheless experiencing a culture war where Christian people assume that they are justified in imposing their religiously based moral code, spiritual sensibilities, and religious symbols on the rest of the nation.
“We should not be the least bit surprised when non-Christian people resist the church’s efforts to exercise such power over them. Unfortunately, when the predictable resistance appears, the church typically responds by crying “persecution,” “discrimination,” and “anti-Christian bias” when, in fact, prejudice and suppression are working the other way around. The church frequently behaves like the worst sort of petulant child, crying “foul!” when Christians are the ones kicking every other player in the shins…
“…In fact, the truth of the gospel and the upside-downness of Jesus’s kingdom values appear to have nothing at all to do with the high level of hostility many Americans feel toward the Christian faith. The monumental national and ecclesial tragedy crying out for recognition is that the Religious Right has managed to obscure the central message of the crucified, resurrected Jesus beneath a never-ending soundtrack of over-heated partisan rhetoric lamenting the dangers of “secular humanism” and “liberal politics.” They have pursued a no-holds-barred strategy to reach their partisan goals and have successfully accomplished what can only be described as a demonic victory. They have blacked out the good news of God’s kingdom from public perception like a hellish eclipse of the Son. Such betrayers of God’s kingdom have no business complaining about their bogus ‘persecution.’”
