Rachel Held Evans is a Christian writer and author. She has written several books including Faith Unraveled (2010), A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012), and Searching for Sunday (2015). She has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Christianity Today, Slate, The Huffington Post, The CNN Belief Blog, and on NPR, The BBC, The Today Show, and The View.

Ms Evans has a new post up on her blog titled "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex." It's an excellent article, and I think many of you will agree with her view.

She begins with calling out false articles that have circulated in the conservative media since the SCOTUS ruling for marriage equality.



Did you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible? Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.”

An entire industry of books and films has blossomed in the red soil of the American Christian persecution complex, with the first “Gods’ Not Dead” installment caricaturing and vilifying atheists and the second set to expose liberal efforts to “expel God from the classroom once and for all.”

Just last week I received at least a dozen messages from friends and readers who told me the response from Christians to the Supreme Court ruling confirmed for them what they’ve known in their hearts for a while: they don’t want anything to do with Christianity anymore, not if this is what it’s all about. So what I’d like to suggest to my fellow Christians is that perhaps taking up the cross means laying down the persecution complex. A spirit of fear and entitlement does more to obscure the gospel than elucidate it.

She identifies some of the memes that many conservative Christians take up each year such as complaining when the wrong Christmas greeting is spoken (Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas) or when a pre-sports game prayer is cancelled out of respect for students who are Jewish or Muslim or non-religious. And, then states the following:She goes on to state that most of the time this phenomenon is relatively harmless, although annoying. However, it has ratcheted up significantly in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling in favor of marriage equality, and it's been doing some real harm.

She goes on to list several reasons why. The rather lengthy article is excellent, and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. She ends it this way:

