Benjamin Dixon, from the Progressive Christian channel, has recently stated that the Christian persecution complex is embarrassing the Christian faith — the gist of his article is that saying Christians here are being persecuted is an embarrassment to the faith, as people are legitimately being persecuted elsewhere.

While this is true, there seems to be an implicit message here that someone, somewhere is being persecuted for what you believe, so the little bit of difficulty you’re going through as a Christian should be disregarded in favor of respecting those who are truly persecuted.

My only problem with that is that I think that if Christians in the United States use models in other parts of the world who are going through worse persecution to say the difficulty they’re going through is no big deal, they may be more focused on disregarding the source of those difficulties than on, like, seeing if they are having a difficult time in this culture because they are actually wrong.

I’m concerned about this because I grew up hearing about the persecution of Christians, and the difficult time that missionaries had. And I thought, as a Christian, that if they could handle horrific treatment — I could handle the fact that same-sex marriage was becoming more acceptable; the latter was no big deal. In fact, I’ve met several Christians who are fine with same-sex marriage in the public sphere, even as they privately think that it’s somewhat of a sin. But while this may seem magnanimous to the outside world, and is certainly better than virulent anti-marriage campaigns, the effect of this attitude is to disregard the love and legitimacy in a same-sex marriage that may get in the way of bible-based conceptualizations, and to insulate my Christian beliefs from criticism.

And this insulation, I think, is why such a huge spotlight is thrown on persecution in the church that happens “out there” — with the constant reminder that what you’re going through is nothing, so you should just accept it; if others can undergo worse, you can certainly handle what you’re facing without being a crybaby. It’s why the writer of Hebrews 11 talks about what people did, “by faith,” ending with:

Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins,destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Compare this to Dixon’s blog, especially this section, where he states:

[Living in a multicultural secular society] is the only tension with which Christians in America must live. We don’t have to fear for our lives. We don’t have to meet in secrecy for fear of execution. We don’t have to hide our faith in the face of dictators that demand their own worship. All we have to do is live in a society where others are free to live their lives beyond the scope and influence of our faith if they so choose. Yet, this is what so many emotional and teary-eyed Christians call persecution. I call it being spoiled and weak. I call it being “ye of little faith.” And I call it an embarrassment in a world where people are dying for the faith. So, please stop with the Christian Persecution Complex.

So this has very old roots in Christendom, this use of the persecution of others — who went through far worse than you could ever dream of — to insulate the faith by saying, “Shut up, struggling Christian. If they can do worse, stop embarrassing the faith with your complaints and get with the Christian program.”

What I’d like to say in counter to that, to any Christian willing to listen, is to…actually listen. I was a Christian who listened and eventually left the faith because I began to see that the discomfort I felt when it came to the concept of same-sex marriage was there because I was wrong — and I am not sure I would have ever seen that if I was more intent on seeing the persecuted in outside countries as role models that blinded me to the twinge of pain I felt when I couldn’t applaud a same-sex couple’s marriage due to my religious beliefs.

In a way, what Dixon seems to be doing, intentionally or not, is encourage people to crawl into an even more intense persecution complex — not the persecution of the United States, but that of other countries — to insulate them from serious consideration of the fact that the changing times might be coming from forces that indicate that they are fundamentally wrong.

Watch the Scientology documentary that’s making the rounds, for instance, and it’s truly surprising what people will sacrifice for their faith. But the tragedy here, as in Christianity, is the exaltation of this sacrifice often insulates belief and mentally discourages people from leaving the faith. To put it mildly, that’s a bit dangerous.