The New Witch-Hunt: progressivism’s growing persecution of traditionalist Christians

Dec 22, 2016 by Jill

by Jonathon van Maren, LifeSite:

The eventful year of 2016 is over, and as the holiday season approaches and busy schedules perhaps allow a bit more time for some reading, I have an urgent recommendation for you: Get your hands on Mary Eberstadt’s short but powerful book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. It’s only 126 pages long—I read it in a few hours—but it lays out succinctly and with beautiful clarity what she calls the battle of the creeds, the war between the Sexual Revolution and traditionalist Christianity that has been waged with increasing sound and fury since the advent of the Pill.

When Eberstadt refers to the targeting of “Christians,” she is of course referring to traditionalist Christians—those who still hold to the two-thousand-year-old teachings on sexuality that Christians have always believed.

This is a distinction that is now necessary. The Sexual Revolution has managed to generate a contingent of religious quislings, “progressive” Christians who have more or less abolished notions of sexual sin but magnanimously want to keep a messiah around to forgive their neighbors of the sins of homophobia and judgementalism. But these Christians are a very new breed. This new “progressive” Christianity is not only less than a century old, but already shrinking—a recent report noted that it is conservative churches that are growing while liberal churches continue to empty out, putting a bit of irony in the claims of so-called progressive Christians that they are “on the right side of history.”

It is worth noting, for a moment, that if Christians with the traditionalist view of sexuality were placed on one side of a scale, and progressive Christians were plopped on the other side, the sheer lopsidedness of the scene would be rather hilarious. On one side, we have everyone from St. Paul to the great Christian martyrs, from Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis, to Jonathan Edwards, Augustine of Hippo, and even the liberal Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other side, we have a handful of so-called progressive Christian intellectuals—and who can name any? —who have abandoned two thousand years of Christian teaching, announcing with staggering arrogance that everyone else was wrong. When the weight of history is dropped onto the scales, it lands on the traditionalist side with such force that such progressives are flung into the stratosphere.

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