Are Christians Under Attack in America?

Last updated on: May 14, 2013 at 7:18 pm by Andre E. Johnson

Are Christians Under Attack in America? 2013-05-14T19:18:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes is a man on a mission. For the past several years he’s been leading a crusade to prove that Christianity in America is being undermined by a secular, anti-religious agenda at the behest of the libertine big-government of President Barack Obama and his heathen minions.

Earlier this month, as a guest on Hannity, Starnes trained his sights on the U.S. armed forces, accusing the President and the Department of Defense of a “Christian cleansing” of the military. The notoriously fact-challenged pundit appeared to be referencing the DoD’s longstanding prohibition against proselytizing, which is defined as “inducing someone to convert to one’s own religious faith,” among the troops. Basically you’re not supposed to do what Maj. Douglas W. Duerksen, a military chaplain, recommends here, or what the evangelical group Cadence International describes in detail in its short documentary “Mission to the Military.” If you have any trouble understanding why this kind of behavior is off limits, imagine your eight-year-old daughter sitting through a sermon on Christ’s grace by her second-grade public school teacher, whose salary is paid for with your tax dollars.

Starnes is little more than a troll with a megaphone, which makes it tempting to dismiss his rhetoric as the rantings of one more anti-government zealot. But the notion that the freedom of American citizens to practice their faith in earnest is being stifled by the very government pledged to protect it is not limited to the radical fringe. Emboldened by the passage of Obamacare and its focus on promoting female reproductive health—and re-energized by the shifting tides on gay marriage—a handful of conservative intellectuals have added their voice to “War on Christians” meme.

Their faulty logic shares one common distinction: a misunderstanding of what the framers intended when they chose to include a mandate on religious freedom in the Bill of Rights. This error was advanced most recently in the April 2013 edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimisnewsletter, in a cover story penned by Yale-trained theologian R.R. Reno. In it, Reno, who edits the journal “First Things,” which covers religion in civic life, blames the demise of religious dogma in the public sphere on the efforts of a handful of highly placed secularists intent on reshaping civic discourse to favor Rawlsian “public reason” over faith-based morality.

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