(00:14:58) Podcast Clip of Ep. 3 - Performative Persecution: The American Church's Obsession With Oppression

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, breakdancing made its debut as an official sport, to the excitement of older hip-hop heads like myself. Some of the best breakers in the world competed on a global stage—a huge moment, though one that won’t return in 2028 or 2032.

Yet what most remember isn’t the exceptional creativity of b-boys and b-girls like Canada’s Philip Kim (Phil Wizard), who won gold. Few can name a medalist, but nearly everyone remembers one competitor: Rachel Gunn, aka Raygun.

Raygun lost all three battles in the round-robin stage without scoring a point, and her routines didn’t resemble breakdancing in any traditional sense. Which would be fine—if she weren’t competing at the highest level of the sport. Breakdancing has a clear history of demanding power moves that take years of sacrifice. Raygun may be a good dancer, but her routines looked like something from a weekend workshop, not the culmination of years mastering hip-hop’s most athletic element.

Her “kangaroo hop” and “sprinkler” went viral, overshadowing the athletes who earned their place on that stage. Soon after, Gunn retired from competition, citing the wave of negativity and its toll on her mental health.

I’m not here to attack Rachel Gunn. Maybe her intentions were pure. But what the world saw looked like stolen valor—her inclusion cheapened the art form and robbed others of their moment.

This essay is about that same effect in our public faith: American evangelicals often perform persecution while others endure it — and the performance cheapens real suffering.

Clear Definitions

To talk seriously about persecution, we need clean definitions—specifically in the context of religious persecution, particularly of Christians.

Persecution: the deliberate targeting of a person or group for their beliefs. Christian tradition holds that the apostles were martyred for preaching Christ—that’s persecution.

Oppression: when structures, laws, and policies are weaponized to restrict the dignity and freedom of believers. Oppression turns persecution into policy.

Cultural opposition: the natural clash of worldviews in a pluralistic society (like a Democratic Republic made up of a diverse group of people).People may reject Christian values, criticize them, or choose others—but that is not persecution.

Granted, these categories can overlap and sometimes feel unclear. But even then, an objective look at the circumstances is usually enough to make the distinction.

And now we can land the analogy: If there were an Olympic event awarding medals to the most persecuted and oppressed Christians worldwide, American evangelicals—white evangelicals especially—would show up front and center, eager to don their laurels and wave to an adoring crowd. But like Raygun, their performance would look like stolen valor. Their “persecution” would be exposed as little more than cultural opposition, staged on the same platform alongside brothers and sisters enduring actual persecution and oppression.

The result? Their theatrics would cheapen genuine suffering, damage our Christian witness, and divert attention from those who deserve our solidarity the most. Not to mention, the backlash they recieved would become the newest controversy they weaponize to victimize themselves and their beliefs instead of seeing it for what it is.

Manufactured Martyrdom

In the U.S., religious freedom and the separation of church and state are two pillars of our system. Remove either, and the other quickly collapses.

Yet in recent years, politicians and celebrity pastors have increasingly portrayed Christianity as under siege. From Trump’s rallies (“They’re not after me, they’re after you”) (Reuters), to Franklin Graham warning that Christians are being pushed out of public life (PBS), to Paula White framing cultural disagreements as spiritual war (Christianity Today)—persecution has become a political talking point. Even federal agencies stumble into this narrative: when the Department of Homeland Security posted the 1872 painting American Progress, critics said it glorified Manifest Destiny and evoked white Christian nationalism (Los Angeles Times).

Nationalism thrives on fear. To weaponize the church, leaders need believers to feel attacked, persecuted, oppressed—to see an enemy at the gates. That outrage can then be harnessed, not for Christ’s kingdom, but for political power.

To be fair, Christians in America do sometimes encounter bias or exclusion—whether in media caricatures, workplace conflicts, or elite cultural spaces. Those experiences can sting, and they shouldn’t be brushed aside. But they aren’t systemic persecution. Too often, cultural opposition or loss of privilege is rebranded as martyrdom (The Atlantic).

Organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) capitalize on this fear. They frame every courthouse nativity or school-prayer dispute as the first domino on the road to gulags. It’s effective fundraising, but it blurs the line between discomfort here and real persecution abroad.

Meanwhile, our brothers and sisters elsewhere face the real thing: Christians in Nigeria massacred during worship (BBC), Sudanese believers tortured in prison (Christian Solidarity Worldwide), churches in Syria bombed (Carnegie Endowment), pastors in China imprisoned (Human Rights Watch), and Coptic Christians in Egypt killed in targeted attacks (Al Jazeera). Supporting them is righteous and necessary. But when the same voices that mobilize compassion abroad also insist that moving a Ten Commandments monument at home makes us victims, we’ve lost perspective.

The New Testament gives us the plumb line. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad” (Matt. 5:11–12).

Instead of rejoicing in suffering for righteousness’ sake, too often we throw tantrums over opposition. Instead of endurance, we lash out whenever someone challenges our privilege. This is not maturity. It is spiritual infancy.

The Roots of the Narrative

If you’ve listened to me much before, you know I resist the urge to put people in boxes. When we focus on the box, we lose sight of the people inside it. What I’m going to say next may strike a nerve, because to be honest about the present we have to talk about a history that involves people many of us love and revere. I am not discrediting everything they did. One of the reasons I confront nationalist tendencies in my fellow believers is because of how subtle—and how deceptively powerful—they are in shaping our worldview and the way we treat others.

I don’t point these things out for the sake of argument or to cause division. On the contrary, I long to see us turn the world upside down in the way the gospel calls us to: through loving community, caring for the poor, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow (Deuteronomy 10:18–19); doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly (Micah 6:8); and witnessing by our love for one another and our neighbors (John 13:34–35). Nationalism, however, will lead us away from the true heart of the gospel, even when our intentions feel righteous.

Despite the real good these leaders and organizations may have done, there is also a well-documented pattern of Christian nationalism being weaponized. That doesn’t mean every action or advocacy they supported was or is wrong. It does mean we must learn to discern when the gospel is being used as a tool for something other than liberating our neighbors from spiritual bondage. My aim is not to denounce people we admire but to denounce the idols we have made of them (1 John 5:21).

We are in a moment that requires difficult conversations. We must be honest about history and the present, and hold our convictions up to the mirror of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16–17). We must recognize and tear down idols in our traditions—especially the ones built out of good things. Those are the hardest to spot, and the most necessary to remove if we are to grow in the Lord (Exodus 20:3).

Since the late 20th century, American evangelicalism—particularly white evangelicals—has been steadily mobilized as a political force. The rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s and 1980s, led by figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, gathered conservative Christians around hot-button issues: opposition to abortion, outrage over the removal of prayer from schools, and resistance to changing social norms on gender and sexuality. These leaders framed such causes as part of a larger struggle to “restore” America’s Christian identity (Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right).

Stepping back, it’s clear this activism was often co-opted politically to accomplish more than protecting religious freedom. It became a bid to reclaim cultural dominance. And that’s where the tension lies: the push for greater public influence often clashed with the very principles of religious freedom and pluralism meant to protect all beliefs equally. For non-Christians—and for Christians outside that conservative bloc—evangelical politics often looked less like a defense of liberty and more like an attempt to impose one group’s convictions on a diverse society.

As Christians who live in this nation, there’s nothing wrong with ensuring our individual rights aren’t infringed upon in the practice of our faith. But as citizens of God’s kingdom, we must be careful not to spend our energy trying to legislate the morality of the very people we are called to love.

But when evangelicals cry “persecution,” what they often feel is actually pushback. Society pushing back on attempts to legislate morality. Courts pushing back against privilege. Neighbors pushing back against the expectation that Christianity should sit at the head of the table. Recognizing this history makes something clear: evangelical claims of persecution don’t arise in a vacuum. They exist in a web of competing freedoms. And often what feels like persecution is simply the natural friction of a pluralistic society resisting religious imposition (The Atlantic).

The Zoom Call: Firsthand Testimonies

Now we have to shift gears and talk about one of the most deadly ways poiticians and people in power have traditionally used nationalism to weaponize the convictions of well-meaning Christians. America’s foreign policies.

Last year, I worked with the Appalachian Peace Education Center to press Senator Tim Kaine to oppose weapons transfers to Israel and call for a ceasefire. When word reached his office that we were planning a protest at Trail Days in Damascus, Virginia, his staff reached out and offered us a meeting instead. We gathered in a local church pastored by a man who had just returned from the West Bank. It felt like a holy collision: A large group of us came together, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others standing in solidarity with the innocent men women and children of Gaza who were being killed in staggering numbers by an Israeli administration that had taken things too far.

Months later, after continued pressure, Kaine’s office granted us a follow-up meeting, this time over Zoom. Since the meeting was going digital we were able to include a broader group of people to present to the Senator their stories.

One of those speakers was Father Fadi Diab, rector of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Ramallah and one of the authors of Kairos Palestine. He told us about Layan Nasir, a young Sunday school teacher, taken from her home at 3 a.m. at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers and placed in administrative detention without charge. He wasn’t allowed to visit her even as her pastor. She remained in custody for many moths after that. He also shared a personal story that had just happened a couple weeks before our meeting. He himself had been attacked by Israeli settlers while driving with his son, their windshield shattered by stones and side windows broken. By God’s grace, they made it out okay. What he said next I’ll never forget: the Christian population of Palestine has dropped from about 17% a century ago to less than 2% today. “It would be devastating,” he said, “for the Holy Land to become a museum of empty churches without its living stones.”

The next speaker was Philip, born and raised in Jerusalem, now living in Virginia but with much of his family in Gaza. He told us there are now only about 1,000 Christians in Gaza, down sharply from around 3,000 in 2007. One of the sanctuaries, St. Porphyrius, was bombed—18 Christians killed, including some of Philip’s relatives. Also, his 84-year-old cousin Ilham Farah, who had been sheltering in the church for weeks, finally risked walking home to change her clothes. An Israeli sniper shot her in the leg. She lay bleeding for hours while ambulances and rescuers were fired upon. By morning, once they were finally able to recover her body, an Israeli tank had rolled over.

Finally we heard from, John, a minister who spent two decades in Gaza founding The Lighthouse School, the only Christian school there. He spoke with visible grief. He told us how every family he still tries keeps in contact with has been displaced at least once. Many of the children were still missing. He showed us a photograph of one of his kindergartners lifeless in the rubble, one small shoe still on his foot. He told us how a tank shell crashed through the office wall of his apartment near the school, and that they were still fortunate that area hadn’t been shelled to the point of destroying the school. Only the cafeteria suffered significant damage. But then he shared something else—a video from Gaza: the school’s playground had been repaired by a few staff members who managed to reenter the area. There were children laughing again, joy breaking through dust and misery.

This is persecution. This is oppression. This is what it means to suffer.

How can it be that many of the same American Evangelicals whose hearts break for suffering Christians around the world, can’t seem to find that same compassion for their brethren in the Holy Land?

The apostle Paul said, “When one part of the body suffers, all suffer together” (1 Cor. 12:26). But our Palestinian brothers and sisters have suffered while we turned away.

The great deception of having Christians supporting the persecution of some of their own brothers and sisters in Christ, while mourning for the persecution of others, is a fruit of the theology of empire. That is what nationalism does to Christianity. It is the idol we must tear down.

Conclusion

I’m not advocating for the church to exit the public sphere, or to leave politics to the secular population while we all just love everybody and hope for the best. I’m asking us to examine the ways politicians appeal to our faith. In America today, nationalism is being used to weaponize the church like never before. Political leaders portray themselves as the last line of defense between “faithful Christians” and the so-called “radical left” that seeks to destroy everything you call holy. They are depending on you to feel attacked, persecuted, oppressed — to see an enemy at the gates. And in your outrage at those they’ve labeled the enemy, you’re too distracted to notice the truth. They just need your vote.

If the American Church wants to be a light to the world, we have to detangle the stars and stripes from the cross. We have to learn the difference between cultural opposition and persecution. We need to be honest in the role we’ve played in stirring up much of that opposition. And we need to stand against persecution wherever it is, recognizing our selective compassion as a distortion of the gospel.

If we keep mistaking opposition for persecution, we risk turning our witness into little more than a viral blooper — remembered not for faithfulness, but for theatrics.

I know these things are hard for some to hear. But at some point, its time to wisen up and realise, as Raygun did, that regardless of our intentions, our obsession with oppression has become a stumbling block to the gospel, and its time to retire from competing… in victimhood.

When you finally remove the veil that nationalism puts before your eyes, you’ll discover that many of the people placed in that box the president has labelled the “radical leftist lunatics who are an enemy to christianity” are actually your own brothers and sisters in Christ. As the Pew Research data depicted below shows, white Christians disproportionately lean Republican, while the vast majority of non-white Christians align elsewhere.

And even if there weren’t a mosaic of Christian belief that appears all across the political spectrum, we’ve got to stop letting politics lead us to demonize people who Jesus would have broken bread with.

Step back, and you’ll see: these leaders are not defending your faith — they are teaching you to trade love for fear, and fear for hatred. Stop giving them that power.

Defy