The Most Persecuted People Nobody Is Allowed to Defend

And who, when they object to any of this, are told they are the oppressors.

There is a class of people in the Western world who are mocked in prime time and celebrated nowhere. Who are caricatured in film, dismissed in academia, and systematically excluded from the public square while every other identity group receives the language of protection and dignity. Whose sacred texts are assigned in universities as examples of oppression. Whose moral convictions are reclassified as hatred by the very legal frameworks their civilization built. Whose children are taught in state schools that the faith of their parents is the primary obstacle to human progress.

And who, when they object to any of this, are told they are the oppressors.

I am describing Christians. And I am going to make a case that the secular progressive culture, which has trained itself to extend automatic empathy to every persecuted minority, has a profound and largely unexamined blind spot when it comes to the most consistently persecuted group in the modern world.

Not because Christians are perfect. They are not. Not because the church has no history to answer for. It does. But because the framework the culture uses to identify and protect persecuted groups is being applied with a consistency that stops precisely at the boundary of Christian identity, and that selective application is itself evidence of something the apostle Paul described with clinical precision two thousand years ago in a letter to Rome.

He was describing the people who suppress the truth. The people whose rebellion is not an intellectual conclusion but a moral choice. The people who know, and turn away from what they know, and cannot tolerate the existence of those who remind them of what they turned away from.

The portrait he painted is on the wall of the present moment. You do not need to be a Christian to see it. You only need to be honest.

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What Paul Actually Said About Rebellion

Romans 1 is one of the most analytically precise documents in the history of Western thought. It is not primarily a condemnation. It is a diagnosis. Paul is not raging at sinners. He is tracing a mechanism, the specific sequence by which a civilization moves from the knowledge of God to the suppression of that knowledge, and documenting the outputs that sequence produces.

The sequence is worth following carefully because it maps onto the present cultural moment with an accuracy that should unsettle anyone paying attention.

It begins not with ignorance but with knowledge. “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

This is the foundational claim. The rebellion does not begin with honest doubt. It begins with suppression. The text is explicit: they suppress the truth by their wickedness. This is not the description of someone who examined the evidence and reached a different conclusion. It is the description of someone who encountered the evidence and chose to push it down. The Greek word translated suppress is katechonton, which carries the sense of holding something down by force, restraining something that is trying to rise. This is not intellectual conclusion. It is active, sustained, effortful resistance to what is already known.

The second step is ingratitude. “Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” The failure to give thanks is not a minor omission. In the biblical framework, gratitude is the primary human response to the recognition that you are a creature who received existence, capacity, beauty, and meaning as gifts rather than generating them yourself. The refusal of gratitude is the first declaration of independence from the giver. It is the child who takes everything the parent provides and refuses to acknowledge it came from anywhere, because acknowledgment would create obligation, and obligation would constrain the absolute freedom that the rebellion requires.

The third step is intellectual deterioration. “Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” This is not an insult. It is an analytical observation about what happens to the mind that has suppressed its primary orientation. A compass that has been forced away from north does not become a better compass. It becomes a worse one. The mind that has been systematically turned away from the source of its own rationality does not become more rational. It produces, with increasing sophistication, increasingly sophisticated foolishness. The intelligence is still there. The orientation is gone. And a powerful, directionless mind is precisely what Paul means by the fool who claims to be wise.

The fourth step is substitution. “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” Paul’s first readers would have recognized the literal idols of their culture in this language. His readers today should recognize something more contemporary. The immortal God has been exchanged not for stone statues but for the ideologies, the causes, the identity categories, the political movements that receive in the secular progressive culture exactly the devotion, the sacrifice, the unchallengeable authority, and the demand for absolute loyalty that the culture is simultaneously insisting no religious claim deserves. The altar has not been dismantled. It has been redecorated.

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The Three Surrenders Paul Describes

What follows the substitution in Romans 1 is one of the most sobering passages in all of Scripture, and it is sobering precisely because it is not a threat. It is a description of a process.

Three times Paul uses the phrase “God gave them over.” This is not God actively punishing. It is God releasing. It is the parent who has warned, and pleaded, and stood at the door, and finally steps back and allows the child to have what the child demanded. The giving-over is not the wrath. The giving-over is the withdrawal of the restraint that was protecting the rebel from the full consequences of the rebellion.

The first surrender is to sexual impurity. “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.”

Paul is not saying that sexual sin causes unbelief. He is saying that the suppression of God produces, as one of its predictable outputs, the untethering of sexuality from its created meaning. When the body is no longer understood as the image of God, as a gift carrying moral weight and pointing toward transcendent meaning, it becomes raw material. The degrading of the body that Paul describes is not merely a moral failure. It is a logical consequence of the prior decision to exchange the truth about God for a lie. Bodies mean what the culture says they mean when God has been exchanged for the created thing.

The second surrender is to shameful lusts, and Paul becomes specific in a way that the current cultural moment cannot process neutrally. He names the exchange of natural for unnatural sexual relations as evidence not of a different moral preference but of the third and fourth steps in the sequence. He is not singling out homosexuality as the worst sin. He is identifying it as a visible marker of the broader suppression, the point at which the exchange of truth for lie has worked its way into the most fundamental ordering of embodied human life. The progressive reader who wants to dispute this is welcome to dispute it, but he should know he is disputing a diagnostic claim about the sequence, not a claim about the relative severity of individual sins.

The third surrender is to the depraved mind. “God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

Read that list again. Not as a condemnation. As a portrait. The God-hater. The slanderer. The arrogant and boastful. The inventor of new ways of doing evil. The one without fidelity, without love, without mercy. Paul is not describing a cartoon villain. He is describing the specific personality type that the suppression of God produces in a person who has traveled far enough down the sequence. And the portrait is recognizable in the present cultural moment with a specificity that should give the honest reader pause.

The final line of Romans 1 is the one that completes the diagnosis and makes it most relevant to the present moment: “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”

They approve. They celebrate. They organize award ceremonies and documentary premieres and social media campaigns not merely to tolerate the rebellion but to honor it, to reward it, to demand that everyone within reach approve of it too. The approving of others is the final stage of the sequence. It is the point at which the individual suppression becomes cultural enforcement. The rebel is no longer satisfied with his own rebellion. He requires yours.

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These numbers are not current, but they were. and they were yearly averages in these riegions.

The Class Nobody Protects

Here is where the scriptural portrait meets the present cultural moment in the most direct possible way.

The Western world has spent the last sixty years developing, with considerable institutional sophistication, a framework for identifying persecuted groups and extending them protection. The framework is real. Parts of it represent genuine moral progress. The extension of legal protection to people who were genuinely vulnerable, genuinely targeted, genuinely treated as less than human is not nothing. It is the fruit of a civilization that believed, on specifically Christian grounds, that every human being bears the image of God and is therefore owed dignity.

But the framework is applied with a consistency that stops at the boundary of Christian identity. And that selective application is the most visible evidence of the final stage of the sequence Paul described.

Consider what the portrait looks like from the outside.

Three hundred and eighty-eight million Christians worldwide currently face high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. One in seven Christians globally. One in five in Africa. The 2026 World Watch List combined persecution score across its fifty listed countries reached an all-time high. Fifteen countries now register at extreme persecution levels, up from thirteen the year before. Four thousand eight hundred and forty-nine Christians were killed for their faith in the most recent reporting period. The numbers are moving in one direction.

Here is what that looks like on the ground.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram and affiliated groups have killed more than thirty thousand Christians since 2009 and displaced millions more. That is the pattern. Here is the acceleration: of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide in the most recent reporting period alone, 3,490 died in Nigeria. Seventy-two percent of the global annual total. In a single year. Nigeria has scored the maximum violence rating for eight consecutive years running. The villages burned. The churches demolished. The pastors executed. The girls taken. This receives a fraction of the cultural attention devoted to a Christian record label dropping an artist for violating a morality clause.

In North Korea, for the twenty-fourth consecutive year the most dangerous place on earth to follow Jesus, Christians are worked to death in labor camps for the crime of possessing a Bible. Entire families receive the same sentence as the believer who was caught. The number living in secret is estimated at four hundred thousand. The coverage in the progressive cultural press is negligible.

In Somalia it is illegal to convert from Islam to Christianity. Al-Shabaab openly executes anyone suspected of being a Christian. Of the members of one documented underground church, only two remain. The rest have been martyred.

In Pakistan, the blasphemy laws are used almost exclusively against the Christian minority. In Egypt, Coptic churches are bombed on feast days. In Syria, on June 22, 2025, a suicide bomber walked into the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus during evening prayers and detonated. More than two dozen worshippers were killed. Before the civil war Syria had 1.5 million Christians. Fewer than 300,000 remain. In China, state-sanctioned demolition of church buildings and imprisonment of pastors is documented and ongoing. In India, three senior Baptist pastors and their driver were ambushed and killed on May 13, 2026, returning home from a peace-focused church gathering.

These are not ancient history. They are happening now. They are happening to the group that the progressive cultural framework has decided it is acceptable, even praiseworthy, to mock.

The documentary about the dark side of the Christian music industry received warm coverage in every major entertainment publication. The genocide of the Yazidis, whose persecution is directly connected to the same ideology that is persecuting Christians across the Middle East and Africa, was a news cycle. The systematic destruction of the ancient Christian communities of Iraq and Syria was a news cycle. The documentary about a pregnant singer dropped from a Nashville label is a festival premiere.

This is not a failure of attention. It is a choice. And the choice reveals what Paul described in the last line of Romans 1. The rebel is not merely tolerating the persecution of the class that reminds him of what he suppressed. He is approving of it. He is finding it entertaining.

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Struck Down But Not Destroyed

Paul wrote about this from prison.

That is worth holding onto. The man who wrote the most precise diagnosis of the rebellion against God in the history of Western literature wrote it from inside the system that was persecuting the people he was writing to. He was not writing from a position of cultural power or institutional safety. He was writing from chains, to a community that was meeting in houses, that was denied legal protection, that could be arrested and executed for their gatherings, that was already familiar with what it felt like to be the class nobody protected.

And he wrote to them not with the language of victimhood but with something that the present cultural moment has almost no framework for: the language of people who know exactly what is happening to them, know exactly why, and are not destroyed by it because they understand that the persecution is evidence, not of their weakness, but of the rebel’s knowledge.

You do not persecute what you do not fear. You do not mock what has no power over you. You do not organize sustained cultural campaigns against something that carries no weight. The energy directed at Christians, the continuous, institutionally supported, culturally prestigious effort to reclassify Christian values as hatred and Christian conviction as oppression, is itself the testimony that Paul predicted.

They know. And they cannot stop knowing. And the Christians who remind them of what they know are the people they cannot leave alone.

2 Peter 2 describes the false teachers who will arise within this cultural moment with a precision that is almost unbearable to read against the present landscape. “They promise freedom while they themselves are slaves of depravity, for people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” The progressive cultural establishment that has promised liberation from Christian constraint has delivered, as its most consistent output, people who are more enslaved than the generation that preceded them. Enslaved to the self that has no anchor. Enslaved to the desire that has no telos. Enslaved to the identity that requires continuous external validation because it has no source of internal stability. The freedom that was promised has not arrived. What has arrived is the condition of the person who cut the rope and discovered that the rope was not the constraint. It was the connection.

And the springs without water that Peter describes, the teachers who promise what they cannot deliver, who appeal to the lustful desires of the flesh to entice those who are just escaping from error, those are visible in the present landscape with a clarity that requires no interpretation.

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Why the Secular Reader Should Care

I want to speak now directly to the person who does not share my faith, who reads these passages as the mythology of a tribal religion, who has absorbed the progressive cultural framework as his own without having chosen it consciously, who has trained himself to extend automatic empathy to persecuted minorities and who has simply never been asked to apply that empathy consistently.

You do not have to believe what Christians believe to recognize that they are the safest target in the Western world. You do not have to accept the theological claims to observe that the communities being systematically destroyed by the ideology you are being asked to accommodate are the communities that share the values you have been trained to dismiss. You do not have to read Romans to notice that the framework you trust to identify persecution is being applied in a way that exempts the most consistently persecuted group in the modern world from its protection.

The empathy you have cultivated, and it is real, and parts of it represent something genuinely good in the culture, does not belong only to the groups the cultural establishment has approved for empathy. It belongs to the Coptic family whose church was bombed on Christmas morning. It belongs to the Nigerian pastor whose congregation was burned. It belongs to the North Korean prisoner whose Bible was the crime. It belongs to the Western Christian who is told that her moral convictions are hatred and who has no institutional protection against that accusation and no cultural voice capable of defending her without being dismissed.

The values that taught you to care about the persecuted are Christian values. The civilization that built the framework you are using to extend empathy to the vulnerable was built on Christian foundations. The legal protections that allow you to mock Christianity publicly without fear of prosecution were produced by a tradition that insisted, on theological grounds, that even the conscience of the dissenter was sacred and could not be compelled.

The puppy that you have been trained to kick is the one that bought your freedom to kick it.

And the honest application of the empathy the culture has taught you, turned without exception toward every persecuted group including this one, would require you to stand between the Christians and the culture that is doing to them what it has trained you to prevent being done to everyone else.

Not because Christians are perfect. Not because the church has no history to answer for. But because the class that is mocked in prime time, excluded from the public square, and systematically persecuted on every continent on earth while the culture that was built on its foundations celebrates the persecution, that class has earned the protection of anyone who actually believes in what that protection was built to provide.

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The Mechanism Paul Named That Nobody Taught You

There is a feature of Paul’s diagnosis in Romans 1 that modern readers almost always miss because the culture has trained them to read it as a condemnation of individuals and it is actually something more systemic and more sobering than that.

Paul is describing a mechanism. A sequence. A process with identifiable steps and predictable outputs that operates at the civilizational level as reliably as it operates at the individual one. He is not saying that each person who suppresses the knowledge of God goes through all five steps in a single lifetime. He is saying that when a culture moves through this sequence, the outputs at each stage are what they are, and the outputs accumulate.

The first output is futility. “Their thinking became futile.” The Greek word is emataiothesan, which carries the sense of becoming empty, hollow, directed at nothing. Not stupid. Not incapable. Empty of the orientation that gives thought its direction. A culture whose thinking has become futile does not produce less activity. It produces more. It produces an extraordinary proliferation of thought, analysis, commentary, research, and argument, all of it increasingly circular, increasingly self-referential, increasingly detached from the questions that would give it meaning. The modern university is the most sophisticated monument to futile thinking in human history. More papers than any previous civilization. More credentials. More specialists. Less wisdom. Less synthesis. Less ability to answer the question of what any of it is for.

The second output is darkening. “Their foolish hearts were darkened.” The heart in biblical anthropology is not the seat of emotion. It is the seat of orientation, the faculty by which the whole person is directed toward or away from truth. A darkened heart is not a sad heart. It is a disoriented one. It is the person who has the intelligence to see and the will to look away, repeatedly, until looking away becomes the default, until the direction of the gaze is so thoroughly established that what was once suppressed with effort is now suppressed automatically, without noticing. The culture that has been darkening for three generations does not know it is dark. It has been in the dark long enough that the dark feels like the natural condition.

The third output is the claim of wisdom. “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” This is the specific intellectual signature of the sequence. The culture that has traveled this far does not become uncertain or humble about its conclusions. It becomes more confident. The suppression requires confidence. The darkness requires a narrative that explains why the darkness is actually light. And so the culture produces, with increasing elaboration and institutional prestige, the claim that it has finally seen clearly what all previous generations were too primitive or too oppressed to understand. That history was building toward this moment of understanding. That the people who still hold the old orientation are not simply wrong but are obstacles to human progress, are dangers to the vulnerable, are, in the precise language of the current cultural moment, on the wrong side of history.

The fourth output is the exchange. “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” And here is the feature of this output that the culture cannot examine from within its own framework: the exchange does not reduce the devotion. It redirects it. The person who has exchanged the immortal God for the created thing does not become less religious. He becomes more so. He becomes more devoted, more zealous, more certain, more intolerant of dissent, more willing to sacrifice for the cause, than he ever was inside the tradition he left. The secular progressive cultural moment is the most intensely religious moment in Western history since the Reformation, in the precise sense that it demands confession of faith, punishes heresy, rewards orthodoxy, and treats its sacred texts as unchallengeable. The altar has been rebuilt. The god has changed. The devotion has intensified.

And the fifth output is the approving. Which is where the present cultural moment sits most clearly.

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The Scoffer and the Spring Without Water

2 Peter 2 and 3 describe two figures that walk through the present cultural landscape with such familiarity that they should be recognizable on sight.

The first is the false teacher. “They promise freedom while they themselves are slaves of depravity.” Peter is not describing a hypocrite in the ordinary sense of someone who fails to live up to his own standards. He is describing someone who has made the promise of freedom the primary product of his teaching while being constitutively incapable of delivering it, because the freedom being promised requires the liberation of the self from every external constraint, and the self liberated from every external constraint is not free. It is enslaved to whatever desire is currently loudest.

“Springs without water and mists driven by a storm.” This is the image for the teacher who creates the expectation of refreshment without being able to deliver it. The spring that has no water does not help the traveler by existing. It makes him worse off. He arrived believing he had found what he needed. He leaves more dehydrated than before, having spent his energy reaching a source that could not satisfy. The culture that has promised liberation from Christian constraint has produced, as its most consistent output, exactly this: people who arrived at the spring expecting refreshment and are leaving more desperate than they came, chasing the next promise of the next liberation from the next constraint, because the previous one did not deliver and the one before that did not deliver and the pattern is not yet legible because acknowledging it would require acknowledging what was exchanged.

The second figure is the scoffer. “In the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say: where is this coming he promised? Everything goes on as it always has.”

The scoff is the intellectual posture of the person who has decided, in advance, that the claim cannot be true, and who therefore interprets the patience of God as evidence of his absence. The continuing of things as they always have is read as refutation rather than as what Peter says it is: the patience of the one who does not want any to perish, giving the rebel more time than the rebel deserves.

And the deliberate forgetting. Peter does not say they are unaware of the flood. He says they deliberately forget it. The suppression is still active. The mechanism is still running. The forgetting requires effort because the memory keeps surfacing. The scoffer is not at rest. He is working. He is working to maintain the position that requires the continuous suppression of the evidence that contradicts it.

This is the portrait of the present cultural moment that the present cultural moment cannot draw of itself. It does not have the outside reference point. It cannot see the sequence from inside the sequence. It can only be shown it by someone who has access to a document written before the sequence began, by a man who watched it run in the first century and described its outputs with the precision of someone who understood the mechanism because he understood the God against whom it was running.

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The Protection That Nobody Is Extending

Here is the practical implication that I want the honest secular reader to sit with.

The framework for protecting persecuted minorities that the progressive cultural establishment has built is real. Parts of it represent genuine moral progress. The instinct to stand between the powerful and the vulnerable, to extend protection to the class that cannot protect itself, to name the abuse that the comfortable are not seeing because they are not the ones experiencing it, that instinct is not nothing. In its best expressions it is the application, stripped of its theological grounding but still recognizable in its shape, of the Christian conviction that the weak, the excluded, and the persecuted have a particular claim on the conscience of those who have power.

Now apply it consistently.

Apply it to the Coptic family in Egypt whose church was bombed on Easter morning. Apply it to the Pakistani Christian girl imprisoned for blasphemy. Apply it to the Nigerian village where the congregation was burned inside the church. Apply it to the North Korean prisoner whose Bible was the crime. Apply it to the Syrian Christian family whose ancient community, continuous since the first century, has been destroyed within a single generation.

Apply it to the Western Christian who is told in her workplace that her moral convictions are a form of violence. Who is told in her child’s school that the faith she is trying to transmit is the primary obstacle to the child’s flourishing. Who is told by the entertainment culture that she is the villain of the story and who has no institutional voice capable of defending her without being dismissed.

Apply the framework without the exception that the cultural establishment has built into it. Apply it to the class that the culture has decided is safe to mock, because it will not retaliate, because its theology forbids the retaliation it could organize, because the people inside it have absorbed the teaching of a man who said put your sword away when he could have called twelve legions of angels.

The Christian community is the safest target in the Western world precisely because of what it believes. It does not riot when its scriptures are mocked. It does not issue fatwas when its prophet is caricatured. It does not organize violence when its sacred spaces are desecrated. It absorbs the attack and continues. It has been doing this since the first century and it is still doing it now and the culture that was built on the foundation it provides has decided that this patience is an invitation to escalate.

The empathy the culture has cultivated, and it is real, belongs here. The protection the culture has built, and parts of it are good, belongs here. The instinct to stand between the abuser and the class that cannot protect itself, which is the best instinct in the progressive cultural tradition, belongs here.

The puppy that pays your bills and bought your freedom to kick it has been getting kicked for a very long time. And the honest application of the values the culture claims to hold would require someone to stand in front of it and say: not this one. Not this class. Not here.

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What the Rebellion Reveals

Paul ends the sequence in Romans 1 with the observation that the rebels know. They know God’s righteous decree. They know. And they continue. And they approve of others who continue.

The 2 Peter 3 scoffers are described with the same precision. “They deliberately forget.” Not they honestly conclude. They deliberately forget. The deliberate forgetting is the ongoing act of suppression, the continuous, effortful holding-down of what rises to the surface every time a Christian speaks, every time a church bell rings, every time a moral standard is applied that reminds them of the standard they chose to exchange for the lie.

This is why the attacks on Christianity are not proportionate to the intellectual threat. If Christians were simply wrong about God, the culturally appropriate response would be patient correction, the same patient correction that is extended to any other group operating inside what the progressive framework considers an honest error. But the attacks are not patient. They are not corrective. They are sustained, organized, institutionally supported, and emotionally intense in a way that does not match the behavior of people who have simply concluded that the Christians are mistaken.

They match the behavior of people who have not concluded anything. Who are still in the middle of the suppression. Who need the Christian to be wrong because the Christian’s existence is a continuous reminder of what was exchanged. Who need the church to be the villain because the alternative is to sit with what the church represents and what that representation costs.

The garlic is above the door. The chains are felt. The energy is real.

And the Christians who have been struck down by it, who have been mocked and excluded and told that their values are hatred and their convictions are violence, who have watched their civilization being dismantled piece by piece and told to be grateful for the progress, those Christians are living inside the same letter Paul wrote from his chains.

“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”

He was not writing about a class that had won. He was writing about a class that knew something the persecutors did not. That the suppression is not the end of the story. That the rebellion, however organized, however culturally prestigious, however institutionally powerful, is running against something that has absorbed every previous attempt to extinguish it and is still here.

The scoffers ask: where is the coming he promised? Everything continues as it always has.

Peter’s answer is the one the documentary makers will not put on screen. That the patience they are interpreting as weakness is not weakness. That the God who is not scrambling to defend himself against the conspiring nations is not absent. That the same word that formed the world from water can reserve it for fire.

They mock what they fear. They suppress what they know. They approve of the persecution of the class that carries the reminder of what they are suppressing.

And the Christians who are being persecuted by it are the most important people in the room, because they are the ones whose continued existence is proof that the suppression has not worked, and whose values are the only thing standing between the civilization that protects the persecuted and the anarchy that has always waited on the other side of the wall they built.

Kick the puppy if you must. But know what you are kicking. And know what you will miss when it is gone.

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The scoffers have always been with us. The suppressors have always been with us. The people who know and turn away, who claim wisdom while becoming fools, who exchange the glory of the immortal God for the created thing and then demand that everyone around them celebrate the exchange, they have always been with us. Paul was writing to a community that knew them personally. Peter was warning a community that was going to encounter them immediately.

What is different now is the institutional power behind the suppression. What is different is that the suppression has captured the universities, the entertainment industry, the media, the legal framework, and the language of human rights itself, and is using all of it to reclassify the people who carry the reminder as the oppressors, and the oppression as progress.

What is not different is the outcome. The sequence runs where it runs. The outputs are what they are. And the Christians who are being struck down by it are still, as they have always been, not destroyed.

A.C. Rosenthal is the author of The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son.

What Is Left When the Wall Comes Down

Let me end with the thing that the documentary makers and the slanderers and the God-haters and the inventors of new ways of doing evil, all of them named by Paul with a precision that should make them uncomfortable, have not fully calculated.

The values that protect them are the values they are attacking.

The freedom of conscience that allows them to mock Christianity publicly without prosecution is a Christian value. The protection of the dissenter. The insistence that the state cannot compel the conscience. The legal tradition that puts the individual’s belief beyond the reach of the sovereign’s coercion. These are not Enlightenment inventions. The Enlightenment borrowed them from the tradition it was in the process of replacing, after the tradition had already done the work of embedding them in the legal and institutional architecture of Western civilization.

The dignity of the individual that makes their complaints against Christian institutions meaningful, that gives their stories of being wronged moral weight, that grounds the claim that their pain matters and deserves to be heard, is a Christian value. The secular humanist tradition did not originate it. It inherited it. It cut the flower from the root and is now using the flower to beat the plant.

The protection of the vulnerable that makes their documentary about a dropped artist a moral claim rather than merely a commercial dispute is a Christian value. The insistence that the weak have a claim on the conscience of the powerful. That the individual matters regardless of his usefulness to the collective. That there is a standard above the preference of the strongest that the strongest are bound to honor. These are not universal human intuitions. They are the specific outputs of a specific theology applied over centuries to the specific architecture of Western civilization.

When the wall comes down, and it comes down one documentary at a time, one reclassification at a time, one institutional exclusion at a time, what is on the other side is not the liberated humanist utopia that the promise of freedom described. What is on the other side is what has always been on the other side of the wall, before the wall was built and in every place where it has been torn down. The strong doing what they can. The weak suffering what they must. The absence of a standard above the preference of the powerful to which the powerful can be held.

The Christians who are being persecuted and mocked and excluded and told they are the oppressors are not simply a religious community defending its own interests. They are the people whose continued existence and whose continued insistence on the values that built the wall are the primary obstacle between the civilization that protects the persecuted and the anarchy that has always been waiting on the other side.

You do not have to believe what they believe to understand what they are holding.

But you should probably stop kicking them while they hold it.

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