Bill Berkowitz: The Christian Persecution Complex as Performed by Donald Trump and the Christian Right

June 19th 2020

Tony Perkins (Gage Skidmore)

By Bill Berkowitz 

Since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Tony Perkins, the head of the Washington, D.C. lobby group the Family Research Council, has been busy. While Perkins, an ultra- conservative Christian ally of the president, condemned Floyd’s murder, after Donald Trump staged his now infamous photo-op walk over to St. John’s Episcopal Church and raised a Bible aloft, Perkins lauded the visit for “sending a message that he’s not going to be intimidated, that our government is not in hiding.” This despite the fact that Trump had hunkered – oh, rather “inspected” -- the White House bunker. 

In an op-ed penned for The Washington Times, Perkins argued that one of the major problems the country is facing is not police brutality, but rather that America is turning away from God. Perkins wrote: “The abuse of power, disregard for human life, and the wanton destruction and uncontrolled rage we are witnessing in cities across our country, all flow from a society that is rapidly losing a sense of right and wrong, of transcendent truth.” 

Perkins went on: “This loss of a moral consensus is not a new development; what’s happened is that it has reached a crisis point. The foundation of America’s shared morality has been under steady assault for over half a century.”

After the Supreme Court’s recent decision against LGBTQ discrimination in workplaces, Perkins claimed that the court’s effort “to rewrite the Civil Rights Act to add gender identity and sexual orientation as protected classes poses a grave threat to religious liberty.” 

Perkins has been a major purveyor of the belief that the systematic removal of “God from public life” is an indicator of the persecution of Christians in America.

Christians have been playing the persecution card ever since … well, ever since the beginning of Christianity, sometimes with good reason. Despite Christianity’s domination of America since its founding, “the notion of Christianity under siege persists” Bob Garfield pointed out in an episode of the On The Media podcast. Garfield, in interviewing Candida Moss, a professor of theology and religion at Birmingham University in the U.K., and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, commented that “historians coined the idea that to be persecuted was to be righteous in the 4th Century and they exaggerated claims that Christians were persecuted in the first place.”

According to Moss, in the fourth century, Christian historians “were interested in using martyrdom for their own political ends, so they presented martyrdom and persecution of Christians as this continual thread, whether it’s the Romans persecuting Christians, whether it’s the Jews persecuting Christians, or whether its now heretics persecuting real Christians. … The problem with this is that this story is largely invented.”

Moss told Garfield that the story of Jesus’ followers being constantly hounded since his death, was largely a branding issue for Jesus followers; to bring more into the fold. Moss proceeded to take apart numerous myths of Christian persecution.  

“The veneration of [Christian] martyrs really takes off after Christians take over the Roman Empire. Although there were incidents of persecution, “after the Roman Empire had been effectively Christianized, Christians start writing about persecution, using it to target other groups that they don’t like, and in fact, using the history of persecution to justify their violence against those who are not members of their own religious group.”   

Perkins has a decidedly different view. Case in point? Restricting church attendance during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Perkins, who started off speaking responsibly about the coronavirus pandemic, has totally changed his tune. Now, he is raising money to challenge leftist governors that he claims are assaulting religious freedom. In late March, Perkins “urged churches to remain closed in a tweet, telling them to ‘Spread the Good News, not the virus!’,” Rob Boston, the editor of Church & State, magazine told me in an email.  

Then things changed: According to Boston, “as Fox News and the right wing’s perpetual outrage machine kicked into gear, Perkins changed his tune and is now claiming that sensible public health measures are really part of a liberal plot to crush religious freedom.”

A day after the U.S. reached the horrifying mark of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, Perkins, sent out an email from his FRC Action platform warning that “An alarming number of governors and mayors, as well as a few judges, have used the coronavirus crisis to restrict our religious freedom and take away our right to assemble.” 

Perkins added: “Worst of all, leftist officials are shamelessly abusing their power to accomplish what they've been trying to do for decades, but previously lacked the power to do: To restrict the operations of Christian churches in America!”

He then went on to praise Attorney General William Barr: “Thank God for U.S. Attorney General William Barr!, who has used his position to defend religious liberty for all Americans during the coronavirus crisis.”

Finally, Perkins made his money pitch: “Your donation will help FRC Action support Attorney General Barr and encourage him to take legal action if needed against anti-Christian bigotry that is issued under the false pretense of local government authority.”

At the Family Research Council’s website, highlights several stories about the coronavirus pandemic and religious liberty. Headlines read: “Religious liberty during COVID-19: Get a haircut, but stay away from church”; “Religious liberty means COVID-19 restrictions cannot target churchgoers”; 

Church & State’s Rob Boston wrote: “The vast majority of religious leaders in American are doing the right thing by following public health guidelines to avoid large, in-person gatherings and have moved services online. These faith leaders care for their congregations and don’t want to do anything that might put them in jeopardy. Perkins had a chance to be among them by taking a principled stand, but in the end, he just couldn’t do it. When the history of this pandemic is written, thousands of religious leaders will be thanked for their caring and common-sense approach. Perkins will not be among them.” 

Boston noted that the conservative Supreme Court recently  “refused to grant an emergency request from a church in California that insisted it should have the right to hold large, in-person services. The court’s action should go a long way toward tamping down fallacious claims that actions designed to protect the American people from a deadly illness are really just a plot to undermine religious freedom.”

However, when your major concern is perpetuating the Christian Persecution Complex, it is clear that Tony Perkin’s caring for his “flock” does not extend to their health, or, for that matter, their very lives.