Whoops, atheism is illegal.

Whoever willfully blasphemes the holy name of God [by] exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars.

It’s moments like this that I scratch my head. We can certainly say that there are people who dislike Christians. But when we have states with actual anti-blasphemy laws on the books, is it possible to say that Christians are being persecuted?

One of the difficulties for Christians, I think, is the desire to live out the patterns that appear in Scripture and follow the examples and advice contained in its stories and letters. The most ‘modern’ portions of the Bible, though, take place in an era where democracy as we understand it was unknown. Early Christians were, by definition, living in a culture that worshiped a multitude of gods, some of whose followers didn’t take kindly to Jesus-lovin’ monotheists. There was a long and well-understood history of heads of state being worshiped as Gods, and citizens who wanted to change the course of their culture had, well, no real options. Roman Citizenship came with privileges, but it didn’t mean that Christians were in any position to change the Empire’s course or alter fundamental societal structures. As such, the New Testament doesn’t actually talk about any of that stuff much. It talks about how to put up with dictators and live your life. It talks about how to respond to injustice. It talks about how to avoid going ape when your rulers do horrible things… The Bible doesn’t, though, discuss things like how to govern in a pluralistic democracy. Nor does the book of James explain how to repair a carburetor.

So in the portion of Scripture that’s supposed to be most applicable to the ‘modern’ state of theology, Christians have got nothin’ to go on. Well, nothin’ except Jesus’ radical self-sacrifice and reliance on person-to-person relationships. Some people deal with this by rolling back to the example of the Old Testament, which told the story of a theocracy with explicit ritual purity laws, moral commands, and arcane theological rules that were all about sin, sacrifice, and absolution of guilt. All but the absolute wackiest of Christians will say, flat out, that all that Old Testament stuff is not what they want. Stoning adulterers may have happened in the Bible, and while Christians may say adultery is bad, they don’t want it to be a capitol offense. They understand that even the New Testament depreciates a lot of the ritual law cruft that was there, and that the landscape of responsibility, sin, redemption, etc. was changed radically by Christian theology.

Still, though. What to do? Where to look in Scripture for examples of how to live in a world where every citizen is, in effect, the ruler? Today, with all the talk of cultural showdowns and The War On Christianity, I think we’re seeing lots of people cling to one of the things that the New Testament DOES explain: how to handle being persecuted. Early Christians (at least, until an emperor converted and made them the good guys) took a real beating in Roman culture. They were legitimately persecuted — killed, slandered, etc. And the closing parts of the New Testament include a lot of advice to those early Christians on how to handle that kind of stuff.

It’s easy to convince a group that they’re being attacked by an outside enemy. It’s even easier if “Being Attacked By An Outside Enemy” is what they’ve been told to expect and what they’ve prepared for. In modern American Christian culture, though, it’s a false alarm. The New Testament was written to people who risked being thrown in jail for upsetting the apple cart of the regional religion. Today, the show is on the other foot. It might change at some point in the future, but Christians (or those who are friendly towards Christianity) are by far the dominant majority in our culture.

What course of action IS there for Christians trying to figure out how to approach this stuff? Some say that embracing the principles in the Constitution — in a pluralistic world — is an implicit betrayal of Christian belief. Any thoughts, Goddies?