As I wrote earlier this month, attacks on conservative Christians are certainly popular in some quarters of the Left, but now I also fear they’re populist — they can help animate a mass movement.
The combination of ignorance, fear, and hatred wielded against conservative Christians in progressive quarters is disturbing.
Just in this new year, we’ve seen two progressive senators aggressively question a Christian judicial nominee because of his membership in a mainstream Catholic service organization, we’ve seen a days-long attack on Karen Pence for teaching part-time at a Christian ministry, and we watched a stunning online feeding frenzy against students at a Catholic boys’ school based on a misleadingly clipped video segment of a much longer confrontation.
Moreover, we just concluded a Supreme Court term in which progressive governments attempted to erode the constitutional firewall against compelled speech by attempting to compel Christians to advance messages they found immoral.
California attempted to compel pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise free or low-cost abortions.
Colorado attempted to compel a man to custom-design a cake for a gay wedding.
And along with each of these events we’ve seen tens of thousands of words of commentary declaring Christians bigoted and hateful — often based on condescending claims of hypocrisy premised on sheer ignorance of Christian theology and tradition.
Who can forget the avatar of progressive populism himself, Bernie Sanders, in 2017 aggressively grilling a nominee for the Office of Management and Budget over his theological views on the differences between the Christian and Muslim faith?
He actually said that the nominee was “not someone who this country is supposed to be about.”
And of course Dianne Feinstein famously rebuked Trump judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett by declaring that the “dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/...sive-populism/
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