You know that feeling you get when someone says something that nicely articulates something that you have long felt but just didn’t quite know how to say? Os Guinness is one of those authors that, as I read him, I think “Wow! I wish I could have said it like that.”
Justin Taylor dropped one of those Guinness passages on hi blog yesterday. He is quoting from Guinness’ latest book, The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It (pp. 93-94), on Christians playing the victim…
As one who believes that the call of Jesus is to a path of suffering that shuts the door to every form of victim-playing, I am angered by organizers of the Religious Right who play the victim card and appeal openly to Christian resentment. . . .
Do they not know that those who portray themselves as victims come to perceive themselves as victims and then to paralyze themselves as victims? . . .
But whether “victimization” then or a “war on Christians” now, such tactics of the Religious Right are foolish, ineffective, and downright anti-Christian. The problem is not that these people are theocrats, but that they are sub-Christian. They do not violate the separation of church and state so much as they violate Christian integrity. Factually, it is dead wrong for Christians to portray themselves as a minority, let alone as persecuted. Christians are as close to a majority community as any group in America; what their fellow Christians are facing today in China, North Korea, Burma, and Sudan is real persecution.
Psychologically, victim-playing is dangerous because it represents what Nietzsche called “the politics of the tarantula,” a base appeal to resentment. But worst of all, it is spiritually hypocritical, for nothing so contradicts their claim to represent “Christian values” as their refusal to follow the teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth by playing the victim card and finding an excuse not to love their enemies. Shame, shame, shame on such people; and woe, woe, woe to such tactics.
I would agree with much of what Guinness says here. However, I’d like to know specifically what tactics he puts in this category. I don’t think for example that calling for fairness and justice or publicly decrying immorality is the same thing as not loving one’s enemies. Nor is standing up for our rights as citizens.
Was Paul, for example, ‘playing the victim’ when he pointed out his Roman citizenship and obtained an apology after being illegally beaten by the authorities at Phillipi?
Guinness also seems to assume that persecution does not happen unless one is a true minority. We need look no further than the South Africa of the recent past to see that this is a faulty assumption. However, I would agree that what we consider persecution in this country pales by comparison to what believers experience in many other places in the world.