Lesson 2016: “Political Correctness” is Anti-Christian Bigotry

Too many Christians have spent years trying and failing to stay on the good side of their enemies. If the election of politically incorrect provocateur Donald Trump can teach us anything, it’s that all that effort wasn’t even necessary. But more importantly, trying to make our beliefs acceptable to the world is a bad habit that leads to softening on our baptismal promise to renounce Satan and all his works.

When President Obama tried to force Christian organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortifacient drugs against their consciences, the politically correct response was to smear anyone who opposed Obamacare’s mythical plan to provide healthcare to the poor. Rather than point out the obvious government overreach and the cruelty of threatening nuns for their beliefs, many Christians spent their energies trying to get on the right side of the politically correct narrative, writing countless thought pieces on how the Christian Right must learn to care more about the poor.

For some Christians, political correctness operates like a never-ending pattern reminiscent of the famous courtroom trick-question “When did you stop beating your wife?” When mainstream media outlets and powerful Leftist or globalist political figures decide on a course of action, Christians jump to get out of their way. When gender ideology is promoted in schools, Christians rush to prove they’re not “transphobic.” When an armed lunatic attacks an abortion clinic, Christians quickly accept and defend themselves against the narrative that smears all pro-lifers as guilty of the sort of rhetoric that leads to violence.

More recently, I was shocked to discover that even when the U.S. backed jihadist “rebels” against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria—despite the pleas of persecuted Christians and Yazidis there—many American Christians were even willing to repudiate their hunted coreligionists in the Middle East rather than boldly differ with Western elites.

Lessons of 2016

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was replete with rhetoric that flew in the face of political correctness—and yet here he is, the duly elected President-elect of the United States of America. His election proves the pointlessness of all that squirming to get on the right side of the narratives that have been handed down to us.

But more importantly, while Christians have busied themselves with the eternal task of not offending the ever-shifting sensibilities of progressive elites, many good people have suffered at the hands of those whom such obsequiousness helped bring to power.

Consider the list of anti-Christian accomplishments that have been achieved in the last few years alone, which I wrote up this month at The Stream.

In the United States, anti-Christians have worked hard to:

• Stir up hedonism by pushing “gender theory” propaganda in schools and normalizing perversity in the media. Line up sexual vices and their attendant drugs and “surgeries” (not least of all abortion) for taxpayer funding and even the coerced support of Church organizations despite religious objections.
• Cover up and downplay the historic news of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in preborn human body parts. Smear the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos in the media as “deceptively edited” while government officials raided and ransacked whistleblower David Deleiden’s home, but dragged their feet on investigating the illegal activity he exposed.
• Conspire to “plant the seeds of a revolution” in the Church by creating Leftist Catholic front groups to undermine the Church’s resistance of government encroachments on religious liberty.
• Nominate a presidential candidate and construct a Democratic Party Platform that explicitly promises to ramp up the above efforts by:
  1. Signing into law the “Equality Act,” a bill which, as I wrote at catholicvote.org, “would be the last nail in the religious liberty coffin of Obergefell, criminalizing the rights of religious employers to, say, refuse to hire gay rights operatives as Catechism teachers.”
  2. Increasing Planned Parenthood’s federal funding and repealing the Hyde Amendment, forcing taxpayers to directly finance abortion on demand.
  3. Appointing Supreme Court justices who would pursue a “progressive vision of religious freedom” that only operates as a cover for labeling orthodox Christian beliefs as “the misuse of religion to discriminate,” in the words of the Democratic Party Platform.

And overseas, anti-Christians have been able to: 

• Refuse to acknowledge the persecution of Christians in the Middle East virtually until the rise of ISIS made it politically embarrassing not to do so. Celebrate Syrian Muslim persecutors as “freedom fighters” for nearly a decade — both by granting them the status of media darlings at outlets such as NPR, and by the Obama administration providing them (to this day!) with the very weapons they used to hunt and murder Assyrian Christians and Yazidis.
• Foment aggression against the Assad regime in Syria, while ignoring the terrified pleas of surviving persecuted minorities who continually beg the West to leave the Assad regime intact as the only thing — however imperfect — standing between them and a final unleashing of genocidal Jihad.
• Trumpet a “refugee crisis” that demands the hasty acceptance of Syrian migrants into Europe and the U.S., only to systematically exclude Assyrian Christians fleeing ISIS. (As Elliot Abrams reports for the Council on Foreign Relations: “The United States has accepted 10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. … That is to say, one half of one percent.”
• Nominate a presidential candidate and construct a Democratic Party Platform that explicitly promise to ramp up the above efforts by:
  1. Supporting what the Democratic Party Platform calls the “moderate Syrian opposition” which has long been hijacked by the same Islamists who have mercilessly persecuted Assyrian Christians since long before ISIS.
  2. Creating a “No-Fly Zone” at the behest of would-be President Hillary Clinton to protect “moderate” rebels in Syria — an aggressive threat to shoot down Russian and Syrian planes.
  3. Exponentially increasing U.S. acceptance of Syrian Muslim migrants while continuing the status quo of systematically neglecting endangered Assyrian Christians.

Don’t let anti-Christian bigots call you “un-Christian” because of Trump

Whatever happens next, Christians should be grateful that the barreling anti-Christianity outlined above is at least severely hampered by the rise of the politically incorrect Trump. We should also consider ways to continue to push back against the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable—rather than on behalf of our own standing as inoffensive subjects.

After all, politics isn’t a game of showing “who we are” by proving we don’t fall into any “deplorable” categories whom the powerful threaten to ostracize or punish. Engaging in politics ought to be an act of public virtue aimed at achieving or defending the common good. Through a Christian lens, this should be gone about especially with an eye to “the least of these,” the vulnerable and endangered whom Christ warned us not to abuse.