The True Persecutor of Christians in the USA

After I heard of Trump’s executive order aimed at eradicating “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government, I read some articles to help understand what he planned.

According to various online newspaper articles, it would involve agencies reviewing practices that try to suppress religious activities and activisms.

I then wondered, does Trump realize he is pushing a new federal policy that he in essence violated not three weeks ago?

Remember that prayer meeting with Pastor Budde where she is invited to speak at a prayer meeting? You know a prayer meeting, where people talk about their faith and religious beliefs, and they pray. They pray in the way their faith has taught them.

But after Pastor Budde basically parroted Jesus’s word (You know Jesus, the one they call Christ, the one the Christian faith is supposedly based on) Trump got all up in his feels, claimed she was out of line, not very good at her job, and attacked her online.

When someone has millions of followers on social media, and they accuse someone of committing some egregious wrong against them—as Trump did Budde—there is always a risk that some of those followers will then attack the person whom they believed wronged their hero. 

And sure enough, Pastor Budde received death threats from Trump supporters simply because she was expressing her Christian beliefs. Is Trump’s administration planning on going after those people?

Remember how we’ve been told all of our lives that many of the Christians who first came to America did so to escape religious persecution? It’s one reason we have the First Amendment, to protect American citizens from being persecuted by the government because of their religion.

You want to guess what folks were most likely to be persecuting Christians back then—those Christians who fled to this new land seeking religious freedom? Other Christians!

Quakers, Separatists, Puritans, and Catholics are all Christian, and all came to this country to avoid persecution from other Christians. Across the pond, before and after we were a country, Protestant and Catholic differences often led to bloody outcomes.

There are over 200 Christian denominations in this country. I fear Trump’s new anti-Christian bias agenda is attempting to define what it is to be Christian, and in doing so, will exclude many Christian denominations from his club. If this isn’t a clear violation of our First Amendment, I don’t know what is.

Let’s pretend for a minute that America really is a Christian nation, with no atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Daoist, Bahai’s, Wicca, or any other religion.  Christians would still be persecuted in this country, by other Christians. Trump’s new anti-bias Christian agenda would be targeting people that aren’t “their kind of Christians,” just as it is now.

One thing about Christians, they LOVE to tell other people they are not real Christians because they don’t believe how they do.

Guess what, there are Christian religions out there that support LGBTQ communities and same sex marriage, along with abortion rights. There are Christians out there who, like Jesus, welcome the immigrant and believe in feeding the poor and helping the downtrodden. 

Right now, I can practically hear some “Christians” proclaiming those religions I just mentioned are not real Christians. Which only proves my point. 

Evangelicals often love to tell other Christians, like Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jehovah Witnesses, and Unitarians that they are not “real” Christians.  

So Trump’s new agenda, in my opinion, is not about protecting the Christian faith, it is about redefining what Christianity is, and then prioritizing their beliefs, while persecuting the “Other Christians,” many of whom are actually practicing Jesus’s teachings.

There are politicians in this country who love to shout about a war on Christians. In my opinion, the call is coming from within the house.  Why? Because there is a loud group of Christians who, instead of spreading the word of Jesus, divide this country by spreading hate instead of love. A group that has turned empathy—one of Jesus’s most notable traits—into a sin. The number of adults identifying as Christian in this country is declining. One reason, I believe, is that they don’t want to be associated with “those” Christians.

I used to identify as Christian, but the behavior of some of the more outspoken Christians in this country has made me unwilling to be asociated with that group. It doesn’t mean I have pushed away Jesus, just the moniker Christian. And I’m not alone.

But this is nothing new. It’s my opinion Jesus’s message was hijacked for personal and political gain the moment he died on that cross. And it has been going on for centuries.

In conclusion, I strongly support our US Constitution and feel Trump’s anti-Christian policy violates the First Amendment.