Christian Persecution: The Movie!

The Poor Oppressed Christians have been making movies lately, filming a worldview that I hope will one day be looked back upon and mocked as extensively as it deserves. Just like the last of these films I covered, God is Not Dead, their latest effort, Persecuted, is based on a laughably impossible premise that the audience is supposed to find threatening. In this case, it's the government attempting to legislate religion, something Poor Oppressed Christians are totally for until they realize that religious freedom also applies to non-Christians. Then they go off the rails about how wrong and unfair it is that they aren't treated as special and given more privileges than everyone else.

The plot revolves around an evil senator who is obsessed with a piece of legislation, “The Faith and Fairness Act.” It’s never clear exactly what the Act does, but it seems to force all religions to operate under a single umbrella organization, and to allow members of any faith the ability to preach in others’ houses of worship. It thus combines the Religious Right’s fear that liberals are itching to silence Christian broadcasters by reviving the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine, and their resentment that people view them as intolerant for believing their faith is the only avenue to truth and God.

Standing tall against this plot is evangelist John Luther (John Calvin/John Wesley and Martin Luther?). Luther is sort of a Billy Graham figure who has overcome a past of drug abuse to become a national figure. His ministry, we are told, reaches more people than the evening news. Early in the movie, the evil Senator Harrison tries to bully Luther into backing his legislation at a religious rally; when Luther refuses to compromise his faith for the senator’s political gain, Harrison puts in motion an elaborate plot to destroy him. The also-evil president of the United States is in on the scheme: he looks a little bit like Ted Kennedy and sounds more than a little bit like Bill Clinton.

What's so silly about all this is that a law akin to the "Faith and Fairness Act" would be a blatant violation of the First Amendment in the United States, and therefore massively and obviously unconstitutional. For all the Poor Oppressed Christians complain about their lack of special treatment and their resulting victim status, the First Amendment actually protects religious groups from government interference of this sort. So such a law could never be passed, and even if it were the Supreme Court would slap it down immediately. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine a politician who would go to great lengths to "destroy" an evangelist for simply refusing to speak in support of a proposed law. But apparently the Poor Oppressed Christians see both as real possibilities.