Amen, Brother!

George Will:

Some Christians should practice the magnanimity of the strong rather than cultivate the grievances of the weak. But many Christians are joining today's scramble for the status of victims.

This victimthink is hardly unjustified, given the frenzy on the left over the threat of a theocracy, but it is contrary to true Christianity to mix religion and politics. The worst thing for Christians was for Constantine made it the state religion of the Roman Empire, as the history of the Popes throughout the dark ages demonstrates. It is fine to stand up for the rights of the religious and to mobilize them on moral issues, but giving ultimata and acting imperiously are not the same as warning of God's judgment.

Will details the growing success of religious views and rightly points out that the religious right is doing better than it seems to want to admit. I expect that this will result in a revival of sectarian jealousy and recriminations, with a dissipation of its political influence. One of the things I keep thinking as I'm reading the early Christian apologists is that they criticize their persecutors for things that the Catholic Church itself later did to nonbelievers once it became dominant. Christians in politics need to remember that.