When you call yourselves “The Four Horsemen of New Atheism”…
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I’ve said it before but even in my teenage New Atheism phase I found these guys vaguely distasteful. I’m glad to see that those I did follow at the time (like PZ Myers) seem to have held up against the onslaught of the far right invasion.
That said, this part of the above article is not correct
Christians, of course, believe that they are relentlessly persecuted (note: they aren’t).
This should read American Christians
Go ask an Italian priest, a Church of England vicar or a German protestant pfarrer whether they feel persecuted and the worst you will hear is a mild disappointment that people aren’t going to church anymore as much as they used to. There’s something unique to the American brand of Christianity that makes them nasty, loudmouthed and paranoid. And I say Christianity because while it is mostly protestants that act like that, the American brand of Catholicism is also decades behind the rest of the world, to the point where they are almost openly defying the current pope.
(I don’t know enough about the social attitudes of the Black Baptist etc. community to say whether I should restrict the above to white American Christianity but I suspect I should)
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That is exactly right. Despite actually being targeted, in their own churches even, African-American Christians do not have the same persecution complex.
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Like so many things coming out of the USian right to infect the world, I suspect the white American Christians have been exporting their persecution complexes to at least the Anglosphere.
People in the UK can probably make their own judgements from what’s coming out of the Daily Mail and the Tories’s rhetoric on religion, but in Australia … oy gevalt.
I was going to write a long exegesis about the history behind this, but let’s just say that the Christians in the Australian Liberal Party did everything in their power to prevent Gay Marriage, until there was a glitch in the system whereby an almost centrist PM got them to compromise and allow a “referendum” on the matter. (Only they wouldn’t allow anything as binding as a referendum, so they did a nationwide non-binding “postal survey” on the matter.) The result was a resounding “yes”. So those same Christians, rather than even displaying the courage of their avowed bigotry convictions, the most vocal opponents to gay marriage on religious grounds didn’t vote “no” when the bill came to its final reading, they abstained.
Then came the whinging about how persecuted Christians in Australia are. Why, some Christians had gay people and leftists get angry with them when those Christians, quite politely, suggested that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to exist!
So one of the most egregious of them, Philip Ruddock, was given the job of running an inquiry into exactly how persecuted Christians are, and, even though they couldn’t find anything even though they looked really hard, come up with laws making religion a protected class against discrimination, like the disabled and gay people are. Because being Christian makes you as at risk of discrimination as being disabled or gay does. More at risk, even: just ask them!
(I should note that #NotAllChristians. I know a lot of white hetero cis deeply faithful practicing Christians who 1) don’t have a problem with gay people and will happily go to their weddings, and 2) are deeply embarrassed by these people who keep proclaiming to speak on their behalf, and want them to shut up and go away as much as the rest of us do.)
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Of course that’s true but there’s a depressingly large proportion of Christians, of multiple denominations, who seem either happy for the extremist, fundamentalist bigots to speak for them or at least not angry enough to speak up.
It’s they who are the problem, the majority, not the ugly carnival hawkers of hate. They are few.
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To be fair, it’s the American media that gives the carnival hawkers of hate voice in the first place to speak for all the Christians in America. The GOP has been insisting that they speak for all Christians and that the Democrats are godless heathens out to destroy Christianity. Then their media outlets put them on as the voice of Christanity (along with the right wing Christian media-sphere) which gets picked up by the MSM as representative of all Christians. The progressive wing of Christianity that exists and has a deep history here in the US has just been ignored in the past few decades. I’m not sure they are the cause of that, as much as the GOP is the cause of that. The last time more progressive Christians got an audience with the public was during the Civil Rights era.
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Well, we can’t have any more of that, now can we?
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I should note that they are there… Sen. Warnock is a pastor at Ebeneezer, after all… but they are just not getting any attention from the MSM. Nor are groups like Catholics who show up to protest at executions or those involved in the Catholic workers movement or those who shelter undocumented immigrants, or the many protestant churches that feed and work with the homeless without demanding that they convert, or who actively support LGBQT+ people, etc, etc. It’s the same “if it bleeds, it leads” logic that has news outlets focus on crime instead of things like the housing crisis. The right wing Christian movement is apparently far more photogenic and worthy of coverage than groups that are trying to act like Christ.
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This is why I read Slacktivist (he came up with that name before it became known as a pejorative):
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No money in that…
Something, something, Prosperity GospelTM
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I mean, it is important that kids learn how to strategize for maximum success in their (homicidal) endeavors, right? He’s just thinking of the next one, and hoping they plan better. 
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I suspect it’s more that the far-right fringe says more outrageous things and draws eyeballs. For decades, it seemed Westboro Baptist and Jim Bakker were the public face of Christianity, even though they were a small minority. Now the MAGAt wing has taken center stage, again (IMHO) because they draw viewers with the crazy, although they are not nearly so small a minority as they once were. (Or at least are more open about it. I suspect they were always racist, show-Christian Sadducees, but felt the need to hide it.)
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That’s some of it, but the MSM makes choices about what and who to cover, and how. Ratings matter, but it’s still a choice someone is making.
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True. And even the not-so-far right fringe. There have been numerous stories where some right-wing city councilor makes the news for stopping church groups from feeding the homeless in some park, but we never saw the stories about how they were feeding the homeless in the park before that, even though they’d been doing it for years. 
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Right-wing parents of the year!
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I bet you that they get invited to some right wing conferences in the near future to speak on child rearing…
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Passports, diamonds etc.
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