Apparently, white wealthy and educated elites don’t like Christians, but the authors of this new book don’t say how many of those elites are Jews.
I don’t regard Jews as evil when they hate Christians and I don’t regard Christians as evil when they hate Jews and I don’t regard Muslims as evil for hating Jews and Christians and I don’t regard Jews and Christians as evil for hating Muslims. Different groups have different interests. The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to hate out-groups. If you are a strongly identifying Jew, Christian, white or black, you are likely to have contempt for outsiders.
I don’t believe in the existence of such sins as racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism. Is America suffering from a mental illness when it competes with China for influence in Asia? Was America suffering from a mental illness when it subjugated the Indians and thrashed Mexico in war to take more land for itself? Are Mexicans insane for coming to America and remaking the country in their own image?
Here’s an interview with the author of a new book on hatred of Christians.
CP: Why did you, and co-author David Williamson, want to research and write about anti-Christian hostility?
Yancey: There is a lot of literature on hostility toward many different groups but just about none on hostility toward Christians. Yet when we collected qualitative data from cultural progressive activists we quickly saw some of the unnecessary vitriol and fears within many of our respondents. We also saw the social status of those who exhibited this hatred and many of them would be in positions that allowed them to at least subtly act on their anger and fears. That motivated us to take a more systematic look at Christianophobia and speculate on how this phenomenon influences certain social aspects in the United States.
Another aspect that drove me to work on this project was that while I consistently saw evidence of Christianophobia in other areas of my life and in our society, unlike other types of intolerances, those who exhibited Christianophobia do not tend to think that they are intolerant. Usually those who do not like blacks or Muslims admit that they are intolerant but simply try to justify their intolerance. Those with Christianophobia tend to deny that they are intolerant but rather that they are fairly interpreting social reality. Envisioning themselves as fair and free of intolerance allows them to blame those they detest rather than recognize how their emotions have distorted their intellectual judgments.
By documenting just how hateful some of the attitudes are toward Christians, and who tends to have such hateful attitudes, I hope to bring Christianophobia into the light so that we, as a society, can discuss this social problem and how we might address bigotry in all of its myriad forms.
CP: Demographically, you found that Christianophobes are mostly white, wealthy, well-educated and non-religious. Is the fact that this is mostly an elite group good or bad for Christians? In other words, given a choice, would you rather be hated by elites or non-elites?
Yancey: Obviously all things being equal, an elite individual can do more damage to a person than a non-elite individual. But this does not mean that Christians have it worse than all other groups. We also have to factor in the number of people with Christianophobia. For example, more people have hostility toward atheists than toward Christians, but those individuals do not tend to be white or highly educated. Thus, they do not have the level of per-capita power of those who do not like Christians.
So is a group worse off if more people do not like them or if those who do not like them have a lot of social power, but there are fewer of them? Context matters to answer such a question. If you want to get elected to political office, then atheists are at a disadvantage since more people do not like them. But if you want to get a higher education, then you will run into a lot more people with power who hate Christians than who hate atheists.
