John Zmirak, a conservative columnist and senior editor of James Robison’s “The Stream” website, warned in a radio interview this week (as he did in a recent column) that Christians in America are on the verge of being violently persecuted like Armenians during the Armenian Genocide, Jews in Nazi Germany, or Tutsis in Rwanda.
Citing the case of an Indiana pizzeria that shut down after facing backlash after its owners said they wouldn’t cater gay people’s weddings (and which has since received more than $800,000 in donations), Zmirak told Alaska’s Joe Miller that “I think this vilification of faithful Christians could lead to violence in America.”
“It’s happened so many times before, and all the signs are there that the enemies of Christianity are seeing ‘how much can we get away with?” he said.
He warned that within five years, “we’re going to see ourselves reduced to the status of second-class citizens the way Christians are in countries like Egypt and Syria.”
When a dominant group wants to persecute a minority, the first thing they do is vilify them. You had the dominant secularists in France before the French Revolution spend about 20 years vilifying the Christian clergy; the moment they took power in the French Revolution, they started killing the Christian clergy. When the Turks decided that the Armenians were a dangerous minority almost 100 years ago to the day, they started out with a propaganda campaign saying that the Armenians were all traitors working for the Russian czar; within a few years, they were butchering in the streets and driving them into the desert to die of thirst. Same thing happened in, of course, Nazi Germany, they vilified the Jews, preparing people for the Holocaust. You saw it happen again in Rwanda, where the once-powerful Tutsi minority, they were declared on government radio stations for weeks and weeks, they were called cockroaches, ‘we must exterminate the cockroaches.’ It was repeated over and over and over again and it was followed, of course, by a genocide that in the course of a month or two, killed more than a million people.
I think this vilification of faithful Christians could lead to violence in America. I think the churches have been persecuted before, Christians are being persecuted all around the world by Islamists — and the U.S. government is doing nothing, of course — I could imagine Americans standing by while churches are padlocked and pastors are arrested for being hatemongers, while children are being taken away from their parents because they don’t want them to be taught they’re extremist views.
It’s happened so many times before, and all the signs are there that the enemies of Christianity are seeing ‘how much can we get away with? Can we close down a pizza parlor for even theoretically being willing to discriminate? Can we get teachers from religious schools fired? They’re going to keep pushing until they hit pushback. And unless there’s powerful pushback from Christians now — not five years from now, when it will be too late, but now — we’re going to see ourselves reduced to the status of second-class citizens the way Christians are in countries like Egypt and Syria.
