Karen Swallow Prior Doesn’t Know what Persecution is

We’ve written for you before about Karen Swallow Prior, how we continually find ourselves vexed and nonplussed that she’s viewed so favorably and regarded as conservative within Christian circles despite the plethora of problems with her. The list is extensive and has been enumerated below.

Recently, however, she took to calling out Christians who don’t want to wear masks at Church and those arrested while engaging in public worship as not really being persecuted, but rather profaning “True Martyrs” who suffered more severely.

It’s at this point that it’s hard to imagine that the gatekeeping Prior is an English professor, as she seemingly doesn’t understand that there is a semantic domain and range of meaning for the term “persecution” and that’s not all about having one’s toes chopped off or being boiled alive.

No one is saying that the persecution endured by participants in the Psalm Sing event, in which the government arrested Christians for singing hymns in public while not social distancing, despite allowing all sorts of secular public gatherings without the same constraints, is akin to the sufferings of Hugo Jacob Kraen, his wife Mary, and two other unknown souls of Asserow.

In their case, after they became converted they were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church who captured Mary and drowned her in A.D. 1532. Hugo and the two others were likewise soon apprehended and taken to prison into Gravenhage. They were made to renounce their faith through hideous torture but refused to do so. Consequently, they were tied to the stake and burned alive.

No one is saying that the two are comparable. It’s not comparable to having a lion take a hunk out of one’s neck and then feel its bite shatter bits of skull and spinal tendons, but it is indisputable that they are on the same broad spectrum of meaning, particularly when we understand it to include forms like “harassing treatment,” “oppression” due to “religious beliefs and practices” and “persistent troubling.”

Was it persecution when Churches were forbidden from singing in church at all? How about when police threatened to fine churches and arrest pastors having drive-in services where the congregants never even left their cars? Is it persecution when the government said Christians cannot meet in groups of more than 6 for bible studies in private homes and that if they do meet they must wear masks at all times under threat of arrest or fine?

When there is one rule for Churches and Christians, and another for pagans and secular businesses, that is a form of persecution, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of having one’s skin flayed and salted.


Promised enumerations below:

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8 thoughts on “Karen Swallow Prior Doesn’t Know what Persecution is

  1. So why exactly would Rosario Butterfield wish to associate with Prior and be friends with her given all of KSP’s positions? It’s beyond belief.

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