Tag: persecution

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.

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Promised enumerations below:

• KSP just told pro-lifers not to vote pro-life in 2020 in Christianity Today.
• KSP said that “abortion is not murder” and “calling abortion murder” is mean to abortion doctors and it’s “unchristlike” in Christianity Today.
• KSP worked with her gay BFF to support gay porn propaganda at college campuses called Fun Home.
• KSP repeatedly attacks immigration law and promotes amnesty for illegal aliens.
• KSP congratulated her “good friend” Rachel Held Evans when she was appointed to Obama’s faith advisory council.
• KSP lauds Black Lives Matter.
• KSP says that poor people don’t have a right to own guns.
• KSP calls herself a feminist, and started an organization with the word ‘feminist’ IN ITS VERY TITLE.
• KSP attacked Vice President Pence and Billy Graham for refusing to be alone with women who aren’t their wives on grounds it’s “sexist.”
• KSP started a feminist organization full of female preachers and wildly unorthodox theologians to create more female preachers.
• KSP flat-out said that she’s not a complementarian and attacks that position.
• KSP was chosen by the Animal Liberation Front (according to them) to infiltrate evangelical institutions with “animal liberation theology” back in 2007.
• KSP serves the rabidly liberal Human Society (which is more radical than PETA) and issued an animal rights declaration called Every Living Thing.
• KSP advocates for the end to modern animal husbandry “even if humans suffer” and “even if the economy of the country be damned.”
• KSP thinks pets go to Heaven because when you name them it gives them personhood.
• KSP says that cruelty to animals makes her more upset than abortion.
• KSP’s language was called gay-affirming by Dr. James White here. He agrees.
• KSP endorsed the pro-LGBT It Gets Better Campaign.
• KSP endorsed the Revoice Conference both before and after it happened, and endorsed it again on Roys’ program just this week.
• KSP endorsed accomodating ‘transgender’ people by changing bathroom facilities to appease them.
• KSP chooses not to take a side in the gay marriage issue when she writes.