Columnist Peter Heck has thrown caution to the wind with a recent forecast: “Criminalization of Christianity is on America’s horizon”. And others in the American Redoubt movement have launched a fictional serial based on the same proposition of a dystopian future. At which every Evangelical GOPer reassures himself, clutching tight his Scofield bible and reciting to himself Lee Greenwood’s refrain, “And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free!”

But as we shall see, these dire prognostications are so far behind the curve as to actually lend power to the enemy. Because speaking of the threat as something spied on a distant horizon only dismisses all the ways Christianity is already being outlawed.

This is the meaning back of every affirmation of religious Pluralism — a thing taken for granted even in our most ‘conservative’ denominations today — that the public square is an equal playing field open to all faiths so long as they tolerate all others; which, of course, assumes them to be of equal validity and value. So, according to this civic theory (the default position in the churches presently, but the precise opposite view of the church at the time of America’s settlement) the entry fee for Christians to the republic we founded is to repudiate Christ’s sovereign claim over all areas of life. Which then is a denial of the essential character of Christianity; and one which casts all orthodox as “fringe”, “zealots”, “bigots”, or even “terrorists”. So all who dissent from this new doctrine in deference to the crown rights of Christ over America are regarded as criminals of the worst sort.

And I’d dare any who think otherwise to simply refuse service to the next Moslem in their business on the basis of his being a Moslem on the grounds that the scripture abjures us to have no part with the works of darkness; or decline to rent an apartment to a Wiccan who works as receptionist for an abortion clinic on the grounds that you don’t want to aid nor lend comfort to such evil. You will quickly be disabused of the notion that you are at liberty to practice the Christian faith in this country.

So too has every overture for civil rights been a demand for the suppression of Christianity. Because the entire concept — rights created by statecraft to countermand God-given rights — is a repudiation of the Christian worldview. The real world implications of which have infringed against our God-given rights to things like property, free association, and even self-defense. This absurdity of forcing White Christians, at proverbial (and sometimes literal) gunpoint, into service of degenerate and hostile aliens (how is that not slavery, by the by?) has matriculated necessarily into LGBT demands to “Bake the cake, Bigot!”, and like absurdities. All of which presuppose the basic convictions of Christian conscience and doctrine to be illegal already.