Stephen Baldwin’s daughter is a potential martyr?

Maybe it's my masochistic relationship to Christian pop culture, but I was compelled to keep up with the latest (and, thank God, last) season of the British Celebrity Big Brother. The reason? Stephen Baldwin.

Stephen Baldwin, as you might already be aware, is the youngest of the Baldwin brothers and a true Christian celebrity. I'm not quite sure why he was in CBB: He has a string of reality programmes behind him, so he might be a simple exhibitionist. He filed for bankruptcy last summer, so he might be doing it for the money. Or he might be doing it to witness to our godless culture. Probably all of the above. Stephen is an intense guy. Very vocal about his faith. In an uncomfortable way. Which is probably why he didn't last that long in the house.

I want to comment on an conversation that was in one of the early shows. They didn't show the context, neither what came immediately before or after, which might be part of the reason it was so stark. Stephen was sitting around the main table with several of the house mates, imagining out loud a situation where a person armed with a machine gun came up to him and his family on the bus. Stephen imagines the gunman turning to his daughter and threatening to shoot her if she doesn't deny that Jesus exists. The daughter turns to her father, asking, "What should I do?" Stephen at this point seems to be relishing in the suspense he's creating and waits a few seconds, so as to prompt someone (in this case, Nicola T) to ask him, "What would you answer?" "I'd tell her to do what I have taught her," he answers. "And what's that?", she - and all of us - wants to know. "She would turn to the gunman and say, 'Absolutely Jesus exists!'", Stephen answers. Or something to that rather dramatic effect.

What struck me immediately about the exchange was how absurd the imagined scenario was. Maybe it could have been plausible if it took place in North Korea or Burma or somewhere where Christians are actually persecuted. Not in America, where they are the majority and where there is religious freedom! Also, what sort of father actively entertains and even shares scenarios where his child is murdered? And not just murdered, but murdered not only without him trying to protect her, but where he actually encourages her to seek out the lethal bullet. There's something deeply wrong with that.

But it's not like Stephen is out of the ordinary. Martyrdom, along with the entire continuum of persecution that leads up to it, seems entirely plausible to many Christians in the Western world. They think that suffering at the hands of the ungodly is an inextricable part of the Christian life and seem to miss the fact that compared to their sisters and brothers who are actually being persecuted, they live in immense freedom. It's not that they aren't aware of their suffering spiritual siblings. They are. To almost a fetishising degree. But they seem to miss the fact that they themselves are not at all suffering persecution.

Here's my take on why.

Christianity came into being in the midst of persecution. The Bible was written in circumstances of extreme stress and the self-understanding of its authors reflects this. So you have verses like 2nd Timothy 3:12,

Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

It's perfectly understandable why Paul would say that. It was pretty self-evident. But that was then, and now, 2000 years later, things have changed. A lot. We now live in liberal democracies, decidedly shaped by Christian thought, where the freedom to practice our religion is guaranteed by law. We have been in the majority for centuries. Indeed, we have done our share of persecuting. But still this self-understanding of being a hated and oppressed minority remains.

I don't know enough church history to know why it persists. Maybe it's a Protestant thing. I don't know. But this anachronistic self-identity feeds on and is kept alive by, ironically, the very thing that it sees as its enemy. There's a confirmation bias going on, I think, that sees any sort of resistance and ill-will directed towards Christianity as part of the aforementioned persecution continuum. Yet, the resistance and ill-will, the so-called persecution, it sees in the Western world are enabled by the very same mechanism - freedom of religion, speech, etc. - that guarantees Christianity its freedom and protects it from persecution. The freedoms our laws guarantee us ensure the coexistence off all religions. Which means that a certain level of verbal abuse is allowed. Which some Christianity sees as persecution. But it isn't persecution. It's exactly the opposite.

And here's the even bigger irony: It's probably because of the death and dying of Christendom, the cultural and political and often persecuting supremacy of Christianity, that some Christians feel persecuted. It's not because there are evil people out there who in league with Satan want to kill Christian girls on buses. It's because Christianity used to have the power, but now doesn't. And because everyone now is guaranteed a say. It's because they're not allowed to persecute anymore that they feel persecuted.

With the false appropriation of early Christianity self-understanding in place plus a fair deal of confirmation bias, these changes, which should be seen as happy, are seen as bad, threatening and persecuting.

Never mind that we're actually free from any persecution at all. Never mind that the things we see as persecution are trivial beyond the ridiculous compared to the actual suffering of religious people throughout the ages and still today. Never mind that the worst persecution we face is the one in our heads. We still think public buses are potentially lethal.

Strange, isn't it?