Crusaders In Conflict

Ridiculing and vilifying everything traditional is the default attitude of adolescents and ungrounded progressives. And they elevate favored identity groups to hallowed status.

But what is a smiley-face totalitarian to do when identity interests conflict?

The recent southern church burnings demanded condemnation by all good persons, regardless of ideological peculiarity. But some progressives, inadvertently revealing that their outrage was studied and turned on political considerations, used the burnings as a vehicle for partisan bannering:

 "In the wake of six black churches burning down, the Christians on my timeline seem more disturbed by how the Confederate flag is treated."
- Twitter poster

For white progressives to take up racial minorities' causes (save for political diversification) is a doctrinal given. And no one of sound mind would deny that they helped achieve needed, significant changes in earlier decades.

But in this case, impulses collided.

In progressives' faulty lexicon, "Christian" is exclusively negative, a synonym for intolerant, oppressive, and bigoted. (Oddly, Islam receives their gushing approval, though it actually is all of those things.)

Never mind that more than a few current anti-Christian progressives have acquaintances and relatives who are Christian - those progressives' own realities illustrate the invalidity of their prejudice. Also disregard that American Christianity has a long and rich history of working in the interests of the very people progressives pretend to care about.

Many American Christians have long been active in efforts against hunger, homelessness, and execution, for example. And they were and are fundamentally involved in anti-war endeavoring.

But progressives do not acknowledge that noble history. They effectively take up Pat Robertson's deceitful cause, defining Christianity solely as a phenomenon of the right and wrongly ceding it to the political opposition.

And what of those terrible attacks on black churches? They were Christian churches, of course. But that inconvenient fact can't be mentioned by progressives sworn to advocate anti-Christian bigotry.

So the Christian faith bedrock of the horribly attacked black churches is ignored, that "black churches" and "Christian" can be misrepresented as inherently adversarial.

Too bad these 2015 progressives can't time-travel back to 1965 Selma, to educate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.