You could call it chutzpah, except they’d probably claim that word oppresses them: Conservative Christian film production companies are making not one, but two movies this year called Persecuted, to promote the myth that conservative Christians have reason to fear they are being oppressed by an evil, secularist government. At least one of them is set in the Soviet Union (clearly analogized to the modern United States), but the other is a stretch that puts even the goofiest science fiction to shame, featuring an imaginary American government that requires religious broadcasters to ‘present all religious points of view when presenting their own point of view.” ( There are over 4,000 religions, easily, in the world, to give you an idea of how little thought went into this script.)

It’s easy to laugh at how ridiculous these fantasies of persecution are, but what other choice do they have? Attempts to create real-life examples of anti-Christian or anti-conservative oppression are, if anything, even more laughable than the lurid attempts to come up with hypotheticals. Indeed, looking over conservative complaints about persecution, either against Christians or just against conservatives, one gets the distinct impression that what oppresses them the most is other people having […]