So Brit Hume is upset that his advice that Tiger Woods accept Jesus as his savior has been slammed. Hume and his conservative Christian allies have cited the reaction as yet more evidence that Christians are the victims of oppression by the liberal elites. After all, if Hume were a Jew and advised Woods to join the Hebrew cohort there would have been no fuss and bother. Same if Hume were say, a Muslim, and instructed Woods to submit to Allah -- conservatives especially would have been fine with this expression of religious opinion, all the more so because no one on Hume's FoxNews would imagine disparaging the Islamic faith that a billion and a half adhere to. Of course a Hindu or Ralian Hume would have not heard a peep of protest. Nor would his broad minded coworkers at Fox been perturbed had Hume told Wood that he should abandon religion in favor of atheism.
Returning to the real world, the project by many Christians to portray themselves as the victims of discrimination is a cynical and deceptive ploy in a nation were three quarters are followers of Christ, God is on the currency and in speeches by government officials, and all but a couple or so Presidents have been Christian (the deist and occasional agnostic Jefferson and apparently casual atheist to deist Lincoln being the best documented exceptions). America is the most Christian of the western democracies, although it is true that religion continues to lose ground as the secular minority continues to rapidly expand (to about a fifth of the population these days, which means that "In God We Trust' business is off by 20%; http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html; http://www.secularhumanism.org/reply-to-rodney-stark.pdf). It is the nontheistic minority that is the all too real target of bigotry. People would not dare to say that one does not find Christians in foxholes, or Jews or Muslims, but the casual slur against atheists often rolls off American tongues despite the many nonbelievers who serve in combat. Gallup surveys find that most Americans will not marry an atheist or vote for one for president, the same attitudes the majority used to hold against blacks. The antipathy towards nonbelievers is not covered and condemned by Hume, O'Reilly, Coulter, Beck, Limbaugh or Robertson who claim to be fair and objective, but whose true self aggrandizing interest is protecting the prerogatives of the religious right and to heck with everyone else.
The conservative Christian line that people and societies must follow the dictates of the designer they believe in or suffer the consequences is bogus, only the most secular democracies are enjoying the best overall socioeconomic circumstances in history (http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf). Here in America evangelicals and the Bible belt suffer high rates of divorce, STD infections, abortion, teen pregnancy, juvenile and adult mortality, homicides and the like. It was evangelicals who elected the first divorcee for president (Reagan), and the Republican party nominated an adulterous divorcee and his co-adulterer (McCain & wife) to be the first couple. Theocon Republican bad boys have been caught out having one affair after another. This is not, by the way, incompatible with classic Christian doctrine, in which being sinful is not the fatal flaw -- it is rejecting the redeeming grace of Christ that is unforgivable.
