But today I’m not writing about the victim mindset on the left. I’m writing about whether a similar mindset is developing among Christians.

The topic is prompted by a letter I got from a pastor, responding to my “Hoax Crime” column, which I’ve held onto for a couple of years now — knowing that one of these days I really had to use it as the basis for a new column, but for various reasons (and as tends to happen when I say “one of these days”) never getting around to it. I’ll let him speak for himself:

I agree with Kaufman that liberals have used victimhood as a cause celebre. What worries me, however, is that evangelicals seem to be using the same tactics.

We’ve become quite skilled at whining about every little instance of anti-Christian sentiment. If we can’t find a reason to complain, we invent our own stories of persecution: Have you read the latest incarnation of the “FCC seeks to ban Christian broadcasting” e-mail hoax? It’s been given new life since Sept. 11.

It’s not news that the world doesn’t like us. What’s news is the fact that American Christians, who probably have the least defensible claim to victimhood of any Christian community in the world, shriek like the church will collapse at any second under the intense persecution of liberals in the government, universities and media.

I’d like to see Boundless tackle the issue of the Christian victim mentality, and how it affects our relationship with the world Christ has called us to reach.

Request granted, pastor — albeit (and I apologize) belatedly. You make some good points, and I’d like to add a few of my own.

There are reasons that Boundless has done its share of stories about anti-Christian activity on campuses. They expose the campus left’s hypocrisy in claiming to favor “tolerance,” “dialogue” and “the free exchange of ideas.” They show what’s at stake when colleges institute codes banning things like “hate speech.” (The real targets aren’t Klansmen, they’re conservatives and Christians.) And they remind believers that we can’t seriously present our whole faith — which includes some very unpopular parts — without taking some heat. All those things are well worth doing.

That said, we should beware becoming mirror images of all those folk who seek to enhance their moral stature by playing the victim. That’s the way the game is played in cultural politics, especially on campus, and it’s easy to get caught up in it. It’s no fun always being on the defensive, always being the one accused of picking on someone else (AKA “intolerance”). In fact, that just makes us feel all the more picked-on ourselves. At the most basic childish level, we’d like to turn the tables.

But it’s not enough just to make the obvious point that Christians are hardly immune to the seductions of the victim mentality. The truth is, we may be especially susceptible.

If you think about it, the temptation is practically unavoidable. Christians are supposed to be outsiders in some sense, never fitting in with the culture around us: We’re “aliens and strangers in this world” (1 Peter 2:11). And Christ did tell us we’d be persecuted if we follow Him. But what He meant to bolster believers facing trials by keeping their eyes on Him (John 15:18 ff.), we like to take to boost our own egos. So we dwell on the injustices we’ve endured and the evils of our enemies. It makes us feel righteous, and we like that feeling. (It sure beats the feeling of repentance.)

Some of us may even experience a type of persecution envy. After all, from Christ and His Apostles to today’s Christians in places like Sudan, believers have faced prison and death for their faith. Compared to them, we do have it pretty soft. Not that we really want to suffer like the martyrs. Still, we’d like to feel we’re part of the same life-and-death struggle. It’d make us feel at least a little heroic.

The Apostle Paul has a word for this attitude: foolishness. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul catalogues his sufferings: imprisonment, beatings, floggings, stoning, even shipwrecks. But he “boasts” (his word) about those sufferings only satirically, “speaking as a fool” (v. 21). No claims of his own righteousness for Paul; no treating his scars as badges of honor. The only righteousness he claims is what’s imputed to him through Christ.

Notice that Paul doesn’t say his sufferings weren’t real. He’s not pretending he doesn’t have enemies, or that they won’t do some nasty stuff. Nor is he saying it’s wrong to feel anger when he’s treated unjustly, or to seek justice for himself (as he did before Roman courts). He’s refusing to use his victim status to build up his image, either in his own eyes or in the eyes of others.

In a sense, it doesn’t even matter whether our own sufferings are real, though it’s healthy to recognize how often they’re not all we’re tempted to imagine. What’s more important is where our focus should be — not on ourselves, but on Christ, and on serving other people in our lives. Seeking evidence of our righteousness, including cultivating a sense of persecution, is sheer self-indulgence: Our seemingly insatiable desire to do so is evidence not of how righteous we are, but of how righteous we’re not.

I know people who’d consider that realization depressing. But really, it’s just one more example of how God’s Law is supposed to work. Much as some people (including some authors whose works show up in Christian bookstores) would have it otherwise, the Law doesn’t show us how we can quit being sinful. It shows us that we are sinful, and that every day of our lives is lived in God’s forgiveness of sin. Christ is our righteousness: not part of our righteousness, not our helper in achieving righteousness, but all our righteousness.

And next to that, the emotional rewards of wallowing in a persecution complex are a pretty poor substitute.

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