We’ve previously posted a review of Mary Eberstadt’s important book, It’s Dangerous to Believe. Here is another one, this time Rachel Lu writing at The Federalist:
Mary Eberstadt’s latest book challenges liberals to confront the troubling—and revealing—implications of their assault on religion.
Here’s the thing I like least about Mary Eberstadt’s latest book, It’s Dangerous to Believe. Liberals don’t seem to be reading or discussing it. Or if they are, I can’t find the evidence.
Admittedly, it’s a hard-hitting book. Very few words are wasted in sympathizing with liberal progressives, and some may prefer not to read whole books comparing them to McCarthyites and witch-hunters. I’d encourage them to read it anyway. This is one conversation religious conservatives would really like to have with you. Call it the Mary Eberstadt Challenge.
For Eberstadt’s more like-minded readers, the book offers a good opportunity to reflect on the challenges currently in front of us. How have we gotten to this point? What should we do next?
The Purge Begins
Much of Eberstadt’s book is dedicated to documenting the evidence that, indeed, Christians are becoming the objects of persecution. She offers scores of cases, all from recent years, in which Christians have been denied freedoms and protections that would be afforded as a matter of course to any other group. The arguments given for this suppression are transparently ludicrous or paranoid. Christians have real reason to be afraid.
Describing these incidents as “persecution” may seem overdrawn to some. Christians today face soft penalties like job loss, harassment, or social stigma, but we’re not being thrown to the lions (at least here in America). We haven’t yet rolled out the torture chambers for Catholic priests or Bible-distributing Gideons. Is Eberstadt perhaps going too far in describing Christian belief as dangerous?
Read more: The Federalist
