by Joe Broadmeadow
Every investigation begins with the same question. Where is the evidence?
Not the feeling. Not the sincerity of the complainant, however genuine. Evidence. A report, a witness, a date, an injury, something a prosecutor can carry into a courtroom and set on the table.
Twenty years in police work teaches you the difference between crime and grievance, and the difference shows up the moment you ask for the file.
Ask for the file on Christian persecution in the United States.
Persecution carries a hard definition. It means the state jails you for what you believe. It means gunmen burn the church with the congregation inside. It means a government treats your baptism as a crime, seizes your children, or executes your pastor.
Those things are happening in the world right now. They happen in North Korea, where a Bible in the house can end a family. They happen in Nigeria, where armed men empty rural churches. They happen in China, where the Party appoints bishops and pulls down crosses.
They do not happen here.
Look at the numbers, not the noise. Sixty-two percent of American adults describe themselves as Christians. Eighty-seven percent of the voting members of Congress do. Every president in the history of the republic has claimed the faith. Congress opens with a chaplain’s prayer. The Supreme Court opens by invoking God. Churches pay no property tax and file no income tax return.
The federal calendar stops for Christmas. No other belief in America enjoys anything close to that footing.
Then look at the courts, where persecution would leave the clearest trail of all.
Lee Epstein and Eric Posner examined every Supreme Court religion case decided after oral argument going back to 1953. Across seven decades the religious side prevailed about half the time.
Under Chief Justice Roberts the win rate jumped past eighty percent, and most of the winners were mainstream Christian organizations. A coach prayed at the fifty-yard line and won. Catholic schools won exemption from employment suits. Religious schools in Montana and Maine won access to public tuition dollars. A Catholic agency won the right to decline same-sex foster placements. Churches won relief from pandemic assembly limits.
A persecuted minority does not post an eighty percent win rate in the highest court in the country. A favored majority does.
The hate crime data tells the same story from the other direction. Of the religiously motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2024, roughly seven in ten targeted Jews, who make up about two percent of the population.
Anti-Catholic incidents accounted for about two percent of the religious total. Crimes against Christians do occur, and police should work every one of them hard. Still, nobody reading the national tally would conclude American Christians carry the weight of religious hatred in this country.
Jews and Muslims carry it, by orders of magnitude.
So, what do people mean when they say Christian persecution? They describe the end of a monopoly.
For most of American history, Christian assumption ran the public square by default. The classroom prayer came from one tradition. The stores closed on one Sabbath. The holiday on the calendar belonged to one faith.
Pluralism has chipped away at the default. A clerk says happy holidays. A school board declines to open with an invocation. A neighbor builds a mosque. A coworker marries someone the church would not have married thirty years ago.
None of those events diminish anyone’s right to worship. They remove the assumption everyone shares the same one. Losing deference is different from losing liberty, though the two feel alike to anyone who never had to tell them apart.
The rhetoric matters because of what it authorizes. Nobody mobilizes over discomfort. People mobilize over threat.
Frame a sixty-two percent majority holding eighty-seven percent of Congress as a hunted remnant, and every act of aggression converts into self-defense.
Pull the book because they came for the children first.
Bolt the commandments to the classroom wall because they drove God out of it.
Route public money to the church school because they starved it.
The persecution story does not describe a condition. It licenses a program.
So, what do people mean when they say Christian persecution? They describe the end of a monopoly.
Joe Broadmeadow
The claim carries a second cost, and this one lands on people who cannot afford it. Think of the Copt in Egypt, the farmer in Benue State, the believer in a North Korean labor camp.
When American politicians spend the word “persecution” on a coffee cup design or a zoning dispute or a lost lawsuit, they spend it down to nothing. Cry wolf loud enough and long enough, and the village stops listening on the night the wolf finally comes.
Apply to this claim the standard any complaint should meet. Produce the file. Name the American jailed for taking communion. Name the congregation the government dissolved. Name the church the state padlocked and kept padlocked. Name the statute forbidding the Gospel. Show me the arrest report, the docket number, the sworn statement, the photograph.
There is no file. There never was one.
American Christians hold the broadest religious freedom any majority faith has ever held anywhere in human history. They worship, build, broadcast, teach, organize, donate, vote, run for office, and win. Nothing stops them. What erodes, slowly and unevenly, is the expectation everyone else will arrange their lives around the same faith.
Calling that persecution is not an error of degree. It is an error of category and, increasingly, a deliberate one.
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