When a Pew survey says that atheists are seen as less trustworthy than rapists in the US, you know the stigma is real. When a whopping 78.4% (Pew 2014) identif

When a Pew survey says that atheists are seen as less trustworthy than rapists in the US, you know the stigma is real. When a whopping 78.4% (Pew 2014) identify as Christian, you know that Christian complaints that they are stigmatized by mainstream society are greatly overblown. Name a single non-Christian President. The best you will be able to do is to speculate that one might have been Deist a very long time ago. According to these surveys, an atheist simply could not be elected President today. Christians occupy most political offices, so they cannot plausibly claim to lack political representation. Rank and file Christians are just ordinary people, but they are manipulated by politicians and political preachers to believe they are being persecuted, that there is a War on Christmas, that Sharia will rule over them in their towns, etc. and that they must claim ever greater control of society in order to protect Christianity. Of course this means they should donate money to certain organizations, vote for certain candidates and silence religious minorities. It also extends to more militant means. Nobody wants to discuss this in polite company, because it's unsettling and it makes many Christians angry and defensive, but a certain number of followers will respond violently, as in the case of abortion clinic bombers who are encouraged to escape from law enforcement, or men who are widely though quietly praised for shooting up a Unitarian church during Sunday morning service. I could go on. This isn't a majority of Christians, but the violence feeds on that substantial supporting population, and it relates to the way many Christians have been politically manipulated into hate. Several recent popular movies present near future scenarios where Christians are systematically persecuted by non-Christians. Convincing people of this kind of falsehood is essential to building hate. This is widely seen as a plausible scenario, despite the fact that the majority of the country identifies as Christian and a disproportionate majority of our politicians identify as Christian. When you assume that this is reality, it feels more justified to infringe on others' constitutional rights and even to harm them. Whether you want to admit it or not, this is the same mechanism used to justify violence against Jews in Weimar Germany. If Christianity is a religion of love and tolerance rather than hate and intolerance, then Christians should at least respect the Constitutional rights of religious minorities, including atheists, even if they disagree with them. A few denominations have good records for this, while others do not. But the former are quiet, and the latter control the drift of Christian politics in the US, which is to attack religious minorities and insist on absolute Christian supremacy as if it were a condition of survival.