For almost each day on the Calendar of Saints, there are multiple persons listed. For September 9, one set of saints were martyrs to their faith. Here is the utterly, appallingly cruel way in which one of them (another saint named Peter who happened to be a court eunuch and a Christian) was murdered for his refusal to disavow his faith:

Peter, having refused to sacrifice, was hung up naked in the air, and whipped on all parts of his body. After the executioners had torn his flesh in such a manner that the bones started out, without being able to shake his constancy, they poured salt and vinegar into his wounds; then had a gridiron brought, and a fire made, on which they broiled him as we do meat . . . ; but he was resolute to the last, and died under the torture.

This horror took place when Christianity was a minority religion, prior to Constantine’s 4th-century declaration making elevating it to the Empire’s official religion.

What a difference an edict makes! Another saint celebrated on September 9 comes on the scene after Christianity is in the ascendency. What is this particular saint, a man named Omer (well beloved by many crown princes in the 7th century), celebrated for? Well, there were Gaulish people known as the Morini in what is present-day Belgium who either refused to become Christians. Here’s what Butler tells us of Omer’s great work:

This holy prelate, assisted by the powerful grace of God, threw down their idols, demolished their temples, and instructed the deluded people in the saving doctrine of eternal life.

Butler writes with no sense of irony in discussing both Peter and Omer with unfettered admiration. There is no apparent cognitive dissonance when Christians–previously a minority who were persecuted–become the perpetrators of cultural and structural annihilations once safely in the majority. Somehow, if it means sustaining or spreading Christianity, then it gets the Imprimatur of Righteousness.

What actually did the Church learn from the period in which Christians were killed by those in power? Apparently this: Power gives one the ability to destroy anyone and anything that the powerful does not like or want in its presence.

Now turning to American Christians, who are actually in the majority yet, quite often, complain that they are being mistreated, targeted by liberals (a minority), the mainstream media (much of which they directly or indirectly control), and the courts–they too are working with the same idea of power! Their belief is that having power means that you should be able to get your own way and destroy or at least control the thoughts and actions of others that you do not like. Their main complaints arise whenever they are stymied in controlling and/or destroying others that they do not like, approve of, or want in their midst.

This goes a very long way in explaining why such Christians embrace and support the most powerful man in America (irrespective of whether he displays any traditionally Christian virtues at all)–it is the hope and plan that through him they will be green-lighted like Omer was. It’s not hypocrisy; it is a blatant desire for the raw power to control and, if necessary, destroy.

One message?

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)