What is the difference between Politics and Persecution?
Calling an ultimate question "political" is how you make the Truth disappear.
Even if you don’t follow Major League Baseball, you have probably seen the clips come across your feed. A San Francisco Giants players declined to wear the Pride hat the team put in front of him, and three more wore it with a Bible verse written on it instead. The reactions came fast and from every direction. Fans said they were disappointed in the team. Others called for fines and reprimands from the league offices. At one point the Justice Department weighed in on whether the players were being discriminated against for their convictions. It became, in the language we now reach for automatically, the latest “culture war clash,” and most people filed it under the heading they keep ready for exactly this kind of thing: just politics, just another round of red versus blue, just political actors doing political things.
I would tell you to pause before you file it there. There is more going on in that collision of a “private conviction” and a public expectation than the label allows, and I want to spend a little time on why.
Now, let me start by saying, I have felt some of this myself. The minute I started speaking publicly and specifically about gender and sexuality, through writing and events and social media, the threats started arriving, some of them in the comments where everyone could see them and some of them anonymously in my inbox. I have had friends reach out, not to argue, but to tell me how disappointed they are that I have apparently gone “right wing” or “MAGA”. I happen to be in a position where I can absorb that. My work isn’t the kind that can be boycotted, our donors believe in what we do, and that alignment gives me the freedom to keep talking. We don’t yet live in the kind of society, at least here in the United States, where the government would get involved in what I say. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Not long ago the case of Päivi Räsänen in Finland came back into the news. She is a grandmother, a physician, and a former interior minister, and she has been prosecuted under a section of the criminal code titled “crimes against humanity.” Before I tell you what she did, think about that phrase for a second, because we all assume crimes against humanity is reserved for something monstrous. It sounds like the heading you would file genocide under, or mass atrocity, or a sex trafficking ring. It is, in this case, the charge brought against a grandmother for distributing a church pamphlet that quotes Romans on marriage and God’s design for it. She was acquitted twice, and then, as recently as 2026, she was convicted.
The through line in all of this is not hard to find once you are looking for it. Push back against the popular sexual orthodoxy and you can expect to be reprimanded, boycotted, threatened, and in some places charged with a crime. There is something larger at stake, and the careless labelling of “political” is keeping us from seeing it.
It is none of your business.
The responses from polite society are fascinating. It comes in several varieties, yet all arrive at the same destination.
Some say, stay out of the politics. Just preach the gospel, leave the culture war alone. Others grant the point and then take it back in the same breath: you may be right that this is biblical, they say, but it’s the way you’re going about it. Opposing two men marrying, opposing gender surgeries on children, opposing the manufacture and acquisition of children, none of that is winsome. It’s too stark, too dark, too aggressive, and the backlash you’re getting is the backlash you earned by sounding like that. Then there are the Christians who land on a kind of armed neutrality: you’re entitled to believe whatever you want, but keep it to yourself and leave everyone else alone. And finally there are those who are simply opposed (supposedly Christian and non), who say you are not permitted to hold this view at all. For them, an individual’s freedom to marry whomever he wants, to obtain a child from whomever he can, and to live it out wherever he pleases is the paramount liberty, and anything that pushes against it is not a private conviction to be tolerated but a harm to be outlawed. They don’t want my view softened and they don’t want it kept quiet. They want it gone, because in their account it is hateful, and an enlightened society shouldn’t make room for it.
If you are an American, some of these arguments resonate more than they should. We are a live-and-let-live people. We believe in freedom and liberty, we want people left alone to do as they choose, and so the suggestion that opposing an adult’s decision is just meddling in someone else’s business has a familiar ring to it. It sounds like minding your manners. It sounds like tolerance.
But notice what those arguments assume. These diverse responses rest on a single shared premise: that this is a political question in the first place. Something polite people can and maybe should disagree on. Something you can decline to give an opinion on, or advocate gracefully for, or even better keep to yourself. And if that premise is right, then using a word as old and bloody as persecution is overheated. But if it’s wrong, if these were never political questions at all, then calling them political is not a neutral description. It is a tactic that lets persecution pass as ordinary disagreement. So before we can say whether any of this is political, we have to test the premise underneath the whole fight, and that means asking the right question first. What is the government actually for, and what was it never intended to decide?
Good Government is limited Government.
Good government does a few indispensable things. It renders justice. It provides security. It maintains a safety net sturdy enough that a person who works hard and still falls on hard times can get back up and seize an opportunity. It keeps us safe and it creates the conditions for prosperity. Around that core sit all the genuine arguments of public life: taxes, roads, defense, foreign policy, how much we spend on rail or airports, how much inequality we are willing to tolerate, how much any one person should be able to make. These are real questions, and reasonable people land in different places on them. Fighting them out in the public square is exactly what the square is for. That is civics, the ordering of our common and shared life.
There is another kind of question, though, and it does not belong in that category at all. What does it mean to be human? What is a child? What is marriage? What makes you a man or a woman? It is not the state’s job to answer those, because they are ultimate questions, and they live upstream of politics. Everything political flows down from how a society has already answered them.
The distinction matters, because it tells you what is actually happening when you pay a price. When the cost comes for your answer to a partisan question, that is political conflict, and we should be prepared to pay it. It is part of the cost of living in a republic (though of course this should never come at the price of your life). When the cost comes, however, for your answer to an ultimate question, that is something older and graver. That is persecution. The label depends entirely on which kind of question you were really answering.
It will help to look at two figures we immediately recognize, Charlie Kirk and Martin Luther King Jr. After Kirk’s assassination there was a fast and bitter argument over whether he counted as a martyr, an argument about his legacy conducted almost before the news had settled. That same fight happened over King; the difference is that our social-media age makes it louder and more obvious, and it hands the worst voices a bigger microphone than they would have had in 1968. Let me say clearly what I am not doing. I am not comparing the two men on impact or reach. That is a debate for someone else to settle on another day. What they share is narrower and more revealing than any comparison of stature: in both cases, people are fighting hard to dictate what the man gets counted as, because the label decides everything that comes after it.
You see, both men said things that were genuinely in the political lane. King opposed the Vietnam War, and national defense is the government’s lane, whatever Christian application the question carries; there is a long and serious Christian conversation there, from just-war theory to pacifism, and the church should bring a prophetic voice to it, but it is not an ultimate question. Kirk, for his part, said plenty that was simply political, about education, taxes, the woke media and the rest of it. None of that is in dispute. But watch what the label does. If you can force a man’s ultimate convictions, his belief that every person is made in the image of God the way King famously argued, or Kirk’s belief about what a man or woman is, what marriage is, what sex is for, into a purely partisan frame, then you can dismiss the whole man as political, as fascist or racist, homophobic, or divisive. That is why the label is defended so fiercely. To name him persecuted for a conviction would be to concede that the conviction had the status of truth rather than mere opinion. Calling him political keeps the conviction safely at the level of opinion. The reason “he was just a political operative” matters so much to the people who insist on it is simple: a truth you can demote to an opinion is a truth you are free to discard.
The political became theological.
Politics used to live in a narrower lane. It did not claim the ultimate questions, because religion answered them. The shared moral inheritance that Christianity built into the West supplied the answers to life’s largest “why.” As faith has receded, though, especially in thoroughly secular states like Finland, those ultimate questions did not disappear. Someone still had to tell us what it means to be a human. And so the state walked into the lane that religion had been forced to vacate. In this way, theology did not become more political so much as the political became increasingly theological. The government took up the work of deciding when life begins, what marriage is, what makes someone a man or a woman.
The state is not staying in its lane. It has annexed the territory that used to belong to the church and the conscience, it now enforces its answers from above, and it calls anyone still living by the older answers political. And notice what that relabeling buys. Once you have successfully demoted an ultimate question into a political one, you no longer have to be right. You only have to win. A question of truth becomes a question of votes, a matter of power and majorities rather than transcendence and revelation. Fifty-one percent can settle a tax rate; it cannot settle what a human being is. But call that question political and you have suddenly agreed that it can be settled the same way by whoever musters the votes. That is the real prize in the relabeling. It does not merely silence the dissenter. It converts the deepest truths we have into something you can win.
You don’t get to sit it out
Here is where it stops being someone else’s problem and becomes ours, because we have made a bargain we ought to be ashamed of. We let ourselves talk about the food pantry, because the food pantry is safe and reads as apolitical. But the moment we touch on sex and gender we have suddenly “gotten political,” and are expected to stop. So we will serve in a soup kitchen all afternoon and go silent on the family, because one is permitted and the other is forbidden, and we have learned to dress that surrender up as something admirable. We let only the safe half of our witness be seen and we call the retreat humility.
If these were merely political questions, staying out of them might be a winsome kind of restraint. But they are not political. They are ultimate. You do not get to file these under topics a polite Christian avoids at the dinner table, the way you would avoid arguing about an income-tax hike or whether the city should turn the park into a parking lot. Sitting those out may be genuine peacemaking. Sitting this out is not peace and it is not even peacekeeping. It is abdication.
I get it. There is a real cost, and not every issue is worth the bill. It is wise to recognize that some questions matter less than your relationship with your sister, and it can be entirely right to decide that a particular hill is not the one to die on.
But there is a category where the thing you are being asked to surrender is not a preference. It is foundational. And on those questions, letting your friends and family shame you into silence by labelling you is a different thing entirely. Do not let them set the price of fellowship at the cost of the truth. That is a deal you do not have to accept. What you have to do instead is put it in the right frame. This is an ultimate question. It has nothing to do with politics, except that politics has tried to annex it. And the opposition you are feeling, the intimidation, the cooling of a friendship, the threats, the occasional flash of real menace, is precisely the kind of opposition Christ told us the world would bring against the people who followed after him and who keep telling the truth about him and about his image stamped on every human being.
Nietzsche said “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” That is exactly what the persecution frame restores to us. The severing of relationships and the cost of speaking are rarely worth it for something merely political. But this was never merely political. When the cost is paid in the service of an ultimate truth, you are not a political actor at all. You are someone following in the steps of your Savior, and you have no reason to expect the world to receive your confession any more gently than it received his.
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: “They hated me without reason.”
— John 15:18-25
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
