Time & Perspective Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook’s line works like a trapdoor: it invites the reader to nod along to a familiar Western assumption - that “Christian persecution” is a dusty, half-mythic memory - then snaps open to reveal the uncomfortable exception. The “so far back in history” phrasing isn’t just a claim about timelines; it’s a critique of cultural complacency, the way majority status can rewrite vulnerability as theater. In much of the US and Europe, Christianity is ambient power: embedded in holidays, language, politics, and moral signaling. In that context, talk of persecution can function less as description than as identity maintenance - a way to convert social change into grievance.

The punch is in “unless you live in China, I guess,” which carries a double edge. On one hand, it gestures at a real and ongoing reality: state surveillance, pressure on religious practice, and periodic crackdowns on certain churches and religious networks. On the other, “I guess” is a pointed shrug, a stylistic move that indicts the speaker’s own milieu for treating non-Western Christians as an afterthought. It’s not a fully developed argument; it’s a drive-by correction.

Subtext: Western discourse often universalizes its own experience. When Christians in majority-Christian societies claim persecution, they may be describing a loss of privilege - not fear of imprisonment. Easterbrook’s aside exposes that mismatch and, in doing so, challenges the reader to separate symbolic “persecution” from the coercive kind that still exists, just inconveniently far from the culture wars where the word gets most airtime.