Majority Minority

It isn’t hard to find silly Facebook advocacy groups. Pepperoni Roll awareness groups, Groups refusing to pass along chain letters, “I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head“, Citizens against Photoshopped Santa Hats, Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!(Official petition to Facebook), Petitions for and against things, A million for the old Facebook, 1,000,000 for [insert candidate here]… whatever. They’re designed as badges of support, camraderie, and occasionally information and action. While some of them are trivial, they’re usually things that aren’t too obvious or included in your basic profile.

Then I saw that a friend had joined “I bet I CAN find 10,000,000 Christians on Facebook“.

Facebook has some 130,000,000 plus unique users. Approximately 80% of US citizens identify themselves as Christian… so even if only a quarter of Facebook’s users are in the US, it should be trivial to find ten million Christians. And that’s simply people who will join a “group” with no cost to themselves. Out of all the things that have gotten people in trouble on Facebook over the last few years, identifying as a Christian isn’t one of them.

Which highlights exactly how meaningless this is. Having met “Christians” who were far less morally sound than the Pastafarians and Discordians I’ve known, simply identifying yourself as a Christian doesn’t mean you actually live by those principles [1]. This isn’t a secret – so presumably the people who set up the group knew it as well.

So what’s the point? As I hinted above, Facebook groups are frequently used to indicate a measure of support for something that isn’t readily obvious… or the level of support for something that is percieved to be in the minority view.

Yet statistically, nominal Christians are the majority in any US dominated group… including Facebook.

I can only extrapolate that this group (and the people in it) believe themselves a minority, even though they aren’t. [2] Which is frightening.

It’s frightening because they might soon be. It won’t be long before the WASP elite are a minorty – and it seems that “traditional” repressive Christianity is on a downward slide. [3] This raises the nasty thought:

If they’re already getting defensive, while they’re still a vast majority, what’s going to happen when they are not the majority any more?

Update In between the time I wrote this and now, when I’m posting it, a status update I’d made got this response:

You could look at that way or as letting the world know there are millions of Christians in the U.S. A country where a minority of people are trying to take God out of everything. When now is the the time our country needs God’s help and direction probably more than ever before.

I think I’ll just put my whole response to that below:

Wow, [REDACTED] – you know different people than I do. Maybe I’m being defensive ’cause I’ve been accused of being such a person, but it’s not true. I mean, I wouldn’t make an evangelical Christian say a decade of the Rosary, and I’d be mighty upset if an atheist told a Muslim they couldn’t pray to Allah. Or the reverse of any of those, really. You shouldn’t be forced to pray any certain way – and neither should those who are in the minority. And our government should represent *all* of us, right? So I hope they wouldn’t force you or I to pray any particular way, and let it leave it to each of us. Matthew 6:5, y’know.

So, like I said… if there’s this kind of strong response when they’re simply not the only acceptable game in town, what’s going to happen when they’re a real minority?

[1] Assuming you can agree on what “Christian” principles are. If you think it’s easy, try getting a liberation theology Catholic and a Calvinist to agree on moral behavior in regards to money, okay?
[2] Your particular denomination might be a minority, but that’s not what the group says. If you want to argue what being a “True Christian” means, go read Living Biblically first, okay?
[3] Repressing OTHERS. You can go be an ascetic monk or nun; you have no right to force me to live by your religious principles, just like I can’t make you celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day.