Carl Trueman reviews Candida Moss’ book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.

Her argument is simple: the myth of the persecution of Christians has fuelled a paranoid victim mentality on the political Right that imperils intelligent civil discourse. Ironically, as she makes this case, she herself engages in precisely the kind of myth making that she rightly decries. On page 252, she recounts her shock at hearing two students at Notre Dame expressing no sympathy for a nine-year old rape victim who had had an abortion. She was right to be shocked; but if her point is that the Christian mythology of persecution polarizes the world around and destroys civil discourse, then she herself here provides a good example of how alternative myths do much the same.