Y’all are probably already acquainted with these stories:
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A mosque near Ypsilanti, Michigan was destroyed by fire on Saturday; the feds are investigating for arson.
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A Florida store owned by Indians was set on fire by a man who believed the owners were Muslim and he wanted to “run the Arabs out of our country.”
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Anti-Muslim incidents have increased sharply since the election of Donald Trump. I linked to many of those stories here, and numerous anti-discrimination organizations have documented that.
You will probably be (modestly) surprised, then, to learn that Christians feel that discrimination against them is vastly greater than that experienced by Muslims.
White Evangelicals Believe They Face More Discrimination Than Muslims
Overall, people were twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination as they were to say the same thing about Christians. Democrats were four times more likely to see Muslim vs. Christian discrimination, and non-religious people more than three. White Catholics and white mainline Protestants were both in line with the American average: Each group was roughly twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination compared to how they see the Christian experience.
The people who stuck out, whose perceptions were radically different from others in the survey, were white evangelical Protestants. Among this group, 57 percent said there’s a lot of discrimination against Christians in the U.S. today. Only 44 percent said the same thing about Muslims. They were the only religious group more likely to believe Christians face discrimination compared to Muslims.
I suppose we shouldn’t expect too much of people who believe everything went south when a talking snake tricked a ditzy blonde into stealing a bad piece of fruit, but this finding bespeaks a truly stupefying and self-centered ignorance of the world and events around them. They really do live in a shoebox.