It seems that I’m a combatant in a war and didn’t even know it. So much for my fabled powers of observation.

Twice last week I was told that there was a war on Christianity, that my faith was under attack. I thought this was a bit strange since more than 70% of the US population self-identifies as Christian. I asked one of the war correspondents to explain this war to me. I have had no difficulty practicing my faith and, so far as I could tell, neither had he.

“There are people in the media criticizing Christianity,” he told me. I asked for a few examples, but he couldn’t remember any. I could have given him a few, but none of those were criticizing Christianity as much as they were skewering people who used Christianity. Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry is a case in point.

Lewis may have been the most uneven major writer in American literature, but he brought his A-game to Gantry. Elmer Gantry was a totally hypocritical human being, using his position in the church (or churches, since he moved around a lot) for personal gain. Although Lewis left Gantry with a seed of a conscience, no reader would mistake him for a real follower of Christ.

And as best I can tell, none of the “proofs” I’ve found as I was looking on line for battles in this war really indicated that I was in any real danger of becoming a casualty. For instance, there was the Fox News mouthpiece who cited President Obama as one of the enemy because he left the phrase “in the year of our Lord” out of a proclamation. He failed to mention that the proclamation was to honor “Jewish Heritage Month.” I doubt any church steeples fell over because of this.

The same is true with the “Merry Christmas” flap. I really don’t care what a clerk in a department store wishes me so long as he or she does it with a smile after efficiently and accurately ringing up my purchase. If I were Jewish, I would be confused if the clerk wished me a Merry Christmas, since I would be busy celebrating Hanukah.

Or the “one nation under God” argument. I have no problem with pledging allegiance to “one nation under God,” but I don’t make the mistake of thinking that it was done that way when I was in elementary school. The phrase was added to the existing pledge in 1954 by politicians to separate us from the “godless communists.” The story of the original pledge (1892) is a good deal more interesting since it was written by socialist. (To be specific, Francis Bellamy was a Baptist Minister and Christian Socialist.)

Then, there’s the gay marriage argument. Somehow a lot of people want to frame what is essentially a legal issue as a religious issue. Whether you have a problem with the legal union of people of the same sex or not, if you really believe what it says in the constitution you shouldn’t have a problem with the government recognizing same-sex marriages. As a husband of 55 years, I don’t find that two guys (or two ladies) getting married threatens my marriage at all—or the dedication that I have to the vows I made 55 years ago.

Try as I might I couldn’t find where my faith was really under attack. I can go to the church of my choice as I wish. Or not go. I can pray as I wish and where I wish. I can keep all sorts of books on my book shelves without fear of being arrested for it. Nobody has to listen to me pray, and I don’t have to listen to anyone else pray if I don’t want to. The thing I cannot do is dictate to others what they have to believe. I think that’s a good thing.

We were taught in grade school that the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock for “religious liberty.” What our teachers or the history books didn’t tell us was that, while they left England to escape religious persecution, the first thing they did here was reestablish it, with the Pilgrims as persecutors. (Which, in a convoluted way, can be said to have inspired the founding of the Baptist Church in what is now the US.)

The people of the Massachusetts Colony are a case study in what happens when religion gets intertwined with the government: Religion becomes more political.

I guess I upset my friends who are combatants in the war when I couldn’t take it seriously. If a television program tries to make fun of Christianity (as opposed to a flagrantly self-serving practice trying to disguise itself as Christianity), I will probably be miffed, and in retaliation I will not watch the show. So there!

However, rather than bring the church into politics, I suggest that we follow the tactics of Christians who lived at a time when there really was a war on Christianity. People were not only losing their jobs; they were losing their lives for their faith. Tertullian, the third-century theologian, published a strategy for the church. He said Christians should live so that the pagans would look at them and say, “Look how they love one another and how they are ready to die for one another.”

Certainly a stronger statement than carping about whether we use the right language in what is probably a pro forma statement anyway.

If there is ever a war on Christianity, I hope that I’m one of the first to the barricades. And if, in this country, there’s a war on Judaism, Buddhism, or Islam, I’m hope I am one of the first to the barricades. I believe that for me to practice my faith in peace, everyone else needs to be free to do the same.

Amen.