When Power Pretends to Be Persecuted

How power convinces itself it’s the victim

I’ve been watching clips from the Turning Point USA event last week, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. Not metaphorically. Physically.

I woke up the today with a heaviness in my chest that wouldn’t lift — that familiar weight that shows up when something you love is being distorted right in front of you and there’s no pretending otherwise anymore.

I grew up inside this faith. I know its language. I know its instincts. I know how Scripture sounds when it’s being used to heal — and I know how it sounds when it’s being used to justify harm.

Watching those clips felt like watching the faith that shaped me get hijacked by people who know exactly what they’re doing. These aren’t outsiders misunderstanding Christianity.

They’re insiders exploiting it.

What kept sticking with me wasn’t just what was said — it was the posture. The performance. The insistence, delivered from enormous stages, backed by staggering amounts of money and influence, that they are the ones who’ve been wronged. Silenced. Marginalized. Finally allowed to exist again.

That isn’t confusion.
It’s strategy.

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Orwell Saw This Coming

In 1940, George Orwell tried to explain why grievance is such a powerful force in authoritarian movements.

Orwell noticed that certain leaders don’t gain loyalty by projecting strength alone — they gain it by presenting themselves as wounded. As misunderstood. As heroic sufferers carrying the burden of a hostile world. In his 1940 review of “Mien Kempf” he wrote:

The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Notice that Orwell isn’t describing weakness. He’s describing a pose.

A performance where overwhelming power dresses itself up as persecution.
Where dominance adopts the language of martyrdom.
Where grievance becomes the moral engine that justifies everything that follows.

And the most chilling line in that entire passage is simple:
the mouse becomes a dragon.

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Turning Mice into Dragons

Here’s how this actually works.

You don’t start with something powerful or dangerous. You start with something small. With people who already have less protection. Less credibility. Less room to make mistakes without paying for it.

You take someone most of us will never meet personally. A teenager trying to survive middle school. A family doing everything they can to stay together. People whose lives are already complicated enough without becoming symbols in someone else’s story.

And then you stretch that story until it snaps.

Suddenly a trans kid isn’t a kid anymore — they’re a threat to the entire culture. An immigrant family isn’t looking for safety — they’re framed as an invasion. A request to be treated with basic dignity gets recast as an attack on freedom itself.

And once that shift happens, facts stop mattering. Because fear has taken over.

Fear doesn’t need evidence. It just needs repetition. It needs the right tone. It needs someone with enough authority to say, This is dangerous, and have people believe them.

When that fear takes root, things that should feel unthinkable start to feel normal. Monitoring becomes protection. Pushing people out starts to sound like “setting boundaries.” Real harm gets reframed as a necessary cost.

And none of this works unless the story is being told by people with real power — people whose voices already carry weight, whose platforms already command attention. That’s the part we can’t ignore.

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Power in Costume

And this only works because of who’s telling the story.

These aren’t people on the edges trying to get someone to listen. They already have the microphones. They already have the platforms. They already have access to national media, political influence, and donor networks that most people will never touch.

Nothing has been taken from them. They haven’t been silenced. They haven’t been pushed out of public life.

What’s changed is how they talk about themselves.

Power didn’t disappear — it learned how to reframe. It learned that claiming injury is often more effective than asserting dominance. That presenting itself as under attack makes it harder to question and easier to defend.

And once that story takes hold, everything downstream shifts.

Attempts to broaden participation start to feel threatening. Efforts to share power get framed as loss. Any challenge to long-standing control gets recast as persecution.

At that point, harm stops looking like harm. It starts to feel like self-defense. Cruelty starts to sound justified. Exclusion gets explained as necessary.

That’s not accidental. It’s how power protects itself when it doesn’t want to change.

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Why This Works So Well in Christian Spaces

I grew up in the church. I went to Bible college. I’ve spent my entire adult life inside Christian spaces. I know how these stories get told. I know how the language works. I know how quickly faith can shift from something that’s admitted to be fragile and searching into something defensive and brittle.

I’ve watched Christian language get bent, over and over again, to carry grievances it was never meant to hold. I’ve seen how easily the cross can be pulled out of its context — no longer a symbol of solidarity with suffering, but a prop used to justify holding onto power at all costs.

This version of faith always needs an enemy. It needs something to push against. Something to blame. A story where “we” are constantly under threat and anyone who challenges us must be trying to destroy what’s good and true.

That’s when Jesus stops being a teacher and becomes a mascot. The Bible stops being something we wrestle with and turns into a slogan generator. And “religious freedom” stops meaning freedom of conscience and starts meaning freedom from accountability.

This isn’t discipleship. It doesn’t form people in love or humility or courage.

It forms loyalty.
It trains suspicion.
And it teaches people how to mistake control for faithfulness.

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How to Push Back

Pushing back doesn’t require you to become an expert or spend your life arguing with strangers online. It doesn’t require perfect language or airtight political positions.

It starts with paying attention — especially when fear is being offered as a shortcut.

Slow down when someone tells you a group of people you’ve barely encountered is an existential threat. Notice when outrage is doing the work that evidence should be doing. Ask yourself who benefits from you being afraid, and who pays the price if you believe the story being told.

Pay attention to who has the microphone. Who gets the biggest platforms, the most airtime, the loudest amplification. Pay attention to where the money is flowing, who is funding the message, and what kind of power that funding protects.

And then pay close attention to who keeps getting cast as the “dragon.”

It’s almost never the people with real power. It’s usually those with the least room to defend themselves — kids, immigrants, poor families, people already living on the margins. When that pattern shows up, history tells us we’re not looking at courage. We’re looking at misdirection.

Moving beyond this also means choosing proximity over panic. Let real people complicate the stories you’re being sold. Let relationships interrupt the caricatures. Fear thrives at a distance. It weakens when we actually know one another.

For people of faith, this is where discernment matters more than certainty. The question isn’t, Does this make me feel justified? It’s, Does this move me toward love, humility, and responsibility for my neighbors? When a message consistently pushes us toward suspicion, hardness, and contempt, it’s worth asking what kind of formation it’s really offering.

And finally, remember this: refusing the performance doesn’t mean disengaging. It means staying rooted. It means not letting grievance shape your moral imagination. It means choosing to see clearly even when fear is louder.

Don’t fall for the performance.

Pay attention.
Stay human.
And don’t let power convince you it’s the victim.

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