At a graduation ceremony at Liberty University over the weekend, Vice President Mike Pence warned students that it has become "acceptable and even fashionable to ridicule and discriminate against people of faith" and that they should "be prepared for persecution."  This was a gentle — one might say Christian — way of describing what has become an all-out war on believers.  This war, which I have described in my book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, got into high gear in the 1960s with the banning first of prayer and then of any reference to the Christian foundations of American democracy in the public schools.  Once atheism became the only constitutionally protected religion, the war on Christianity became a central source of the political divisions that followed.

Mike Pence, perhaps the most decent man in politics, and his wife Karen have been the target of relentless attacks by LGBTQ radicals who have conducted vigilante campaigns against Chick-fil-A, the Colorado baker, and religious institutions across the country for the crime of being Christians.  This war reached a turning point more than 40 years ago with Roe v. Wade's invention of a constitutional right to kill unborn children — a direct assault on the belief of every Christian in the sanctity of human life.

Vice President Pence knows about religious persecution.  From the moment he signed a bill for religious liberty and ever since he entered the White House, he has been the target of vicious and outrageous attacks on his faith by the LGBTQ radicals, and by Democratic primary candidate Pete Buttigieg in particular.  In what has become almost the main theme of Buttigieg's primary campaign, and in flagrant disregard of the truth, Buttigieg has accused Pence of being a bigot because he is a Christian.  In fact, the opposite is the case.  When Buttigieg came out publicly as a gay man, Pence, who was then governor of Indiana, reached out to him and praised his achievements as mayor of South Bend, even though Buttigieg's tenure in South Bend was unworthy of such praise.  Pence did it out of Christian compassion, that Buttigieg should not feel excluded — even by a Republican governor — for his sexual orientation.

Buttigieg compounded this travesty by presenting himself as a victim of persecution, even though — far from making him a victim – the fact that he is gay is what has catapulted him as the mayor of a small and failing city to being one of the top three candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Being gay allowed him, despite his white privilege and class privilege, to present himself as a voice for the oppressed, and thus to take his place in the Democrats' perverse "Identity Politics" melodrama.  Identity politics — which fuels its war on Christians — is killing the Democratic Party, and it will kill America, too, if candidates like Pete Buttigieg rather than Mike Pence emerge from this war victorious.

David Horowitz is the author of the newly published book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, Humanix 2019.