Grab your 20-siders. We're going in.

Located on a site called Bible Reasons and called “25 Reasons Why The World Hates Christians And Christianity,” his screed didn’t exactly inspire me to trust its level of accuracy. Christians don’t tend to have a very firm grasp about how non-Christians see them and their religion. But it did provide some insight about just where right-wing Christians in particular are deceiving themselves.

You’re probably noticing a common thread running through the messages and media aimed at fundagelicals these days: this idea that they are in the very beginnings of a desperate and dire time of dreadful persecution. And we’re not talking about this persecution happening in some third-world theocracy, either, but right here in good ole Murrka! This fantasy American Christians have concocted has them teetering on the very threshold of the end of the world.

We might laugh about or mock Christians who have entirely too high an estimation of themselves or too dramatic or fictionalized an interpretation of their experiences, but the problem of inaccurate self-perception is real–and it doesn’t go away upon deconversion from religion.

This response is something I’m starting to call the Oncoming Bus Gambit. Chances are you’ve heard it many times yourself–it’s very common among Christians of an evangelistic bent, who employ it to rationalize their mistreatment of other people. And it fails just like all of their other rationalizations. Today I’ll show you what the Gambit is, how to spot its variations, why it fails, and how to defuse it.