Feeling Embattled

FEELING EMBATTLED

Beliefs crystallize into identities through the feeling of being under siege from a hostile world, much the way prolonged pressure bonds carbon atoms together to form a diamond. Think of minority religious sects or oft-mocked subcultures like “preppers,” who believe it’s worth preparing for a natural disaster or societal collapse. Being mocked, persecuted, or otherwise stigmatized for our beliefs makes us want to stand up for them all the more, and gives us a sense of solidarity with the other people standing with us.

It might seem like every issue must have a dominant majority and an embattled minority. But both sides of an issue can genuinely view their side as the embattled one. That’s what’s happening in the “mommy wars.” Formula-feeders feel like they’re constantly on the defensive, forced to explain why they’re not breastfeeding and feeling judged as bad mothers, silently or openly. (It’s not just their imagination. One 2001 poll found that two-thirds of breastfeeding mothers “feel sorry for” the children of mothers who don’t breastfeed.7)

Breastfeeders feel embattled, too, for different reasons. They complain about a society set up to make life difficult for them, in which most workplaces lack a comfortable place to pump breast milk, and in which an exposed breast in public draws offended stares and whispers. Some argue that this is a more significant form of oppression than that faced by the other side. “Because let’s face it,” one breastfeeding mother wrote to bottle-feeders, “while you may feel some mom guilt when you hear ‘breast is best,’ no one has ever been kicked out of a restaurant for bottle feeding their baby.”8

Or take atheists and Christians. Atheists feel embattled because of the amount of discrimination they face in the United States. Many have been told they are immoral. They often talk about “coming out” as atheists, after having spent a long time feeling obliged to hide their stigmatized views. A Gallup poll in 2019 found that 40 percent of Americans would not vote for a well-qualified member of their own party if that person was an atheist. (For comparison, the corresponding percentages of people who said they would not vote for a Jewish candidate and a Catholic candidate were 7 percent and 5 percent, respectively.)9

Unlike atheists, evangelical Christians are more likely to live in families and communities who share their faith, so they aren’t embattled in the same sense. Nevertheless, they feel increasingly alienated by the legal and cultural changes in America over the last fifty years, such as legal abortion, gay marriage, and sexualized content in the media. “The culture war is over—and we lost,” one Christian leader lamented in a book titled Prepare: Living Your Faith in an Increasingly Hostile Culture.10