Christophobia is alive and well in times of crisis:

It never takes much for the Christophobes to come out of the woodwork. Any excuse will do actually. And it is not just today’s progressives who carefully follow the maxim, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ Misotheists and Christ-haters have been doing this for millennia now.

History is replete with examples of this of course. Consider one very famous case of this from the early days of the faith. When Rome was destroyed by fire in 64 AD, the pagan Roman Emperor Nero blamed the Christians. Let me look at this episode in a bit more detail.

In his classic 1958 book on early Christianity, The Spreading Flame, F. F. Bruce gives us some description about the blaze and the blame that was put on Christians:

Rumour was not content to ascribe the fire to accident, and some…