It is only very rarely that Christians find their essential civil liberties threatened in this country. Often, when they do, it is because they *are* deep-fringe freaks to the point that the majority of Christians would claim "these are not Christians". It doesn't matter. The ACLU fights to ensure that our basic civil liberties are protected.
As a codocil, the point on the ACLU being "anti-Christian". Note that it is never the liberal, laid-back Christians that say this. It is always the deep, fundamentalist, often born-again conservative Christians. It's true, these people have many political views, goals, and policies that they derive from their Christian faith, and they are in this, time and time again, opposed by the ACLU, because those very same views, goals, and policies conflict with or threaten the civil rights of others.
The real issue is that both sides are acting morally, to the best of their ability. Conservative Christianity takes as a given that everyone who dies without accepting Jesus Christ into their lives as Savior will burn forever in Hell, and incidentally make God (the creator of all things, and source of all goodness int he world) Sad. The ACLU considers this to be one theory among many, and not one with particularly large amounts of evidence behind it. Belief in the aforementioned has enormous moral implications in terms of what is right and acceptable, and naturally leads those that follow it to attempt to convert everyone they can, by pretty much any means that they think will be effective that are not inherently prohibited by their faith. Those actions, in turn, threaten the civil rights of others, which means that the ACLU (with its own internal imperative to protect the civil rights of others) naturally opposes them, and pretty rapidly acquires a reputation as an enemy of Christianity - particularly in places where the Conservative Christians have enough coverage of the population to fill significant numbers of political positions with those that agree with them.
This is not the whole story. It is true that various forms of political drift have led the Republicans to tend to oppress civil rights more often than the democrats, and the conservatives to align with the republicans, and the democrats with the liberals, and the ACLU to get fewer Conservative Christian volunteers, and more volunteers from the groups that feel threatened by said Conservative Christians (who, in turn, tend to be liberal) and that over time this does color their perceptions - they do tend to see the concept of "civil liberties" through a generally liberal lens, because the people who they have working for them tend to be liberal, but that is the smaller of the two effects, and one that they do *try* to control for. It's also one, I'm sure, that they'd prefer not to have to deal with at all. The liberal politicians are delighted that the ACLU supports them and harasses their foes more often than the other way around, but I guarantee that the ACLU itself would *much* prefer to be bipartisan.
(Indeed, I was at an ACLU rally recently, calling for the return of Habeus Corpus. We had one speaker from a fairly important conservative political group, who made a speech about how Habeus Corpus was one of the good old-time conservative values rights that made our country great. We were delighted to have him. We wished we'd had more like him.)
As a codocil, the point on the ACLU being "anti-Christian". Note that it is never the liberal, laid-back Christians that say this. It is always the deep, fundamentalist, often born-again conservative Christians. It's true, these people have many political views, goals, and policies that they derive from their Christian faith, and they are in this, time and time again, opposed by the ACLU, because those very same views, goals, and policies conflict with or threaten the civil rights of others.
The real issue is that both sides are acting morally, to the best of their ability. Conservative Christianity takes as a given that everyone who dies without accepting Jesus Christ into their lives as Savior will burn forever in Hell, and incidentally make God (the creator of all things, and source of all goodness int he world) Sad. The ACLU considers this to be one theory among many, and not one with particularly large amounts of evidence behind it. Belief in the aforementioned has enormous moral implications in terms of what is right and acceptable, and naturally leads those that follow it to attempt to convert everyone they can, by pretty much any means that they think will be effective that are not inherently prohibited by their faith. Those actions, in turn, threaten the civil rights of others, which means that the ACLU (with its own internal imperative to protect the civil rights of others) naturally opposes them, and pretty rapidly acquires a reputation as an enemy of Christianity - particularly in places where the Conservative Christians have enough coverage of the population to fill significant numbers of political positions with those that agree with them.
This is not the whole story. It is true that various forms of political drift have led the Republicans to tend to oppress civil rights more often than the democrats, and the conservatives to align with the republicans, and the democrats with the liberals, and the ACLU to get fewer Conservative Christian volunteers, and more volunteers from the groups that feel threatened by said Conservative Christians (who, in turn, tend to be liberal) and that over time this does color their perceptions - they do tend to see the concept of "civil liberties" through a generally liberal lens, because the people who they have working for them tend to be liberal, but that is the smaller of the two effects, and one that they do *try* to control for. It's also one, I'm sure, that they'd prefer not to have to deal with at all. The liberal politicians are delighted that the ACLU supports them and harasses their foes more often than the other way around, but I guarantee that the ACLU itself would *much* prefer to be bipartisan.
(Indeed, I was at an ACLU rally recently, calling for the return of Habeus Corpus. We had one speaker from a fairly important conservative political group, who made a speech about how Habeus Corpus was one of the good old-time conservative values rights that made our country great. We were delighted to have him. We wished we'd had more like him.)