You think Christians are persecuted for their beliefs?

[Igel]

14. Sure.

M. She was a grad student in the same dept. I was. She worked as an IT consultant for the department and spent a year as a "missionary" in the Ukraine. The dept. was one studying Slavic language, and Ukrainian was her dominant "other" language after Russian.

When organizing study groups, she was last. Because nobody wanted to work with an anti-abortion Bible-thumping Jesus freak. They were free-thinking feminists, not reactionaries. Once I was entering the dept. as she left in tears, with shouts of things like "Go away, nobody wants you here" and "We don't need people like you." The self-professed progressives were laughting. They apparently asked her opinion. She answered. They disapproved. They abused her psychologically, but she was the intolerant one. Dorks.

It wasn't the first time she left in tears. She was withdrawn the first year, but the second and third years in the program she was routinely picked on. She was pro-abortion, very much behind the ERA, and her "missionary" work was volunteering for scutt wages in an orphanage. But she was religious and didn't hide it. She was also helpful and just a nice person. She also liked Slavic literatures.

The hypocrisy of the self-righteous was apparent in the following term. She took a class on Russian medieval literature. For outsiders, that means either "sermons and religious tracts" or "chronicles and legal records." It went "sermons" and not "chronicles." The funny thing is, knowing Orthodoxy and scripture well, she was picking up on allusions and word play that the professor did. The professor encouraged her to pursue it as a dissertation topic. And suddenly everybody wanted her in their group because, well, they'd always been friends.

The following year I wasn't around much, but from what I saw as soon as she stopped being useful she was again a social pariah.

On edit: I think her dissertation wound up being on Andrej Belyj. Not Russian religions traditions.