The current flap over blasphemous art at the Brooklyn Museum quickened this week's round of complaints that anti-Catholicism is rampant. Mailings arrive full of appeals for funds to fight anti-Catholicism through anti-defamation fronts.

The Ashcroft hearings elicited last month's round of complaints that anti-evangelicalism is similarly rampant.  Periodicals, radio programs of the call-in sort, televangelism, and quoted expressions in the press by evangelicals and their defenders would suggest that evangelical "defense-against-defamation" organizations have their work cut out for them.

Anti-Judaism has been a chronic issue in the United States, and there is an Anti-Defamation League of long standing that indeed has its work cut out for it.  But is anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, worse now than it was years ago?  Is it a national crisis?  Does it get reported on fairly?  Of course, every expression and occurrence is offensive. But, for instance, when one lunatic paints a swastika on a synagogue in Madison, Wisconsin, we hear that liberal Madison deserves to lose its reputation because it is an anti-Semitic place.

Anti-African-American expression is the classic racist plague in America, and there is plenty of it around -- though little directed against the churches as such.  There is anti-Mormonism, and it needs checking. Secularists constantly get defamed, and their organizations speak up. But the African-American churches, the Latter-Day Saints, and ordinary secularists prosper.

Without wanting to congratulate the United States, be a Pollyanna, or display blind eyes, observers might still call for perspective.  In America, there are virtually no dead bodies thanks to religious strife; fewer in the whole twentieth century than you will read about elsewhere in one day's newspapers.  Most religious groups never had it so good. If they knew the history of group conflict, they would find today's forms milder than in the times of real and all but officially sanctioned anti-Judaism, anti-Catholicism, anti-fundamentalism.

In a paragraph that can easily be misunderstood, let's ask:  what is going on here?  Psychologists and sociologists unite in reminding us that in-group strength comes in the face of out-group pressure. If everyone around a group ignores them or takes them for granted or elicits no defensive response, it is harder for a group to prosper. (And why don't mainline Protestants, those folks that everyone can sneer at with impunity, have anti-defamation fronts?)  Could some of the cry that "our group" suffers under perceived "anti-" prejudices be not only a sign of lost perspective but also a strategy that will promote prosperity of the beleaguered?