Hurt mail as hate mail

Carl Trueman writes well on dangers of the rising culture of victimhood--a position that degrades conversations about truth and obscures the very concept of truth itself. Here's sample:

That therapy, conversation, and a general prioritizing of aesthetic categories now grips the church and its own moral and theological discourse should be a cause for real concern. In a world devoid of truth content, claims to truth are oppressive and thus personal, hurtful, and distasteful; and the church seems, by and large, to be buying into just this kind of namby-pamby nonsense.

But I think there is more to this phenomenon of hurt and pain than a mere aping of the culture. It is more cunning and dishonest than that, Over the last couple of years, I have noticed that the hate mail in my inbox has been replaced by what I now call hurt mail. Now, the agenda of your typical hate mailers is pretty straightforward: they are simply attempting to intimidate or humiliate the recipient into silence. What you see is what you get. Hurt mailers, by comparison, are rather more subtle and duplicitous: by claiming pain, they immediately do two things. First, they make themselves the poor victims; and second, they imply that the targets of this hurt mailing are intentionally malicious perpetrators. The game is precisely the same as with hate mail -- to make someone whom they dislike or whose opinions they discount shut up -- but the tactic is different: to win by seizing the moral high ground that belongs to the professional victim.

This new tactic also involves a fundamental change in the whole moral landscape....

Thanks to Mike Leake for the link. And I recommend reading Dr. Trueman's whole article; it's one of the best I've read in a long time.