The Trap of Victimhood: Why Do Believers Feel More Persecuted Than They Actually Are?

Last week, at the Observatory of the Invisible, Ernesto Castro recounted, with his usual irony, his experience following his recent baptism. He had expected, he said, hostility, suspicion, some kind of attack commensurate with the step he had just taken. Instead, he found that daily life was continuing exactly as before. He joked that he was still waiting for “the stigmata,” wondering humorously what he had done wrong to avoid being persecuted.

A few months earlier, Ana Iris Simón—also a recent convert, raised in an atheist family—shared a similar story in the Catholics and Public Life Congress. What surprised her was the pessimism she often encountered among believers, as she found their discourse to be gloomy and hopeless—a stark contrast to what she herself felt. Coming from an atheist background that she described as “cold,” the faith community struck her, by comparison, as warm.

Both accounts point to the same paradox: those who have been part of a community for some time—whether religious, political, or of any other kind—tend to feel more under siege and to perceive their surroundings in a more bleak light than those who have just arrived. The newcomer, with a fresh perspective, perceives more clearly both the positive aspects of the place and the disproportionate nature of the prevailing pessimism. This is not an isolated observation by two intellectual converts; it is a pattern that social psychology has been documenting for decades.

Adaptation erases the good and leaves the bad

The first relevant mechanism is Harry Helson’s hedonic adaptation: when a stimulus remains constant, it ceases to elicit the same emotional response. For someone who has spent their entire life in a community, the benefits of belonging to it—the comfort, the meaning, the companionship—have become invisible through habit. 

What continues to stand out, however, are the friction, external criticism, and conflicts. The newcomer, unaccustomed to many things, perceives the stark contrast: he notices the warmth of the environment with the same intensity that a veteran no longer notices it.

Negativity bias: The bad things carry more weight

Added to this is what Roy Baumeister and his colleagues discovered: negative events, comments, or threats leave a deeper and more lasting psychological impact than positive ones of equivalent magnitude.

This negativity bias means that hostile criticism of a faith or negative news about an institution carries much more weight in people’s memories and in the collective mood than dozens of neutral or friendly interactions. Anyone who has been exposed for years to this steady stream of negativity—debates, headlines, social media comments—develops a sense of being under siege that does not necessarily correspond to the actual frequency of hostility, but rather to its emotional intensity.

Seeing enemies where others see indifference

There is also a well-documented phenomenon known as the “hostile media effect,” originally described by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper in 1985. In their classic experiment, supporters and opponents of the same cause were shown the same news material, and both sides, in a symmetrical manner, perceived it as biased against their own position.

This explains why the two teams have such different feelings about the same soccer game. Do we now understand why the Argentines felt they were treated unfairly in the World Cup?

When this bias is applied to matters of faith, it becomes clear that the more someone identifies with their group, the more they tend to interpret the general social climate—the tone of public discourse, popular culture, and secular society—as systematically hostile, even if that society is in fact largely indifferent. 

The Destruction of a Christian Heart

None of these mechanisms implies that hostility toward believers does not exist, nor that criticism of the Church is unfounded in some cases. What these experiments suggest is that the intensity with which one perceives the hostility is not a reliable gauge of the actual atmosphere, but rather the result of a set of cognitive biases—adaptation, negativity, group identification—that become more pronounced the longer one remains within that environment. 

That’s why, paradoxically, sometimes it takes the perspective of a newcomer to recalibrate the perspective of someone who’s lived there their whole life. 

It is worth pausing to consider something that is not merely a matter of misperception but a spiritual issue: these very biases, when they take root in the heart, make it materially more difficult to live out the core of the Christian message.

The commandment to love one’s neighbor presupposes, at the very least, seeing one’s neighbor as someone capable of being loved and of loving. But if negative biases have gradually created the impression that this particular neighbor—the long-time neighbor, the mocking coworker, the prevailing cultural climate—is fundamentally hostile, then loving one’s neighbor ceases to feel like a demanding commandment and begins to feel like something that directly contradicts one’s own emotional survival. 

Bias does not eliminate the commandment, but it makes it psychologically more difficult in a way that probably does not reflect reality.

Something similar happens with joy and hope, which in the Christian tradition are not optional additions but a distinguishing mark—St. Paul insists on joy even while in prison. If one’s attention is constantly captured by episodes of rejection, those few vivid moments of hostility end up weighing much more heavily on one’s memory than the thousand neutral or positive moments that surround them. The result is a Christian who, without meaning to, finds himself stuck in a defensive and gloomy state of mind—precisely the opposite of what his own faith calls him to embody before others. 

The despair that Ana Iris Simón felt upon entering church settings is a direct consequence of the fact that these biases, left uncorrected, end up taking the place that hope should occupy.

None of this is an accusation or a cause for blame: these are human biases, common to any group, and as such, they are not resolved through willpower but through an awareness that they exist. 

That is precisely why the perspective of the recent convert—that of an Ernesto Castro who expects stigma but finds none, that of an Ana Iris Simón who finds warmth—can serve as a helpful insight for those who have been part of the community for some time: a reminder that others, viewed without the filter built up over years of bias, are usually much kinder than selective memory would have us believe.