Everything, I suppose, that is not in his creed is infidelity with him, and his creed is infidelity with me.
—Thomas Paine

A few days after the September 11 attacks, a shaken President George W. Bush declared that the coming war on terrorism would constitute a new "crusade"—referring, it seemed, to the medieval clash between Christendom and the infidel Muslims who then held the Holy Land. Bush was promptly urged to stop using that particular metaphor. It conjured up counterproductive images of Western aggression and extreme religious intolerance, and was certain to offend the Islamic world at large — including the millions of Muslims who lived in the United States.

Bush complied. The crusader talk ceased. But nobody said we couldn’t rewrite the thousand-year-old script to better conform with today’s bottomless sense of grievance, with our compulsion to define ourselves as the injured party in any and all situations. I mean, who wants to be a warrior for orthodoxy nowadays? Far better to imagine ourselves as the victims of a crusade: to insist that Americans are in fact the “infidels” on the receiving end of extreme religious intolerance.

It took me a while to understand this. The first self-proclaimed infidel I noticed, if memory serves, was at a Tea Party protest I attended in 2010. Actually, he wasn't even a full fledged infidel. Instead, he was a “Farm Team Infidel,” a phrase that his T-shirt illustrated with an image of a man in a baseball cap aiming a pistol, rendered in the familiar tricolor silhouette of the Major League Baseball logo.

The combination of image and slogan baffled me completely.

As time passed, however, I discovered other infidels among us. There were those whose T-shirts boldly proclaimed their heresy in Arabic. There were infidels who announced their contempt for the sacred from the handles of their knives and the covers of their rifle scopes. There was a “Team Infidel” that blasted Korans with s...