The former Chief Rabbi is appalled at the lack of protest about the treatment of Christians round the globe, and so should we be
Sunday 27 July 2014
[An important piece, with some additional commentary and critique from the "home team" at the end. Ed.]
But it has been a different story for the 3,000 Christians of Mosul who were driven from their homes in northern Iraq by Islamist fanatics who broadcast a fatwa from the loudspeakers of the city's mosques ordering them to convert to Islam, submit to its rule and pay a religious levy, or be put to death if they stayed. The last to leave was a disabled woman who could not travel. The fanatics arrived at her home and told her they would cut off her head with a sword.Vallely's article is right on the money when he calls attention to the general pogrom that is being unleashed upon Christians around the world today. He is also right when he highlights the silence of the West on the matter and the double standards at work. But, in our view, he completely misses the mark when trying to explain this lapse of moral judgment.
. . . 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.
Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38 states worldwide, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.
The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States estimates that 100,000 Christians now die every year, targeted because of their faith – that is 11 every hour. The Pew Research Center says that hostility to religion reached a new high in 2012, when Christians faced some form of discrimination in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of the world's nations.
All this seems counter-intuitive here in the West where the history of Christianity has been one of cultural dominance and control ever since the Emperor Constantine converted and made the Roman Empire Christian in the 4th century AD. Yet the plain fact is that Christians are languishing in jail for blasphemy in Pakistan, and churches are burned and worshippers regularly slaughtered in Nigeria and Egypt, which has recently seen its worst anti-Christian violence in seven centuries.
A few voices have been raised in the West about all this. The religious historian Rupert Shortt has written a book called Christianophobia. America's most prominent religious journalist, John L Allen Jnr, has just published The Global War on Christians. The former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks told the House of Lords recently that the suffering of Middle East Christians is "one of the crimes against humanity of our time". He compared it with Jewish pogroms in Europe and said he was "appalled at the lack of protest it has evoked".
Why is this in a culture that is happy to make public protest against the ferocity of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza or the behaviour of Russia in Ukraine? In part, it is because our intelligentsia are locked into old ways of thinking about Christianity as the dominant force in Western historic hegemony. The church has not helped in this, with its fixation on pious religiosity and on cultural issues that it falsely regards as totemic – issues such as gay marriage and women bishops.
A bogus dichotomy between religion and equality has been set up, resulting in a succession of comparatively trivial new (sic) stories about receptionists being banned from wearing religious jewellery or nurses being suspended for offering to pray for patients' recovery. Adopting the rhetoric of persecution on such matters obscures the very real persecution of Christians being killed or driven from their homes elsewhere in the globe.
Most of the world's Christians are not engaged in stand-offs with intolerant secularists over such small matters. In the West, Christianity may have increasingly become embraced by the middle class and abandoned by the working class. But elsewhere the vast majority of Christians are poor, many of them struggling against antagonistic majority cultures, and have different priorities in life.
The paradox this produces is that, as Allen points out, the world's Christians fall through the cracks of the left-right divide – they are too religious for liberals and too foreign for conservatives.
In the UK, it is socially respectable among the secular elite to regard Christianity as weird and permissible to bully its followers a little. This produces the surreal political reality in which President Obama visits Saudi Arabia and "does not get the time" to raise the suppression of Christianity in the oil-rich nation; and in which Prime Minister Cameron gets a broadside from illiberal secularists for the historically unquestionable assertion that Britain's culture is formed by Christian values.
The reality of being a Christian in most of the world today is very different. It only adds to their tragedy that the West fails to understand that – or to heed the plea of men such as the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal when he asks: "Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?"
Paul Vallely is visiting professor of public ethics at Chester Univeristy
Firstly, he trivialises the oppression of Christians in the West, writing, that Christians have made far too much fuss "on cultural issues that it falsely regards as totemic – issues such as gay marriage and women bishops." In so opining, he betrays the root of this problem in the West, on the one hand, and that he himself becomes an implicit advocate or apologist for the West's loathing of Christianity, on the other.
For the secular West in general, religious faith, including Christianity, is a curious relic of the pre-secular primitive past. The fact that Christians still remain in the secular West is testimony to their particular ignorance, superstition, and primitive thought patterns. Christians resist homosexual "marriage" because they have made totems--like all primitive religions--clinging to these archaisms because they are unable to move with the tide of secular enlightenment. A similar condescending paternalism applies to Vallely's criticism about Christians resisting the ordination of women. He fails to grasp that Christians resist these defalcations because of their fidelity to the Lord of the heavens and the earth. They believe and understand that His law binds--way beyond the pretensions of secularist ethics and fads.
Of course, Vallely would protest that such totems are minor matters in the global scheme of things, but in doing so fails to realise that it is secularism which is informing his judgment about what he judges is really important and what he considers unimportant.
The fact that secularists abuse Christians for such faith and fidelity to the Christ is in principle no different from the abuse of Christians by Hindu extremists in India or Islamists in Iraq. In both cases fidelity to Christ is being excoriated and punished. The only difference is that in the West there is enough of a Christian legal tradition still remaining that the law restrains the hatred and anger towards Christians that is expressed whenever it has opportunity--on websites, twitter, and other media not subject to anti-defamation laws.
Christians are thankful that such mercies still apply in the West and that the pogrom here is restrained. But we are in no doubt that secular humanism is an aggressive, minatory religion that will oppress and punish all who stand in its way--given half a chance. Vallely lacks epistemological self-consciousness about his own position (he is not a neutral observer, after all), and he also lacks awareness of the epistemology of secularism.
Finally, Vallely implies that Christians are significantly to blame for the silence of the West over the global persecution of Christians. Christians have distracted the West by majoring on minors, and adopting "the rhetoric of persecution" on such matters. Christians have lost perspective, he implies, failing to understand that that the secularist ethic of equality enforced upon Christians is not persecution, whereas real persecution exists when you lose your home or your life.
His article cites John L. Allen, referring to his recent book, The Global War on Christians, who claims ". . . the world's Christians fall through the cracks of the left-right divide – they are too religious for liberals and too foreign for conservatives". That about gets it right, for Western liberals and conservatives are both alike secularist,--although arguably secular conservatives, because of the desire to preserve what they deem acceptable from their heritage, are generally more tolerant of Christians than secular liberals.
We Christians do not despise the help and assistance of Unbelievers and secularists. We are thankful for it. It was Julius Caesar, for all his monstrous ambitions and lawlessness, who respected and protected the Jewish enclaves in Rome. Such things are not uncommon in the history of the Kingdom. Whilst we pray for the "king" and seek the good of all men, we have low expectations of a mutual response, albeit very thankful to God when it happens as in ancient Rome. For our hope is not in fallen man, but in God, our Lord and Saviour. For we know that the heart of the king (and authorities of every kind) is in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever He will. (Proverbs 21:1)
We are thus thankful to Vallely for calling attention to the global pogrom against Christians and being a latter day type of Julius Caesar for the Lord's people.
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