Anti-Christian persecution is occasionally reported in major news outlets like the Economist and Newsweek but, “on the whole, the war on Christians remains the world’s best-kept secret,” says US journalist John L Allen.It’s a view shared by Italian journalist Francesca Paci who says about the persecution of Christians in Iraq, Algeria, India, etc: “We ignore too many things, and even more indefensibly, we pretend not to see too many things.”
In 2011 the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Fouad Twal, speaking about the suffering of Arab Christians, asked: “How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?”
Allen, a high-profile Vatican-watcher, has explored the various reasons for the silence in a new book, The Global War on Christians.
He first notes a basic point, “that some secularists have little personal experience of religion and can be strikingly ignorant on religious subjects.”
Add to this a reflexive hostility to religion, especially Christianity, in sectors of secular opinion.
In this mindset, historical events like the Crusades or the Salem with trials and contemporary issues like the crackdown on some US nuns or Evangelicals seeking to restrict a woman’s “right to choose”, make Christianity the villain.
“People conditioned by such views are inclined to see Christianity as the agent of repression, not its victim,” says Allen.
But “victims of the global war on Christians challenge this narrative head-on, because they show Christianity not as the oppressor but as the oppressed,” he says.
Already two thirds of the world’s Christians live outside the West and often carry various stigmas – they represent a faith the arouses suspicion, or they belong to an oppressed ethnic group or social class, such as the Dalit converts in India.
Given the facts, “it’s time for secular thought to get past The Da Vinci Code,” says Allen. “Today’s Christians aren’t dispatching mad assassins; more often than not, they’re fleeing the assassins others have dispatched.”
There is also the problem that for many people the war on Christians seems to be too far away.
“Today’s martyrs often go to their deaths in Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands, and Sudan – places that many people in the West would struggle to find on a map, to say nothing of feeling a personal investment in what’s happening there.”
Then there’s the complexity of the war on Christians, with no simple remedy. Thus, a response to Buddhist extremism in Bangladesh will be no help in dealing with narco-terrorists in Colombia
Veteran French intellectual leftist Régis Debray offers another reason for the silence.
For him, anti-Christian persecution falls squarely into the political blind spot of the West: the victims are “too Christian” to excite the Left, “too foreign” to interest the Right.
Then there are the partial views. “Conservatives pounce on every outrage by Islamic radicals but shrink from condemning the way Israeli security policies often suck the life out of Arab Christianity.
“Liberals celebrate the martyrs to Right-wing regimes in Latin America but are often unwilling to acknowledge anti-Christian hatred in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, or the way that Leftist regimes often make Christians their first targets.”
Allen admits that it may be disappointing that the secular world has ignored anti-Christian persecution. But he wants to know why mainstream western Christianity has ignored it also.
Only extremely rarely, for example, is the global war on Christians the topic of a Sunday sermon or the issue for a faith formation group.
“At the political and social levels, the churches of the West have not yet driven anti-Christian persecution to the top of anybody’s to-do list, despite expending enormous resources on other questions,” says the journalist.
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