Christians are persecuted all over the world. Why no liberal protest?

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If you like Bible verses at Christmas, unlike the craft store clerk who didn’t know what a “nativity scene” was even after mentioning the wise men, Mary, Joseph and “baby Jesus”, I suggest Matthew 5:11. Which, to her and her fellow millennials, says: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, because of me. » So there are many blessings all over the world.

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This doesn’t make headlines, as Christianity has been thrown into the dungeon of toxic oppression by decolonial studies. Its followers are pilloried as cruel, hypocritical and powerful, despite being arguably the most persecuted religion in the world.

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Even in Canada, they are targets, from the Moncton nursery, Moncton city council attempting to remove its traditional Hanukkah menorah to the creeping ban on Christian prayer by military chaplains on Remembrance Day. And the rampant ideology behind it all, by which the Canadian Human Rights Commission has just denounced Christmas as a toxic part of Canada’s so-called “history of religious intolerance…deeply rooted in our identity as a colonial state.”

Unlike which model of illumination? Soviet Union? Saudi Arabia? Iran?

Wikipedia gently allows that “contemporary persecution of Christians includes the genocide of Christians by the Islamic State and persecution by other terrorist groups, with official state persecution occurring primarily in countries located in Africa and Asia because they have state religions or because their governments and societies practice religious favoritism.

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If you’re wondering which “state religions”, well, “non-state actors” are of “particular concern” to the US State Department, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Houthis in Yemen, the Islamic State in Iraq and in the Levant, al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban and Tahrir al-Sham in Syria. But we must also recognize the merit of the communists in Cuba, China and North Korea.

The Vatican estimates that more than 360 million Christians, “one in seven” worldwide, “experience high levels of persecution and discrimination because of their faith.” And here, “persecution” does not mean living in countries where stores display Ramadan. It means blow up churches and forced marriage after rape. Where are the feminists?

A report from Open Doors lists “the 50 countries where Christians face the worst persecution”, which seems like a lot. Where are the liberals?

Of course, the history of Christianity, as it relates to human beings, is not without blemish. But who else has actually expressed concern about slavery, women’s equality, or other basic “human rights” that we assume are universal, even if they only seem to undermine “the West”?

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As Tristin Hopper wrote, Canada’s remarkable history of religious tolerance, dating back before Confederation to the Freedom of Religious Act of 1851 in the Province of Canada, failed to impress the CHRC. But it is real and exists because the “Dominion of Canada” was founded on explicitly Christian principles, with its name and motto “From sea to sea” coming from Psalm 72, as Canadian Heritage scrupulously recalls. . avoid noting.

No non-Christian country has ever had an abolitionist movement, much less gone to war to prevent non-Christians from enslaving other non-Christians. But the CHRC talkative “No one is free until we are all free”, especially from patriarchal religion, although maybe we can keep a plastic Santa or two, plus an elf in a rainbow shirt .

Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, later explained that in studying the “apex predators” of antiquity, particularly the Romans, “I came to feel that they were more and more foreign to me, more and more frightening. They and the Greeks glorified power and lacked compassion in a way that we had so completely renounced, even the atheists of a “Christian” civilization found them intolerable.

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As Holland, “It took me a long time to realize that my morals are not Greek or Roman, but deeply and proudly Christian.” But take the CHRC’s view and we return to Stalin’s sneer: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Not that Canada would be divided either, if we wanted to oppose the global trampling of Christians and the humble in general.

Our Prime Minister, cornered at the CRTC, declared: “Obviously, Christmas is not racist.” But he added: “We all have to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, all the different holidays. » Just more fun dressing up, you know? And Pierre Poilievre babbles: “We love our great Canadian traditions, including Christmas. » But reduce the Nativity to an outdated habit and we return to Roman euthanasia, abortion and contempt for the weak.

It is therefore a well-intentioned error on the part of a Conservative MP. to try make December “Christian Heritage Month”. This turns Christianity, the foundation of our society and our values, into a dozen amusing old-fashioned habits, like people of Scottish descent eating haggis on Robbie Burns Day. But no one would kill or die from haggis.

All over the world they are doing it about Christ. But this global persecution receives surprisingly little attention or sympathy in Canada because we are increasingly not those kinds of people.

National Post

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