More than half of UK Christians say they have faced hostility and ridicule because of their faith, according to research published on Thursday.
The report, titled “The costs of maintaining faith“, was compiled by the non-profit organization Voice for Justice UK (VfJUK) and found that of more than 1,500 people surveyed from different Christian denominations and age groups, 56% reported a reluctance to share their beliefs in one way or another.
Among those under 35, this number rose to 61%.
Receive our latest news for FREE
Subscribe to receive daily/weekly emails with the best stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
“Bullying has also been reported,” a statement read. Executive summary conclusions of the report. “Christians did not feel free to express their opinions at work. The younger generation appears to have had more of these negative experiences than the older generation, suggesting that things are getting worse.”
While recognizing theoretical legal guarantees of freedom of expression in the UK, the study claims that the country has “some of the highest levels of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe”, which researchers attribute to hate speech laws that have led to a prevalence of “harassment, self-censorship, direct and indirect discrimination.”
The third chapter of the study looks at discrimination, which researchers say is increasingly reported among young Christians in the UK. Some of the difficulties were reported in the workplace and ranged from being forced to work unnecessarily on a Sunday to being required to keep their Christian religion. their beliefs for fear of reprisals.
The fourth chapter devotes particular attention to the National Health Service (NHS), which has witnessed repeated incidents of sanctions against Christian employees, such as Mary Onuoha, who took legal action after being punished. forced to resign from a London hospital for wearing a necklace with a cross.
The study also explores some anti-Christian sentiments in UK education, where Christian parents and teachers report feeling increasingly excluded and discriminated against.
The study suggests that the situation in mainstream churches is no better, with the study’s ninth chapter exploring how many of them “adopt progressive, secular ideologies, with the result that laity may feel discriminated against and are leaving more and more.”
Many Christians surveyed who met biblical standards did not identify with any particular Christian denomination, the researchers noted.
The study found that much of the cultural hostility towards Christians in the UK emerges from LBGT ideology and that most young Christians surveyed who reported worsening persecution also strongly believed in biblical teachings regarding sexuality, gender and marriage.
“Our research has shown that when it comes to beliefs about marriage, sex and gender, while the rest of society has been swept away by progressive ideologies, most Christians appear to have remained faithful to the orthodox Christian faith “, the researchers wrote. “Counterintuitively, it was often the younger generation who held more traditional views than the older generation. »
“This has put Christians on a collision course with progressives,” they added.
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians (OIDAC) in Europe has published a statement noting how the study’s “alarming” results echo some of the tendencies the observatory discovered the rise of anti-Christian sentiment in historically Christian countries.
OIDAC in Europe, OIDAC in Latin America and the International Institute for Religious Freedom wrote a report in 2022 entitled “Perceptions about self-censorship: Confirm and understand the “chilling effect” which has revealed that many Christians in these countries remain silent.
To avoid general and vague assessments, the researchers limited themselves to European Christians in France and Germany and to Latin American Christians in Mexico and Colombia.
They found that despite the lack of overt physical persecution, many Christians in these countries self-censored their beliefs to avoid subtler and more pervasive persecution, which the study likened to “death by a thousand cuts.”
“A few cuts don’t kill and hardly hurt,” researchers said at the time. “But small, ongoing strikes eventually have an impact. We posit that the accumulation of seemingly insignificant incidents creates an environment in which Christians do not feel comfortable – to some extent – living their faith freely. “
“Indeed, Western Christians experience a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from perceived pressures in their cultural environment, linked to widely publicized legal cases,” they added.
The number of Christians in the UK is falling, according to a 2022 study. investigation of more than 3,000 British adults commissioned by five Christian organizations.
According to data published by the British Office for National Statistics that year, less than half the population identified as Christian for the first time since the country’s first census in 1801.
The data showed that only 46.2 percent – or 27.5 million of the country’s more than 67 million people – identify as Christian. In the 2011 census, 59.3% of the population, or 33.3 million people, described themselves as Christian.
Jon Brown is a journalist at the Christian Post. Send news tips to jon.brown@christianpost.com
