We always try to keep important information available and I am really starting to worry about not telling you of a serious issue we are facing for over a 100 years now. There is a rate of 11 Christians being killed every hour in a violent anti-Christian persecution around the world. In a low rate year there is 1 Christian being killed every hour, 24/7. We don’t see this very often in the west because if someone attacks our freedom of religion they would get sued and if the thing is really serious they would probably get a death row and probably give some reasons to keep Guantanamo opened! But the south my dear friends, it’s property of Sr. Matanza (Mr.Killer)
In an awful year there would be 150.000 Christians being killed all over the world in an anti-christian persecution and for reasons related to their faith. In the most luckiest of years there would be around 10.000 killings.
“In some (Islamic and Hindu) countries they kill Christians because they wear a cross or have a Bible, and before killing them they don’t ask if they’re Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholic or Orthodox.”
Conversation with a radical who said bragged of killing an entire Christian family in Syria:
“I killed them because they were Christians,” he quoted the radical as saying, adding that the assassin didn’t know if his victims were “Maronites, Catholics, Melkites, Chaldeans, Orthodox … just that they were Christians.”
The fact of being Christian was all it took to justify a death sentence.
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According to Patriarch Louis Sako, more than 1,000 Christians have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, while scores of others have been “kidnapped and tortured.” He said 62 churches and monasteries have been attacked.
Sako cited a recent estimate from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees that 850,000 Christians have left Iraq since 2003, by some estimates representing almost two-thirds of the country’s Christian population.
That exodus, he added, includes both Orthodox and Catholics.
“We feel forgotten and isolated,” Sako said. “We sometimes wonder, if they kill us all, what would be the reaction of Christians in the West? Would they do something then?”
Sako made clear he’s not asking for a mobilization “to protect Christians,” but rather Western efforts to support “harmonious societies for all human beings”, based on “a civil state in which the only criterion is citizenship grounded in full equality under the law.”
Sako said that at the moment, the influence of Western nations in the region seems to be based primarily on self-interest: “All they do is create problems, sell weapons and take oil.”
Sako warned that the same trends are currently gathering force in both Syria and Egypt, citing estimates that in the last 18 months some 100 churches in Egypt have been attacked, while 67 churches have been assaulted in Syria and more than 45,000 Christians have left the country.
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Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.
The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well.
In Baghdad, Islamic militants stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on 31 October 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of 58 people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented; of the 65 Christian churches in Baghdad, 40 have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 US-led invasion.
The effect of this campaign of violence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and realistically many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed.
India’s northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured and at least 50,000 left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more.
An estimated 5,000 Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report, and declined to arrest her attackers.
In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country’s Christians are concentrated.
A Burmese Air Force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas ‘black zones’, where military personnel were authorised to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive.
In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement ‘Boko Haram’ is held responsible for almost 3,000 deaths since 2009, including 800 fatalities last year alone. The movement has made a speciality out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians out altogether from parts of the country.
In December 2011, local Boko Haram spokesmen announced that all Christians in the northern Yobe and Borno states had three days to get out, and followed up with a spate of church bombings on 5 and 6 January 2012, which left at least 26 Christians dead, as well as two separate shooting sprees in which eight more Christians died. In the aftermath, hundreds of Christians fled the area, and many are still displaced. Over Christmas last year, at least 15 Christians are believed to have had their throats cut by Boko Haram assailants.
North Korea is widely considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, where roughly a quarter of the country’s 200,000 to 400,000 Christians are believed to be living in forced labour camps for their refusal to join the national cult around founder Kim Il Sung. The anti-Christian animus is so strong that people with Christian grandparents are frozen out of the most important jobs — even though Kim Il Sung’s mother was a Presbyterian deaconess. Since the armistice in 1953 that stabilised the division of the peninsula, some 300,000 Christians in North Korea have disappeared and are presumed dead.
As these examples illustrate, anti-Christian violence is hardly limited to a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam. In truth, Christians face a bewildering variety of threats, with no single enemy and no single strategy best adapted to curb the violence.
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Because the bulk of the globe’s 2.3 billion Christians today are impoverished and live in the developing world, and because they are often members of ethnic, cultural and linguistic minorities, experts regard their treatment as a reliable indicator of a society’s broader record on human rights and dignity. Just as one didn’t have to be Jewish in the 1970s to care about dissident Jews in the Soviet Union, nor black in the 1980s to be outraged by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, one doesn’t have to be Christian today to see the defence of persecuted Christians as a towering priority.
Why are the dimensions of this global war so often overlooked? Aside from the root fact that the victims are largely non-white and poor, and thus not considered ‘newsmakers’ in the classic sense, and that they tend to live and die well off the radar screen of western attention, the global war also runs up against the outdated stereotype of Christianity as the oppressor rather than the oppressed.
Say ‘religious persecution’ to most makers of cultured secular opinion, and they will think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, Bruno and Galileo, the Wars of Religion and the Salem witch trials. Today, however, we do not live on the pages of a Dan Brown potboiler, in which Christians are dispatching mad assassins to settle historical scores. Instead, they’re the ones fleeing assassins others have dispatched.
Moreover, public discussion of religious freedom issues often suffers from two sets of blinders. First, it’s generally phrased in terms of western church/state tensions, such as the recent tug-of-war between religious leaders in the United States and the Obama White House over contraception mandates as part of health care reform, or tensions in the United Kingdom over the 2010 Equality Act and its implications for church-affiliated adoption agencies vis-à-vis same-sex couples. The truth is that in the West, a threat to religious freedom means someone might get sued; in many other parts of the world, it means someone might get shot, and surely the latter is the more dramatic scenario.
Secondly, discussion is sometimes limited by an overly narrow conception of what constitutes ‘religious violence’. If a female catechist is killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, because she’s persuading young people to stay out of militias and criminal gangs, one might say that’s a tragedy but not martyrdom, because her assailants weren’t driven by hatred of the Christian faith. Yet the crucial point isn’t just what was in the mind of her killers, but what was in the heart of that catechist, who knowingly put her life on the line to serve the gospel. To make her attackers’ motives the only test, rather than her own, is to distort reality.
Whatever the motives for the silence, it’s well past time for it to end. Pope Francis recognised this in remarks during a General Audience last month.
‘When I hear that so many Christians in the world are suffering, am I indifferent, or is it as if a member of my own family is suffering?’ the Pope asked his following. ‘Am I open to that brother or that sister in my family who’s giving his or her life for Jesus Christ?’
In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, who leads a church with more than its fair share of new martyrs, phrased the same questions more plaintively during a conference in London. He bluntly asked: ‘Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?’
There may be no question about the destiny of Christianity in the early 21st century more deserving of a compelling answer.
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Recently, the show focused on statistics used in my writing on anti-Christian persecution — not so much my recent book, The Global War on Christians, but rather a cover story I did for The Spectatorin early October. The gist was that three of the statistics I cited in that piece are exaggerated or, at least, open to question.
Those statistics are:
- A 2009 estimate from the chairman of the International Society for Human Rights, based in Frankfurt, Germany, to the effect that 80 percent of acts of religious discrimination today are directed at Christians. A spokesperson for the society told “More or Less” they no longer use this estimate because it’s impossible to know with precision what share of acts of discrimination are directed against specific populations.
- A September 2012 report from the Pew Forum indicating that between 2006 and 2010, Christians had faced some form of harassment in 139 nations, almost three-quarters of all the societies on Earth. Here, “More or Less” faulted me for leaving out important context because the Pew report also found that Muslims faced difficulties in almost as many nations and that other religious groups are also under threat.
- The estimate from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity that each year for the past decade, an average of 100,000 Christians per year have been killed “in a situation of witness.” The program charged that this estimate includes too many situations, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which Christians are being killed but not for reasons of faith. Moreover, a great deal of this killing is also Christian-on-Christian.
These are legitimate concerns, and you don’t have to be in denial about anti-Christian violence to raise them. I tried to respond in my interview with the BBC, and I’ll give a fuller version here.
My basic point was that virtually all of the numbers used to talk about religious violence, whether directed at Christians or anybody else, are estimates. Getting hard data is notoriously difficult, in part because victims often don’t make reports for fear of reprisals and in part because the neighborhoods where the most lethal activity is occurring don’t welcome independent investigators nosing around.
Everyone in the field wishes the data were more reliable, although they also realize that in the grand scheme of things, that’s a detail. The big picture is that whatever the exact numbers turn out to be, Christians are increasingly at risk.
80 percent
When Martin Lessenthin, chairman of the International Society for Human Rights, provided the 80 percent figure in 2009, he made clear that it was an estimate based upon conversations with colleagues and surveying the findings of other human rights observatories. Because there is no precise catalogue of all violations of religious freedom around the world, it’s impossible to know with certainty what share is actually directed against Christians or any other group.
In effect, Lessenthin was trying to make a fairly simple observation with his estimate. Because Christianity is the world’s largest religion, with 2.3 billion adherents, and because its greatest growth is in regions with a mixed record on human rights, the raw number of assaults on Christians is bound to be larger than any other group.
If it’s hard for some to believe that, it probably speaks to a problem with narratives. In the West, the usual narrative about Christianity is that it’s big, wealthy and politically powerful, which makes it hard for some people to get their minds around the fact that Christians can actually suffer persecution.
Yet that view of things is badly out of date. Two-thirds of the planet’s Christians now live in the developing world, a share projected to reach three-quarters my mid-century. The majority is poor, and they’re often members of ethnic, linguistic and cultural minorities, so they’re doubly or triply at risk. The faith is growing in rough neighborhoods such as sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, where local Christians are often blindly (and erroneously) identified with “the West.”
The claim that these Christians endure 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination may be no more than an educated guess, but it still reflects reality better than a badly outdated worldview styling Christians as more likely to be the oppressors rather than the oppressed.
139 countries
“More or Less” was absolutely correct in noting that according to the Pew data, Christians are hardly the only group being harassed. In the 2012 survey I quoted, the totals for the number of countries in which followers of a given religion faced difficulties were as follows:
- Christians: 139
- Muslims: 121
- Jews: 85
- Others: 72 (a catch-all category that includes Baha’is, Zoroastrians, etc.)
- Folk Religionists: 43
- Hindus: 30
- Buddhists: 21
The study documents what it calls a “rising tide” of restrictions on religion around the world in which Christians are not the only victims.
In the book, I note the risk in using the rhetoric of a “war on Christians” when other faith groups are also in the firing line, writing that it “could make the defense of religious freedom seem like a parochial matter of Christian self-interest, rather than principled support for the human rights of all persons.”
That said, the reason for paying special attention to the Christian data is because it challenges the narrative. It’s far easier for the typical Western mind to accept that Jews or Buddhists can experience persecution than that Christians do, and actually in much greater numbers given the larger overall size of the Christian population.
Waking up to the reality of the global war on Christians doesn’t mean other groups aren’t suffering as well. At the same time, nothing about their suffering means the global war isn’t happening.
Counting martyrs
I devote a section of chapter one in The Global War to the debate over the estimate provided by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity of 100,000 new martyrs every year. The BBC fact-checkers are right that there’s a lively debate about that number, with even some of the most concerned experts on anti-Christian persecution believing it’s inflated because it includes too many casualties whose deaths had nothing to do with religious motives.
I quote Thomas Schirrmacher of the World Evangelical Alliance, for instance, who said in August 2011 that he regards a tally of 20 Christian fatalities per day, which works out to 7,300 per year, as more realistic. Recently, the Christian missionary organization Gospel for Asia released its own estimate of 14,000 Christians killed for the faith every year around the world, claiming the number is based only on reported cases.
The debate almost certainly will go on. As Schirrmacher put it two years ago, “We are far from having a reliable report of the number of martyrs annually.”
Even Schirrmacher’s low-end estimate, however, works out to almost one new Christian martyr every hour. There may be an argument over the body count, but there’s no serious dispute that the “global war” is real.
In the book, I caution against an overly restrictive definition of what counts as anti-Christian violence, suggesting that the classic standard for martyrdom of a death in odium fidei, meaning in explicit hatred of the faith, leaves too much out of the picture.
Here’s the thought exercise I often use: Consider a devout female catechist in Congo who’s killed by a paramilitary group for resisting their forced enrollment of child soldiers. One could say that’s tragic but not martyrdom, because these thugs didn’t care about her faith. They just wanted to keep her hands off their new recruits. Yet drilling down, the catechist’s motives had everything to do with her faith. She put herself in harm’s way because she believed she was following God’s call to serve the vulnerable, so in a very real sense, she died for the Gospel every bit as much as an ancient martyr killed for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods.
In a sound bite, it’s a mistake in surveying the global war on Christians to focus exclusively on the motives of those pulling the triggers. At some stage, we also have to consider what was in the hearts of the people getting shot.
That perspective does not resolve the debate over numbers, of course, but it does suggest a more expansive standard for deciding what counts in trying to determine the real scale of anti-Christian violence.
John L. Allen Jr is author of The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution.
[John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent. His email address is jallen@ncronline.org. Follow him on Twitter: @JohnLAllenJr.] *working at the constitutional level to guarantee religious freedom and equal rights for believers of all faiths throughout the land.*