Last Monday, Theos hosted an event to mark the release of the paperback edition of Rupert Shortt’s Christianophobia: How the global oppression of Christians is being ignored.
Christianophobia tells a story that is too rarely heard. Its central argument is that the persecution of Christians around the world is a very large phenomenon, which has suffered from an equally large deficit in media coverage. Christians are the single biggest persecuted minority in the world, and yet their plight remains tragically unknown.
Shortt investigated the situation in a variety of countries, focusing primarily on the Middle-East, Asia, and North Africa. Christianophobia, he argues, stems from many complex combinations of many complex causes, including the creation of alien minorities through the redrawing of borders by imperial powers and post-war nationalist movements, and jealousy over prosperity and inequality. These factors intersect with already present tensions between religious movements, which governments and other institutions then allow to boil over into persecution.
Shortt’s book, through its detailed and nuanced approach to a criminally obscure subject, presents an important contribution to our understanding of persecution, and the position and identity of Christianity within the global context. What it is not is an attempt to demonstrate how Christians are ‘oppressed’ within a domestic context. Aware of the toxic nature of this debate, Shortt distances himself from those who would co-opt his book to reinforce claims of this nature, explicitly stating that his understanding of ‘persecution’ is drawn from the brutality endured by Christians in the Middle-East and not the treatment complained about in the UK.
That is not, however, to say that this book has no implications for the domestic debate. However different the situations, both the undeniable persecution abroad, and far less clear cut claims of ‘persecution’ at home, revolve around the notion of an imbalance and abuse of power. Abroad, governments often utilise their authority and the willingness of a hostile people to hound their Christian populations. In the UK many Christians feel that their views are being silenced in public by a tiny but unduly influential secularist movement - although secularists claim that this alleged silencing is, in fact, the long-required rectification of a centuries-old imbalance of power and privilege. Either way, it is power – its distribution and its application – that is under the microscope.
This fundamental structural similarity (imbalance of power plus abuse) between perceptions of the situation at home and the reality of the situation abroad, means that the situations presented in Shortt’s book can be used to reflect upon those perceptions.
The sheer scale of the imbalances presented in the book dwarfs any comparative ones in the UK. This makes the distinction in power within the domestic context appear negligible by comparison. As such, placing domestic affairs into international perspective confronts head on a certain kind of complacency in which we become so caught up with the specks in each other’s eyes that we come to think of them as logs, often forgetting in the process that individuals with actual logs are busy beating people with them elsewhere.
That recognised, introducing this wider perspective should not lead us to discard as simply hysterical the views of those who (wrongly or not) feel themselves to be victims. Ultimately, our neighbours are the people with whom we must live: we cannot ignore or belittle their concerns just because others are experiencing greater suffering elsewhere. It is essential for quality of life not be chased from your home by an angry mob. However, it is also important to feel safe to approach the world without being forced to capitulate on, or shamed into hiding, beliefs which are absolutely central to your worldview. As such, just as it is important to reflect upon the situations of those being persecuted abroad, it is vital that we approach the concerns of those (of faith, or indeed otherwise) at home with charity.
Nick Burbach is currently an intern at Theos
Picture by jerine from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
