Christianophobia: A faith under attack
Rupert Shortt
Rider Books £20
(978-1-8460-4275-1)
Church Times Bookshop £18
(Use code CT719)
PICKING up this book made me reflect on four decades of
reporting on the Middle East, and realise that the threat to Arab
Christian minorities has emerged as an ever more prominent
theme.
While being aware of Christians facing oppression in other
corners of the world - Indonesia, India, China, and so on - only
after reading Rupert Shortt's new book (
extract, Comment, 16 November) did I grasp what a global and
shocking problem this had become. No fewer than 200 million
Christians, we learn, are now under threat, more than any other
faith group. "This ought to be a major foreign-policy issue for
governments across a vast belt of the world," Shortt writes. "That
it is not tells us much about a rarely acknowledged hierarchy of
victimhood." In our politically correct modern world, sensitivity
over Islamophobia has become more fashionable than concerns about
Christianophobia.
Not only does the author provide proof that Christians are
afflicted on a huge scale, but he also succeeds in his other stated
aim: to show that the injustice remains under-reported. He
compensates for this last failing by taking a detailed look at the
plight of Christians in 19 countries, one by one, through the
Middle East to Asia, Africa, and Central America. It does not make
for comfortable reading. Page after page, the author methodically
and dispassionately lists the atrocities committed against
Christians, mostly (but by no means exclusively) by militant
Islamists.
It is a grim catalogue. Acts of intimidation can be as
unsettling as violence itself. An Iraqi Chaldean archbishop tells
of the "common expressions of sectarian belligerence" experienced
by Christians in his country - from direct threats in letters with
bullets enclosed to the appearance of armed men outside Christian
households and Qur'anic quotations daubed on the walls.
The author is right to point out, however, that much of the
violence committed in the name of religion has other triggers. In
Nigeria, for example, Islam and Christianity often come to blows in
the fertile Middle Belt that separates the swamps in the north from
the arid land in the south, where the issues at stake are jobs and
resources as much as anything else. Nor are Christians always the
innocent party in sectarian disputes. "Let no Muslim think they
have the monopoly on violence," says Peter Akinola, former Anglican
Archbishop of Nigeria.
Then there is the significant problem, not least in the Holy
Land and elsewhere in the Middle East, of the association in the
minds of Muslims of indigenous Christianity with the West, to which
imperialist and Islamophobic connotations are still attached.
In calmly chronicling the acts of violence and intimidation, and
analysing the varying challenges that Christianity faces around the
globe, Shortt has produced an important book that statesmen of all
faiths would do well to read. In his concluding paragraph, he
points out that it need not be like this; for, when Christianity
and Islam "are true to their guiding principles, both faiths insist
on the sanctity of the person as a seeker of God, and from this
should duly follow a recognition of religious freedom as the first
of human rights".
Quite so. But what further steps should be taken to achieve this
goal? That is a subject for another book - one that will need to
draw heavily on the findings of Christianophobia.
Gerald Butt is the Middle East Correspondent of the
Church Times.