It’s Time for an Encyclical on Christian Persecution
No-one would describe the New York Times as especially sympathetic to orthodox Christianity. The Grey Lady’s established aversion to anything but all-but-completely secularized versions of the Christian faith didn’t, however, stop it from recently publishing a widely-read article underscoring the on-going brutal persecution of Christians in the Middle East. If the Times is perturbed about what’s happening to Christians in the region in which Christianity first emerged, that should tell us something about just how bad things are.
The facts about the deepening Christian persecution around the world hardly need repeating. Every day we read of the mistreatment of Christian guest-workers in Saudi Arabia, the violence unleashed against Christians in India by Hindu nationalists, the repression of Christians by China’s Communist regime, or the slaughter of African Christians by Muslim extremists. What is being inflicted upon Christians across the Middle East by ISIS and other Islamic terrorists is in a league of its own. It is, in a word, unspeakable.
When some Western Christian leaders speak about this onslaught against their fellow Christians, they tend to use language along the lines of “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger.” To an extent, this fits with Christ’s injunction to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. That said, what is being done to Christians violates every norm of justice, and there’s been no shortage of Christian clergy who haven’t hesitated in recent years to use very direct, highly-charged, and occasionally bombastic language to condemn what they regard as economic injustices and to call out those they regard as responsible for such wrongs.
Read the article “It’s Time for an Encyclical on Christian Persecution” on crisismagazine.com.
