The persecution of Christians is a subject of intense debate in this country. What should be a relatively simple question to answer — whether persecution happens — is instead politicized, with the right insisting upon an infringement on Christians’ freedom to worship, and the left dismissing such claims as alarmist and baseless. This polarity of perspective is prevalent in our very own opinion section. However, the question of Christians’ disputed persecution need not be politicized, and it can be broken down into facts devoid of political bias. The simple answer, an answer based not in opinion, but in empirical data, is that Christianity is the single most persecuted faith on the planet. This fact, however, is obscured by America’s national politics, a system in which the conflict between the Christian right and the more secular left has distracted from the truth about the world’s most oppressed religious group.
The reality of Christianity’s oppression is undoubtedly surprising to most people in the West. Thus, before we can address the global and systematic maltreatment of this population, it is important to understand exactly why the persecution of Christianity has been such a divisive topic. To start out, neither the left nor the right in this country is correct.
As embedded religious practices and a traditionally Christian society give way to a more secular era in which government and religion are becoming truly separate, the Christian right is claiming to be persecuted. Unfortunately for them, this kind of persecution is largely nonexistent and is instead a knee-jerk reaction to their diminishing influence in a country that has, since its creation, been ingrained with Christian values and practices.
In response to this long-maintained dominance, the left has constructed a picture of Christians as the oppressive class, a power-hungry group of despots desperately clinging to the vestiges of their pre-eminence. It is this opinion, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of people in this country are Christian, that has concealed the truth of the matter. The truth is that 80 percent of all religiously discriminatory acts in the world target Christians.
Because of Christianity’s position as a global hegemon, the plight of Christians worldwide is dismissed. In its attempt to even the political scale, the U.S. and the West at large have overlooked this very real onslaught of religious oppression targeted at those most often associated with intolerance — a sick irony if ever there was one. The result of this politicization of oppression is that the very real suffering of Christians around the world has gone almost entirely unacknowledged.
According to the The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States, 100,000 Christians are killed each year as a result of their faith. In addition to this alarming statistic, about 200 million Christians are oppressed or socially disadvantaged for their beliefs. Notwithstanding, this vast suffering remains unaddressed.
However, the left in this country is not entirely to blame for this pernicious narrative. In many ways, the Christian right’s response to this country’s recent social advances has maligned its reputation to the extent that staunch criticism is almost impossible to avoid, if not entirely deserved. In this case, the actions of a minority of individuals (Kim Davis’ refusal to acknowledge the legality of gay marriage, for example) has helped to support an image of conservative Christians as intolerant and behind the times. This perception, when applied to the rest of the world, makes it both easy and convenient to ignore the plight of this religious group.
In recent years, this country has made countless attempts and considerable progress to counter the Islamophobia that follows terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists, a necessary and progressive step to fight against prejudice, even if the vast majority of religious hate crimes in this country are targeted at Jews (56.8 percent compared to Muslims’ 16.1 percent). So here, an interesting pattern is beginning to form. Regardless of all data, we seem to protect only those who do not hold a traditionally dominant position in society.
The takeaway is that even hegemonic groups are not immune to persecution. Simply ignoring the suffering of those with alleged political power will not make oppression go away, nor will it strengthen previously held misconceptions. As we have made steps against Islamophobia, so too can we help fight against Christians’ persecution. We simply need to put aside our political differences.