London Letter: Christians are on the run

Of all the leaders of this Century, none have punched below their weight as much as US President Barak Obama.

He may be a nice guy, cool and all, but as a leader he just doesn’t cut it.

Consider his ‘statesman-like’ response to the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Lieutenant Moath al-Kasasbeh at the hands of extremists recently: ‘Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.’

In other words, Christianity is rooted in bigotry and savagery. So don’t get on your high horse about a man being burned alive. Or someone having his head chopped off in front of a video camera.

Okay, maybe President Obama meant something more nuanced and I am off beam. But whatever way your read it, there seems little doubt that Obama actually thinks Christianity is a ‘white man’s religion’ and concerns the two biggest and most politically incorrect sins on the planet today; racism and prejudice. Sins far worse than dousing someone with petrol and lighting a match.

Obama is not alone in this bang-on belief. It is deeply embedded in the chattering class luvvies and hipsters, as natural as foam on their lattes. They’re convinced Christianity is a Western belief, so if you malign Christianity, you are sticking it to the man in true rock ‘n roll style. The fact that most of the hipsters (with the exception of President Obama) are white men themselves makes the idiocy of it all starker.

It is also totally incorrect.

For a start, not only did Christianity originate among dark people in the Middle East, most Christians now live outside the West and have little idea of the Inquisition or Jim Crow laws.

Indeed, today almost one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24%). Europe is roughly the same (26%), while 37% of Christians live in the Americas. Even in the traditionally ‘less Christian’ regions of Asia and the Pacific, about one in eight people are Christian.

Absurd

To make Obama’s ‘white man’s religion’ belief more absurd, even in the Americas more Christians are now found in Latin America than in the United States and Canada combined.

To peel it down further, there are more Christians in Ethiopia than France, three times as many in Egypt as there are in Ireland and one and half times more in Nigeria than either Italy or Germany.

Where I live, there are three times as many Christians in the Philippines than there are in the entire United Kingdom.

So while churches are emptying in the privileged citadels of the First World, they are packed to the rafters with the most fervent believers imaginable in Africa, Asia and South America.

And it is in those poor countries that Christians are on the run big time. In Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria, Philippines, Iraq and Pakistan, they are being slaughtered by the day.

Indeed, most of us will see the extinction of Christians in Iraq in our lifetime. The Chaldean Christians, one of the oldest continuous religious communities in the world, numbered 1.5-million under Saddam Hussein. Today there are less than 400 000 and the survivors are fleeing their homeland in droves.

We could also see the extinction of Christians in Syria, which number about 2.2-million, depending on who wins the civil war raging in that country.

The truth is that far from being a white privileged bastion, Christians are the most persecuted group on earth today.

For millions of Egyptians, Ethiopians, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Sudanese and Iraqis, nothing has changed since the lions’ dens of Rome. Their faith is truly tested in the fire every day of their lives.

This is something the leaders of the West, many of whom are either atheist or lapsed believers, have zero comprehension.