GLOBAL ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANS
Religious liberty scholar Paul Marshall, journalist Lela Gilbert, and human rights lawyer Nina Shea have released a new book on international torment of Christians by Islamists and communists called Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson). Their launch was March 27 at the Hudson Institute, where all three are affiliated, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer biographer Eric Metaxas moderating.
It's rarely if ever fashionable among Western elites to focus on persecution of Christians. According to secular and leftist mythology, Christians are habitually the persecutors and imperialists. Victims groups are typically non-Christians. But today most Christians are outside the West, in the East or Global South, where hundreds of millions are routinely vulnerable to oppressive regimes and/or hostile movements. The largest persecuted Christian group is in China. But persecution of Christians is most ascendant against Christians in majority Muslim countries.
Even U.S. citizens who are persecuted for their faith overseas are not a typical priority for the U.S. Government or the media, Shea observed. Pastor Saeed Abedini, a U.S. citizen and ethnic Iranian who returned to Iran, has been imprisoned and tortured there for 6 months because of his Christian ministry. It was not until March 22, in a statement issued very late on a Friday, that Secretary of State John Kerry publicly called for his release.
"I am deeply concerned about the fate of U.S citizen Saeed Abedini, who has been detained for almost six months and was sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran on charges related to his religious beliefs," Kerry wrote. "I am disturbed by reports that Mr. Abedini has suffered physical and psychological abuse in prison, and that his condition has become increasingly dire."
Oddly, Kerry never mentioned that the imprisoned pastor is Christian, although U.S. Government pleas on behalf of tolerance for other religious groups often cite the religion. Shea blamed a "misguided multiculturalism" that is unwilling to acknowledge Christians as victims and that thinks silence about radical Islam extends an olive branch that will earn good will. "It doesn’t work," she said. "And it sends the wrong signal."
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