What was the most vilified religion in Scotland in 2010-2011? Not
Islam – only 2.1 percent of religious hate crimes were directed against
Muslims. Not Judaism – only 2.3 percent were directed against Jews.
According to a report by the Scottish government, 95 percent of all
religious hate crimes were directed against Christians.
"These statistics show the shameful reality of religious hate crime in Scotland,” the
Minister for Community Safety, Roseanna Cunningham, declared last year.
“Like racism, this kind of behaviour simply shouldn't be happening in a
modern Scotland but sadly, it seems there are still those who think
hatred on the basis of religion is acceptable.”
Christians are also the targets of most religious hate crimes in
France. A report released last year showed that 84 percent of cases of
religious vandalism had targeted Christian sites in 2010 – an increase
of 96 percent in two years. Two hundred and fourteen cemeteries were
vandalized, along with 272 chapels, 26 war memorials and 10 crosses.
Christian monuments are not the only targets. Earlier this month
the hacker group Anonymous
crashed the Vatican website, leaving a message: “Anonymous decided
today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the
liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit
organization spreads around the world."
The
Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, an Austrian NGO, documents the growing problem of Christian persecution in Europe in a recently-released annual report.
According to its director, Dr Gudrun Kugler, all Christian
denominations in Europe face “a broad phenomena of intolerance and
discrimination caused by those who reject and disrespect Christianity as
a whole: radical lobbies which have gone overboard, seeking to limit
the practice of the Christian religion and with it fundamental rights
and freedoms.”
Is she over-dramatising the issue? Dr Kugler responds that many
religious leaders and politicians in Europe have been hitting the alarm
bell.
Last year Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a senior Russian Orthodox
prelate with a PhD from Oxford, warned that there is a “basic danger of
attempting to use religious diversity as an excuse to exclude signs of
Christian civilization from the public and political realities of the
continent, as though this would make our continent friendlier towards
non-Christians.”
And a Muslim government minister in the UK,
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, admitted that Christianity was under siege by militant secularism in a landmark speech earlier this year.
“I see it in United Kingdom and I see it
in Europe: spirituality suppressed; divinity downgraded… at its core and
in its instincts [militant secularism] is deeply intolerant. It
demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the
right to a religious identity and failing to understand the
relationship between religious loyalty and loyalty to the state.”
Dr Kugler admits that the hardships faced by European Christians are
minor compared to the daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and
torture in countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. But, she says,
“History teaches to address injustices before they become a slippery
slope towards even greater injustices.”
Dr Kugler says that the growing intolerance and discrimination take several forms.
Human rights violations and discrimination.
Christian are being denied the right to educate their children when
there is a conflict between the parents’ convictions and state required
sex education. The Catholic Church had to shut down adoption agencies in
the UK because they were being forced to accept same-sex couples as
adoptive parents.
Workplace discrimination. French pharmacists are
required to sell the “morning after” pill which causes an early
abortion. Midwives and nurses in Scotland must oversee abortions.
Workers in the UK are threatened with dismissal for wearing crosses.
Marginalization and negative stereotyping. The media
is constantly projecting hostile images of Christians and Christian
values. The Norwegian killer Andres Breivik was instantaneously and
wrongly called a “Christian fundamentalist” even though he had no
connections with any mainstream Christian churches. Last July the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe even
passed a resolution to “encourage the media not to spread prejudices against Christians and to combat negative stereotyping”.
Hate crimes. Violence against Christian sites and
clerics is becoming more common. Churches, shrines and cemeteries are
often torched or desecrated. “It is indisputable that hate crimes
against Christians occur in the OSCE region,” Janez Lenarčič, of the
OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights,
told a conference in Rome last year.
“Such attacks instil fear, not just in the individuals they target
directly, but also in the wider community, particularly where the
Christian community in question belongs to a minority.”
But if most European countries are at least nominally Christian,
isn’t it ridiculous to talk about a vilified minority? Wrong, says Dr
Kugler. It is not nominal Christians who are getting the sharp end of
the stick, but people who take the precepts of Christianity seriously.
And these
are a minority.
“South African blacks were not a minority
when they suffered from apartheid. Also women always constituted a
majority in history. Rocco Buttiglione was not accepted as an EU
commissioner due to his adherence to Christianity, the majority faith.
It is true that intolerance and discrimination more often affect
minorities. More essential than numbers is power: who sets the tone, who
is listened to, and who creates the agenda. Every day Europe’s majority
faith is being treated disrespectfully; its faithful are faced with
hostility and cultural animosity; and its free exercise is confronted
with unjust limitations.”
Amazingly, statistics on “Christianophobia” are sketchy, a failure
which Dr Kugler’s group is trying to set right. It acts as a
clearinghouse, logging incidents of discrimination and intolerance which
have been reported in the media.
As she points out, people need to know these grim stories to ensure
that history does not repeat itself. In 2010, graffiti at the University
of Barcelona sparked a minor controversy in Spain. “
Los cristianos son como ratas. Apunta bien,” it said. “Christian are like rats. Shoot straight.” This happened in a country where thousands of Christians
were shot like rats in the Spanish Civil War just because they went to Mass. Europe cannot afford to let this happen ever again.
Béatrice Stevenson is a French history student and research assistant for The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians.
Postado por Victor Teixeira.
