Christians: the real enemy of modern-day progressives

Christians: the real enemy of modern-day progressives

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• MARCH 26, 2016 12:00AM
• SAVE
• PRINT
• Angela Shanahan
  
  Columnist
  Canberra
  

Which religion is the most persecuted in the world? Today, Christianity is by far the most widely persecuted religion in the world.

Until recently, I thought most people knew this. Think about the number of countries in which Christianity has been oppressed to the point of near extinction, particularly in the Middle East, where Christianity began and predates Islam; in Africa, where the Muslim-Christian fault line is most pronounced; or in parts of Asia, where Christianity has a long history of almost continuous persecution in places such as China and North Korea.
Recently, when reading about the reaction to John Allen’s book The Global War on Christians, I realised many people, especially the young, don’t know this. Even when they are given the facts, they seem loath to believe it and often cite the cultural dominance of Christianity, which they forget is a purely Western phenomenon.
The murder of Syrian Christians by Islamic State was the first many people knew of the existence of Christians in the Middle East. So why don’t we hear more about this persecution? More pointedly, what happened to the high-minded notion of accepting 12,000 mainly Christian refugees from the Middle East, especially Syria and Iraq? Where are they?
Then there are families such as the Naeems, a Christian family of nine that has been stuck in Beirut for more than a year and has a relative in Canberra. The Naeems have had their documents for refugee status tentatively approved but have been told they must wait another 12 to 18 months to get an interview. These are people trying to operate through legal channels. Can it be the liberal secular media, after showing due outrage about the persecution of Christians under Islamic State, has lost interest in the fate of these people?
I don’t think one can simply blame the media but many of us wonder why we are still not seeing more Christians in the intake. Perhaps there is victim overload. We live in a thoroughly libertarian milieu in which everyone is a victim, with their own rights ideology. Most of the time these rights are just wants, so real victims such as persecuted Christians challenge that hollow sense of entitlement.
But there is more. The Christian religion is seen by some political and social elites as the one great obstacle to the elevation of human wants into human rights. So who cares about them? It is easy to make noises about Islamic State, but for progressives the real enemy seems to be Christianity.
The result is the “soft” persecution of Christians in the West who speak out against progressive ideologies. Use is made of the human rights apparatus and anti-discrimination law. Look at the continuing persecution of Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous for merely enunciating Catholic teaching on marriage. Similar things have happened in continental Europe and Britain. This sort of soft persecution goes to the heart of freedom of religion.
And Christians from societies where the family is paramount, marriage is sacred and who have suffered real persecution for their faith are hardly likely to support things such as same-sex marriage.
To paraphrase Gough Whitlam, people such as the Naeems would be seen by progressives in and out of government as “the Balts” (right-wing reactionaries) of the Middle East. No wonder the promised influx of Syrian Christians has not materialised.
What many may not realise is that religious freedom is the foundation of political freedom.
Last year at a conference on religious freedom, Attorney-General George Brandis said: “Religious freedom is every bit as important as political freedom. To those who are adherents of a religious faith — and in Australia, according to the last census, that was seven among every 10 of us — religion can be the most fundamental source of our sense of right and wrong, and of those beliefs about mankind and his place in the cosmos which transcend the everyday. It is often not appreciated in our Western tradition that modern notions of political liberty had their origins largely in the struggles for religious liberty.”
When a perverted idea of liberty, one that elevates wants to rights, strikes at religious freedom, it strikes at the heart of freedom itself.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opi...day-progressives/story-fn562txd-1227803045343