How Western Elites Betray Their Christian Heritage
Meet the true revolutionaries--the latter-day Jacobins of the early 21st century are as wilfully blind and blood-thirsty as their kindred spirits of the 1790s
Regular readers know I report on issues that are frequently ‘under the radar’ of legacy media, such as today’s posting. Yet I note that reporting on the war on Christianity is now making inroads, that is, at least as far as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is concerned.
While I doubt that this will change soon, I suspect that the rising levels of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance will, before too long, change the current course of action in the West.
Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.
Instead of Talking About Persecuted Christians, They Prefer to Talk About Islamophobia: How Western Churches are Betraying their Believers in Africa and Asia
In Nigeria, Islamists are massacring thousands of Christians. The reactions in the West are telling.
By Kacem El Ghazzali, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 May 2025 [source; archived]
Seven-year-old Nenche Steven miraculously survived. Islamist Fulani militias broke into his home at night on 13 April. They shot his father, chopped off his mother’s arms, and tried to behead Nenche and his two siblings with machetes. Only Nenche survived. His fate is barely mentioned in Western media and the local churches hardly talk about him [huhum, why would that be? I suspect it’s because this seems to derive from an ethnic/religious conflict; the most recent reporting I found—of 15 killed Christian traders (careful, incl. stark images)—dates from 19 May 2025 and I cannot vouch for anything].
Palm Sunday 2025 began in the Christian community of Zike in the Nigerian state of Plateau like any other holiday—with prayers and preparations for the service. What followed was one of the most brutal massacres in Nigeria's recent history: the Fulani militias killed 56 people, many of them children, with unimaginable cruelty [I’m unsure about the creativity of the human mind here; I suppose a cynic might throw in a comparison to, say, WW2 in Europe…].
Religious Hatred Turns into a Conflict of Farmers vs. Herdsmen [kinda reminds me of Cain vs. Abel]
This was not an isolated incident. Within just three weeks, 126 Christians were killed in this region and around 7,000 people were displaced. The statistics are staggering: since 2009, over 50,000 Christians have been murdered by Islamic extremists in Nigeria [alone]. John Eibner, international president of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), comes to a devastating verdict: for many Western politicians, black Christian victims do not seem to play a role [note that racism also plays a huge role in the current Anglo-American opposition vs. Russia and China]. An assessment that is confirmed by the scant media coverage and the political reaction to this violence.
The Nigerian government has long portrayed the brutal attacks as a conflict between herdsmen and farmers over scarce resources. This interpretation has been widely adopted by the international media and some NGOs. But for the survivors, this interpretation is a cynical trivialisation. Although conflicts over land and resources play a role, Islamist ideology cannot be denied as a driving force. It explains why the attacks take place specifically during religious masses, why churches are systematically destroyed, and why the violence is accompanied by shouts of ‘Allahu akbar’ [well, what could one add but—the silence of Western gov’ts is telling]
Forced Conversions and Marriages in Pakistan
The violence in northern Nigeria is part of a global pattern. According to the Christian aid organisation Open Doors, around 380 million Christians worldwide are currently being discriminated against or persecuted because of their faith. Christians experience a high level of persecution in 78 countries [no links are given].
The situation is particularly precarious in Pakistan, which ranks eighth in this year’s World Persecution Index [or Weltverfolgungsindex, compiled by the German NGO ‘Open Doors’]. Religious minorities are not treated as equal citizens. Every year, more than a thousand Christian and Hindu girls are abducted, forced to convert, and married [sic] off to Moslem men.
The notorious blasphemy laws, which were tightened under General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, provide for draconian punishments—including the death penalty—for alleged [sic] insults to Islam or the Prophet Mohammed. These laws are regularly used to settle personal conflicts and intimidate religious minorities.
In the Middle East, the historical cradle of Christianity, the Christian presence is dwindling dramatically. In Iraq, the Christian population has shrunk from around 1.5 million to less than 150,000 since 2003 [gee, I wonder what happened in 2003. In Syria, hundreds of thousands of Christians have fled the civil war and Islamist militias [turns out that, much like in Syria, Baath rule appears to have had a better track record in this regard than whatever came afterwards (note that this is no endorsement of Assad or Saddam)]. In Egypt, Coptic Christians regularly experience discrimination and violence.
Dramatic Decline of Christianity
During the Arab Nahda (the renaissance of the 19th century), Christians and secular thinkers once tried to define belonging to the Arab nation through language, art and philosophy—and not through religion. With the rise of Islamist movements in the 20th century, religion and nationalism became increasingly intertwined. This marked the beginning of the dramatic decline of Christianity in the Middle East.
Autocratic regimes and religiously motivated groups are systematically increasing the pressure on Christian communities. In his work The Next Christendom (Oxford UP, 2002), sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins notes a remarkable shift: while Christianity is increasingly losing importance in the secular West, it is experiencing a renaissance in the global South—often under conditions of extreme persecution [anyone with an inkling of understanding of the message of the Gospel understands why, which is also why the sociologist perhaps doesn’t].
This paradoxical development goes largely unnoticed in Western discourse [to say nothing about the journo™; note that there’s also a reason why the Catholic creed is apparently leading that charge—it can, with more or at least more credibility, claim to be both universal and less prone to woke-ification than mainstream protestant denominations (esp. if one considers that the theological dispute between esp. Lutheranism and Catholicism no longer exists)]. While warnings of alleged Islamophobia are popular in left-wing and church circles, the systematic suffering of millions of persecuted Christians is barely mentioned in the public debate. A silence that raises disturbing questions about the selective empathy of Western societies [well, the Last Judgement awaits all of us].
Christian Victims Do Not Fit the Progressive [sic] Narrative
In the ideologically narrow worldview of some progressive Westerners, Christians are categorised as perpetrators because of their historical connection with Western colonialism—regardless of their actual situation [talk about original sin vs. the story of the adulteress and the pharisees]. While violence against Christian minorities is systematically ignored, any criticism of political Islam is reflexively categorised as ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘racist’. At the same time, Christians are not perceived as relevant in contrast to other religious groups. Neither in terms of security nor in terms of the economy or politics [so, we’re basically watching a slow-motion, albeit increasingly pervasive, cancellation of Christianity in the West].
The Mauritanian anti-slavery activist Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir, who was sentenced to death for criticising the tradition of slavery in Islam, aptly described this as the ‘curse of geopolitics’: a system in which humanitarian principles [that are mostly deriving from Christian morality, esp. with respect to Western efforts to curtail slavery] have to take a back seat to strategic, economic, and security interests [note the argumentative and intellectual sleight-of-hand: the preceding paragraph chastised the ‘ideologically narrow worldview of some progressive Westerners’ while now we’re back to arguing about anything but].
The explanation may also lie deeper: perhaps the vital, uncompromising Christianity of the persecuted reminds Western observers of something they no longer want to have anything to do with [a backbone?]. The existence of these courageous fellow believers may have a disturbing effect on the increasingly secular societies of the West [I suppose that the strong correlation of material well-being and expertise™ among the upper middle classes of the West vs. the believes of the downtrodden might also play a role in this…]. The remaining Christians are confronted with an interpretation of their own faith that they find strange, uncomfortable, and ultimately shameful, as it reveals the superficiality of their own religious commitment [note that it should be mentioned that the church leadership in their woke-fied mindset, incl. the absurd and intellectually bankrupt following of the (vaccine) science™ have moved away from the herd: to mention this, though, is tantamount to heresy].
Fashionable Topics Instead of Solidarity
The question arises: where are the churches and Christian theologians in the West, who would be obliged to be a voice for their sisters and brothers in faith? Anyone following the local churches in the media will be disappointed. They remain silent, and the issue of persecuted Christians is hardly addressed in their interfaith endeavours [we note, albeit in passing, that passing judgement on the utter depravity of, say, certain Moslem practices (widespread among the Taqfiri/Wahabi practitioners of Sunni Islam), is politically toxic—which is why I think it would take moral leadership that is beyond reproach: obviously, no Western politico™ or expert™ can deliver on this]. They not only endeavour to celebrate a theatrical harmony to the outside world. They also like to join in when it comes to turning alleged ‘Islamophobia’ into a pop dance.
Yet Moslems of all denominations are nowhere better off than in the West. Not even in comparatively liberal Sunni Morocco can Shiites live their faith freely [do we actually need another real-world argument for the West? Or the Baath-run Syria and Iraq of yesteryear, at least in regards to their secularised, non-sectarian stance? (Note this isn’t a defence of either Assad or Saddam)].
This is confirmed by the Moslem legal and Islamic scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im in his work ‘Islam and the Secular State’. He argues that, paradoxically, Moslems can only enjoy true religious freedom in secular states [that is, unless they stop trying to impose Sharia law™ on everybody else]. It is therefore important that Western academic and religious institutions intensify their commitment to persecuted Christians in many parts of the world—without neglecting their legitimate criticism of all forms of religious discrimination [criticism of other religions’ practices and idiosyncrasies does not equal discrimination, though, and even famous ‘atheists’ like Richard Dawkins have come to realise that Christianity is worth it].
Bottom Lines
What else is there to say?
As Western elites intensify their commitment to spread Islam, and as Western countries become more Islamicised, the risks of sectarian-ethnic violence increases.
The Christian faith, esp. the Catholic Church—see Rodney Stark’s highly relevant Bearing False Witness (Templeton Press, 2016)—have been on the receiving hand of long-run, concerted attacks.
If we were to take the NZZ’s Kacem El Ghazzali’s argument seriously, the problem is that Western govt’s are picking winners and losers, as opposed to enforcing (guaranteeing) equality under the law.
In the final analysis, the main issue, at least to me, seems that the West lacks the courage of its own convictions, and that criticism very much includes the Christian congregations.
No amount of civil religion (‘ethics’ as a school subject) can replace a strong moral foundation. It was, after all, Christianity that not once, but twice, ended slavery (once in Late Antiquity and the second time around 1800). This is both a fact as well as something Europeans and Westerners can be justifiably proud of (Rodney Stark’s book tells these stories in some detail).
Have horrible atrocities been committed in the name of religion?
Of course, and no amount of sugarcoating is going to change this; yet, what I find very much lacking in the above piece is—the message of the Gospel: humility, acceptance of mankind’s flawed nature, and something that, to me at least, is the enduring celebration of His creation: free will.
Recognition thereof also, and inevitably so, leads to the realisation that we humans aren’t God. It sounds simple, if not outright simplistic, but in that fact lies an eternal truth: we’re all responsible for our actions, and at some point, we’ll be called before our Maker to ‘splain ourselves.
Matthew 7:12 holds a simple, if not eternal, truth:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I’d rather live and die by that maxim than anything else.
Western elites aren’t Christian. If they were they wouldn’t go along with Gaza criminality. Most of them aren’t religious but when they are, they are more likely Luciferian than followers of Christ.
Just a small marginalized question From Greek :
Is "western elite" christian... and moreover have they "cristian heritage"
PS. As "Elites" I am refering to decision making top-level, and not to the second or third level "elite-by-own -claim" puppets.
My best regards, Epimetheus