Pilgrim Soldier

A few months back I wrote an article about the perceived persecution of Christian’s in the west, particularly off the back of a series of incidents that were being put down to an anti-Christian bias in the UK. It was originally published at theRubicon and you can click here for the original article.

What prompted this post? Well the reason is simply that I went to the Army’s UK website this afternoon only to find a poll which posed the question:

Is there ‘widespread Christianophobia’ in the UK?

At the time of writing it seems that out of the 91 respondents so far 58% think there is! However, I’m convinced that this perceived ‘persecution’ of Christians is once more a clever ploy to detract us from the real radical nature of our faith. It is far easier for us to subscribe the loss of the traditional privilege that the Church has enjoyed in the UK and Europe and look upon it that as persecution. It means that the fault is everyone else’s and not the Church’s!

There is also an element in which it is almost totally over the top to point to situations like that of a teenager being unable to wear a ring denoting her commitment to sexual chastity or the policy of an airline to stop crosses being worn as jewellery and call them persecution. This is especially true when compared to the sort of persecution suffered by early Christians and far too high a number of Christians in some countries today.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that the situation in Post-Christendom Europe is harder for Christianity than it has been at any point in the last maybe 1,500 years. I also believe that it is entirely possible that real persecution has begun to rear its head. I’m just not sure that Christianophobia exists in the West in any sort of widespread way, although it does in other areas of the world that have been the victims of aggression perpetuated in the name of God by people calling themselves Christians and who are supported by too many churches. One thing I do suspect though is that Churchophobia might exist in abundance in the West, but this is not the same thing.

Is there a fear or hatred of the Church? I think there might be, but seeing as it has for too long been an instrument of the state used for control and expansion, rather than a counter-cultural force seeking to bring in the Kingdom of Heaven, this is hardly surprising. Given the tacit approval of abusing priests and even officers (tacit in the fact that rather than defrocking or sacking authorities chose to move them and keep things quiet) and its inability at times to stand up for the right even when totalitarian regimes were destroying whole people groups, it is at least partly understandable that the church is seen at best as hypocritical and at worst as downright evil by some.

I’ve not even touched on the fact that the church seems to grow in accordance to the persecution it faces, so this may suggest that persecution is actually an important principle in church growth that few church growth specialists seem to factor into their material!

In conclusion it is clearly true that our influence is declining but is this all bad? My original article posed a number of questions and they bare repeating here.

So what are we to do? Are we to continue to lament the loss of the historic privilege and influence that the Church has enjoyed? Or are we to embrace the radical nature of the Christian way and forge ahead in the new found freedom to show Jesus’ culturally subversive message to a fallen world? If we choose the latter option I suspect that we will be more attractive to a world full of people searching for something deeper and more real than the world offers, even when we speak what at face value many would deem to be unpalatable by the world’s standards.