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. 
