Christians Overwhelming Persecuted for their Faith according to a British Gov’t Report
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Roughly 80 percent of people who suffer persecution for their faith are Christian according to a recently released report issued by the British government.
The Rt. Rev. Philip Mountstephen, Bishop of Truro, released his interim report on global Christian persecution at the end of April.
“Aggressive nationalism” and “ultra-nationalism” were cited as major driving factors of Christian persecution in Asia, such as in India, Burma, and China, where national identity and religious belief are seen as inseparable.
“In the ‘national sphere’, religious extremists/nationalists have carefully crafted an influential political narrative that states that Christianity is an alien or foreign religion,” the report states.
Among the most jarring statistics found in the report concerning the persecution of Christians was an estimate by the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) from 2009, which states that 80% of the people worldwide who suffer persecution for their faith are Christian.
A footnote to the report elaborates that although the statistic has recently been removed from the ISHR website, members of the NGO have maintained the figure’s accuracy in private conversations with Mountstephen and have even said that it is a conservative estimate.
Despite the magnitude of the Bishop’s findings, the report concludes with an admission that the panel of U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office members and NGO consultants who aided with the review regrettably “have not [yet even] analyzed the situation in Europe and Eurasia,” which could unearth even more evidence of Christian persecution.
The report, which was commissioned by U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in 2018, is due to be completed in June and will include region-by-region analysis and case studies on the plight of believers globally.