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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35503 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. Their plight is almost entirely ignored by corporate media.

This is certainly true if you count by volume. It seems likely to me that Jews may be more persecuted as a percentage of all Jews, because there are very few Jews and billions of Christians. According to the non-profits who care about this sort of thing, 380 million Christians live in countries that have high levels of persecution and discrimination towards Christians.

Listing Mexico and Colombia as places where Christians are persecuted seems like they're using a tendentious definition of 'persecution'.

If you click on the individual country they explain their reasoning. Here was the reasoning for listing Mexico:

Although the majority of Mexico's population is Christian, many believers live in danger of persecution, particularly from criminal gangs, drug cartels and indigenous groups. In many parts of the country, the presence of criminal groups is growing. Christians who bravely speak out against their activities, or who are involved in community work or evangelism (especially with youth, drug addicts and migrants) are deemed a threat. That makes them a target. In some cases, Christian children or the children of church leaders are singled out.

In some Indigenous communities, those who decide to leave ancestral and traditional beliefs to follow Jesus face ostracism, fines, incarceration and forced displacement. Given that indigenous leaders are those who administer justice in such areas, believers have no one to turn to to investigate wrongdoing and protect their religious freedom. These families can also face harassment from the community, such as property damage, restriction of access to schools for their children, and threats.

I did click through. I was underwhelmed. 'Persecution' implies some sort of specific targeting on account of religion. Christian gangsters going after Christian community leaders for reasons orthogonal to religious identity sounds more like Mexico has a crime problem than a religious persecution problem. Mexico is an overwhelmingly Christian society with relatively high rates of religious involvement in communities

I confess to being skeptical of the claims about indigenous communities. Most of these indigenous communities are already Christian (albeit a form of Christianity that would look pretty weird to American Protestants), and looking at their own report it looks mostly like sectarian friction in rural communities.

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The point of all this being that I think they are being sufficiently smudgy with their representation of facts in areas I have some knowledge of to make me question their reliability elsewhere.

Sectarian persecution is, under a liberal epistemology, certainly religious persecution.

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