Here’s a thought for Christmas, why is it easier to persecute Christians (and men)?

Did you know that Christians are the most persecuted religious group on the planet? It’s hard to get your head round that fact---just like its hard to accept the fact that 83% of victims of violent death worldwide are men and boys.

And as it’s Christmas, it’s worth considering why 75% of religious persecution in the world is against Christians; to ask if our Western attitudes towards Christ have anything to do with this and to contemplate whether gender has a role in this?

According to Simon Hill, a left-wing Christian form the Christian think tank Ekklesia, while the UK is increasingly secular, our state is not. He told the BBC:

“The monarch promises to uphold Christianity. The Church of England's leaders can vote on legislation in Parliament. Religious schools are allowed to discriminate in selection and recruitment. In 2010, the House of Lords narrowly passed an amendment to the Equality Act exempting employees of religious organisations from some aspects of homophobic discrimination. The amendment was passed so narrowly that, without the bishops, the vote would have gone the other way.”

According to the last census, the proportion of Brits self-defining as Christian fell from 72% in 2001 to 59% in 2011.

I am one of the 25% of the public who ticked the “no religion” box. I was brought up in the Church of England (CofE), baptized, confirmed, sang in the church choir, attended a church school and was sad to see the church that held much of my family’s 20^th Century history pulled down and replaced with houses in the 21^st Century.

The average attendance of the 16,000 CofE churches that remain is 58 people per week, which means that around one million people attend a CofE church service in the UK every week.

Apparently 58% of us (and rising) never go to church. I’m a slightly odd non-believer as I go to church most months, but mostly when no-one else is there. I regularly visit churches when I’m walking in the Sussex countryside and often quietly sit and contemplate the spiritual side of the human existence. I also attend Christmas services, I went to four at different churches this year, mainly because I like a good old festive sing song-a-long, but also because I’m interested in what the world’s leading spiritual teachers, past and present (including Jesus), have to say.

I am mostly disappointed by the lack of real connection to Jesus’s spiritual teachings that the CoE offers, I rarely leave church feeling that what was said has contributed to my spiritual growth. I’ve never heard a speaker come anywhere near the quality of the Bishop of London, who said in his Royal Wedding sermon:

“A spiritual life grows as love finds its centre beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed.”

It seems to me that we have a Church of England that is generally failing in its role of nurturing the nation’s spiritual wellbeing, while being afforded special privileges at the nation’s top table---privileges that no other religions in the UK are afforded.

Those privileges include allowing 26 male Lords Spiritual to sit in the House of Lords and pass or oppose legislation.

There are no “Ladies Spiritual” because the seats only go to Bishops and women still can’t be Bishops, although this may change soon thanks to campaigners like Canon Rosie Harper who has been telling her colleagues to “stop being weird and vote yes” for women bishops.

The Lords Spiritual are one of the final remnants of legal Patriarchy in the UK. Royal succession laws were changed in 2013 to stop the monarchy privileging sons over daughters but most hereditary peerages still pass down the male line and only 2 of the 92 hereditary peers who sit alongside the Lords Spiritual and help run our country are women.

In addition to discriminating against women, the Church of England also places restrictions on gay clergy, ruling in 2011 that it would officially allow gay men to become bishops, but only if they were celibate.

So we have a situation in the UK where mostly white, straight, male Church of England Christians are still given special privilege at the top of society and a time when men continue to dominate positions of power in the UK.

Only 23% of MPs are women, for example, though there are no laws preventing women being equally represented, quite the opposite in fact---since 2002 political parties have been allowed by law to draw up all-women shortlists of candidates for elections (a law introduced and embraced by Labour).

The fact that more men are in power is often presented as one of the main arguments against addressing the problems that men and boys face---“men as a group run the world” they say, ignoring the fact that just like women, 99% of men do not run the world.

And it is this thinking, this perception that certain groups like “men” have all the power, that creates what has been called a “hierarchy of victimhood” through which we assign greater validity to certain “victims” based on individual characteristics such as gender, race, sexuality and religion. This “hierarchy of victimhood” is partnered in our thinking to a “hierarchy of oppressors” through which the world is divided into “the oppressors” and “the oppressed”; “the haves” and “the have nots”; those who “are problems” an those who “have problems”.

And so we become collectively more intolerant of the harm that happens to people at the top of the “hierarchy of victimhood” who include women, gay people, non-white people, disabled people, poor people and in the West, non-Christians.

And yet 75% of religious persecution in the world is said to be against Christians. According to Rupert Shortt, Religion Editor of The Times Literary Supplement, some 200 million Christians (10 per cent of the global total) are socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.

In the UK, a poll of practicing Christians, found that 67% say that they “sometimes or often feel a member of a persecuted minority because of the constraints on religious expression in this country”.

A week before Christmas, Prince Charles, our future head of state and church who is committed to building bridges between Christianity and Islam, spoke out against the persecution of Christians saying:

“We cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are, increasingly, being deliberately attacked by fundamentalist Islamist militants.”

Others have followed suit. The shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, spoke up against the "political correctness, or some sense of embarrassment at 'doing God'" that makes this a taboo subject. The Guardian leader said: “this reluctance to speak out is partly generated by a peculiar sense that there is some hierarchy of victimhood, with Christians less deserving of concern.”

And so too it is with men and boys. We are collectively unwilling to speak out on behalf of men and boys. The Guardian leader could equally have said: “this reluctance to speak out is partly generated by a peculiar sense that there is some hierarchy of victimhood, with men and boys less deserving of concern.”

If we want to understand how we relate to ourselves as men; how we all relate to men and boys in general and how we relate to other people belonging to other “groups: of society, then it’s worth considering where we place people in our own personal hierarchy of empathy for our fellow men and women.

It is after all, a season of Good Will to everyone and that includes Christians and that includes men and boys. 

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Photo: Sam Sepe