In the liturgical calendar, Christmas Day is immediately followed by the feast of St. Stephen, the very first martyr of the church. Two days after that is the feast of the Holy Innocents, honoring those children under the age of 2 who were murdered by the brutal tyrant Herod. As many wiser than I have observed, our celebration of the birth of the Christ Child is marred by man’s sinful desire to stamp him out, as well as those associated with him.
Yet we need not look to historical events 2,000 years in the past to appreciate that following Christ has consequences. This past month, more than 1,000 Christians in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh were subject to violence at the hands of Hindu mobs. Some were reportedly forcibly converted to Hinduism. In the U.S., we may have spent Christmas peacefully and joyfully, but Christians continue to face persecution around the world.
21. “The persecution of Christians in India is intensifying as Hindu extremists aim to cleanse the country of their presence and influence,” reports Open Doors. “The driving force behind this is Hindutva, an ideology that disregards Indian Christians and other religious minorities as true Indians because they have allegiances that lie outside India, and asserts the country should be purified of their presence.” About 2.5 percent of India’s population are Christians.
Who’s Reporting on This?
This latest round of anti-Christian mob violence has elicited quite a bit of media coverage within India, much to the credit of the country’s non-Christian press. Yet the story has received just about no coverage in Western media, with the exception of one Catholic website, The Pillar. Consider that: Mob violence against a religious minority affecting more than a thousand people in a country with a history of violence against religious minorities is not receiving any attention from liberal corporate media.
For example, CNN’s recent reporting on India has been on Covid and climate change. The New York Times’ most recent reporting on India has been on food delivery apps. The Washington Post has been reporting on a high-profile murder case. In other words, to our legacy media, the wide-scale persecution of Christians isn’t even newsworthy.
As I reported at the beginning of last year for The Federalist, Christians around the world suffer deadly persecution for their faith. Almost 6,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2021, an increase of almost 25 percent from 2020. International aid organizations are projecting increased persecution of Christians in various hotspots such as Nigeria, India, and China for 2023. The total number of Christians killed in 2022 has not yet been released.
As I discuss in my book “The Persecuted,” the persecution of Christians is truly a global phenomenon, occurring even in “tolerant” democratic countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey. Moreover, as Western media become ever more antagonistic toward Christianity, we can expect less-and-less reporting of attacks on Christians, both because of their ignorance of such things and because of their unwillingness to report on stories that don’t reinforce the sexual and racial narratives that are foremost on their ideological agenda.
This story was originally published in thefederalist.com . Read the full story here