These Christians Don’t Understand Why We Care About 50 Dead Muslims
In the last two days, I’ve seen two outspoken Christians in my Facebook feed post about Fulani herdsmen killing groups of Christians in Nigeria. This is not an issue I know much about. Indeed, it is not an issue those who posted about it know much about, it would seem. It’s undoubtedly a topic worthy of our attention as a society, because the death of any group of people for their religious beliefs is something we should all abhor (even those of us who have no religion and no god).
And yet, the timing of these posts in my feed are very telling. In the days after a white supremacist attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand left 50 dead, there has been a concerted and not remotely subtle effort to minimize this story. It’s argued that these attacks don’t deserve the news coverage because Christians are also often killed in great numbers too. The second part of that assertion is true; the first is grotesquely wrong, and frankly evil.
Christian persecution complex
When I was a Christian youth, essentially all of the religious teaching in my life was about how I was among Jesus’ persecuted followers. I had to be prepared to defend my faith because I would undoubtedly face attacks from all directions. In reality, the only “persecution” I ever faced was a few jokes in my direction and some (deserved) questioning of my beliefs. I was as outspoken (and obnoxious) a Christian as could possibly exist, and no one ever made my life harder for it.
This idea of the persecuted Christian in America is a myth, a lie children are taught to make them scared to enter the secular world, and a lie politicians tell to garner votes. No group of religious people have greater freedom anywhere on Earth than Christians in America have.
There are certainly persecuted Christians in the world, that isn’t in question. There are persecuted members of every other faith, as well. Religion does one thing better than anything else, and that is cement the notion of otherness in its followers. Outsiders are the enemy, they must be dealt with.
A dearth of sympathy
The Christians who are dying at the hands of the Fulani herdsmen deserve our sympathy, as do the Rohingya Muslims who are dying in Myanmar, and the many innocents (mostly Muslim) dying in Syria. There are groups of Christians killing Muslims, Muslims killing Christians, Buddhists killing Muslims, and many other horrors done in the name of religion (including sectarian violence within religions). Ideally, we would all care about all of these atrocities and work to stop them, but we won’t, and we can’t. Economically, politically, rationally, physically, spiritually, there is simply no way any person could possibly learn and care equally about all the terrible acts of religious persecution in the world.
I am not bothered by the Christians in my feed posting about Fulani herdsmen killing Christians. What I have a problem with is the timing. These same Christians have never posted about these atrocities before. It’s quite possible they only learned about them because, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, political operatives are trying to steal attention away from innocent Muslims and focus on “bad” Muslims. Those who posted in my feed might not even realize they are feeding into that narrative (I’m being extremely generous). They may genuinely have just seen an article and felt it needed to be seen.
If that is true, it’s still horrific. In the wake of 50 innocent Muslims being slaughtered, these Christians felt they needed to steal attention from that event to focus on a problem of regional violence that they don’t even really understand, simply because they don’t want to miss an opportunity to say, “Don’t cry for Muslims, Christians have it worse.” That’s gross in and of itself. If, on the other hand, their real motives were, as so many racist members of the political Right want, to suggest that those 50 Muslims deserved to die because other Muslims have killed Christians, that is unconscionable and evil.
Many Christians often ask why the Fulani (or fill-in-the-blank) atrocities don’t get more coverage, with the suggestion (sometimes implicit, often explicit) that Muslims receive more sympathetic coverage from the media than Christians (beyond laughable). Maybe the answer is simple: Even most American Christians don’t care about the massacre of Christians around the world unless they can use those deaths for a political point.
There are absolutely American Christians who are invested in protecting persecuted Christians, as well as persecuted Muslims, and persecuted people of all faiths. But posting an article on Facebook as counterprogramming to sympathetic coverage of Muslims is not how you support a persecuted group, and it’s certainly not how a follower of Christ should behave.
The death of 50 Muslims is not outweighed by the death of any number of Christians or any group. To believe so is to support the very same white supremacist ideology that led to those 50 deaths. If American Christians want to generate a #MeToo movement for Christian persecution, first they need to show that they have the capacity to care about the persecution of others.
