Christians are the most persecuted in the world. But they have no friends (and the West delights in humanitarianism)
“Christianity is the greatest faith in a world of thriving religions,” writes John O’Sullivan. “Sometimes it's hard to hear, since it is the mental image that grips most Westerners, including many Christians, it is a dying faith in a disenchanted secular universe in which God is not so much dead as retired. The reality is very different. In the 2015 the four largest religions (conventional) of the world were Christianity in descending order (31,2% of the world population), l’Islam (24,1%), Hinduism (16%) and Buddhism (7%). Looking ahead to population projections for the 2060, this image changes only slightly but significantly. Islam surpasses Christianity as the world's largest religion. More worrying than the overall numbers is the distribution of Christianity's decline. Almost all of the growth in Christian numbers is occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. And the decline occurs in the traditional heartlands of Christianity, namely Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and the Americas. In Europe the decline is absolute and relative. European Christians are declining as a percentage of all Europeans in part because they have a lower birth rate than others, partly because many simply abandon their religion. Between the 2015 and the 2020 the number of Christians in Europe will decrease by 8,2 millions. In addition to demographics, Christians around the world face two additional and growing dangers: religious persecution and the lack of powerful friends. They are not, Obviously, the only believers who face persecution. The murder of Jews in France; the attempted genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria; the repression of the Zoroastrians (among others) in Iran; the recent mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand; These and other examples show that religious persecution is rampant, widespread and largely unashamed throughout the world. However, Christians in particular are attacked from three directions. First of all, in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, Nord Africa, Iran, Pakistan and Türkiye, the Christians (together with the Jews) they are victims of a growing wave of Islamist and jihadist fervor. Read More