Guy Crouchback: Persecution’s doublethink

Ruth Gledhill is a “religion correspondent” for the London Times, the paper which in Britain has been among the pack-leaders in the attack on the Pope. A few days ago she wrote, in part:
“In Britain Christians cry: ‘We are being persecuted.’ But the lions don’t exist beyond their imaginations or the arena beyond their story books. Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and his fellow victims are giving all Christians a bad name. It is time for liberals to stand up and say: ‘We will not be slain by this malevolent spirit, not even when the persecutors are our fellow Christians …’
“Christianity has always been big on victimhood and victims have to find a persecutor. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been known to grumble about his treatment by we beasties of the media – but even he thinks that the craze for victimhood has gone too far. He used his Easter Day sermon to focus on the truly persecuted in countries such as Nigeria, not nurses complaining about being banned from wearing crucifixes.
“It’s not just so-called discrimination in the workplace. Conservative evangelicals and Catholics joined forces to promote Westminster 2010, a conscience manifesto launched on Easter Day to promote “Christian” values on poverty, abortion, marriage, euthanasia.
Lord Carey was among the signatories.
Most recently he urged senior judges to stand down from Court of Appeal hearings involving religious discrimination if their previous rulings were “hostile” to Christianity.
“Many leading judges are religious; many are not. But they are all fiercely independent and impartial. They are trained to set aside any personal prejudice. To suggest that they are anti-Christian is not only insulting but fails to understand the oath they swear by Almighty God, to ‘do right by all manner of people, after the law and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will’.” And so on.
The document is an interesting illustration of the Stockholm syndrome, by which victims crave the approval of their persecutors and attempt to identify with their cause.
We saw it on a massive scale in Nazi-dominated Europe when millions of Jews and others shuffled off to the gas-chambers with astonishingly little resistance.
This did not just happen in Germany – 75,000 went from France, for example. Weirdly, in the manner of George Orwell’s “doublethink” those who protest against persecution are denounced as persecutors – how many secret police, armoured divisions and arenas full of lions does Ms Gledhill think Lord Carey controls?
But note that she is not attacking violent resistance, merely the act of bearing witness in a completely peaceful manner- as Christians are enjoined to do.
Note too how cleverly the phrase “nurses complaining about being banned from wearing crucifixes” is slanted to make such complaints appear petty and contemptible.
Apparently it is also contemptible for Christians to protest against such manifest evils as euthanasia. Sacking someone for wearing a crucifix is not gassing them, but the principle here is in the same direction.
To pretend Christianity is not at present being singled out for persecution in Britain and a number of other European countries (as well as now in at least one case in Australia) is to invite more of the same.
Not only have Christians been sacked for wearing crucifixes to work (not merely having the crucifixes banned as Ms Gledhill states), or offering to pray for patients or pupils but, along with a thousand other pinpricks, Muslim “Community police” have prevented Christian evangelists with threats of beating from entering certain areas of English cities.