By Dr. Greg Cochran, ICC Fellow
Not long ago, I picked up some family members from the airport and drove home via several freeway interchanges — navigating freeways which, as always, were fairly crowded. Though crowded, the freeways seemed unusually friendly for lane changes. Scanning the side mirrors and the rearview mirror, I wove a path through taillights, blinkers, and lane markers to our home.
A curious recognition startled me as my car entered a more lighted area closer to my home. The passenger side mirror had been knocked off its normal position and was pushed away from the door quite a bit, so much so that it was actually useless for spotting cars in the lane to my right. This revelation was unnerving. I had changed multiple lanes repeatedly over the prior 20 minutes. I drove most of the trip home with a dangerous blind spot. Indeed, I had unwittingly placed my family and other drivers at risk, blindly darting in and out of the lane to my right. The incident caused me to realize that I had been driving with confidence while being dangerously ignorant.
Thinking about the possibility of living and working with blind spots has caused me to realize how possible it is to act in confident ignorance. In fact, this dynamic applies to Western media when it comes to the matter of reporting Christian persecution. Western media — as a general rule — report the news confidently while remaining largely ignorant of the scope of the Christian persecution problem. Thankfully, organizations such as ICC fill in the gap and work to raise awareness. But the blind spot persists — so much so that even unbelievers have taken issue with the lack of reporting.
French philosopher Regis Debray — a leftist rebel who once fought alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia — has sounded the alarm against Western media on account of the deafening silence regarding Christian persecution. As Debray says, “Anti-Christian persecution falls squarely into the political blind spot of the West.” Debray cries out not on account of a particular concern for Christ and the church; rather, his sounding the alarm intends to call for awakening others to the dehumanizing dangers of allowing injustice against marginalized people. Much like my adventure as a novice airport shuttle driver, Debray realizes the danger of being confident with a blind spot of ignorance.
Advocates for persecuted Christians understand the serious global implications of Christian persecution. In places like Nigeria, Christian persecution causes economic devastation as farmers lose their crops, their farms, and, far too often, even their lives. Beyond the economic destruction, Christian persecution in these countries wreaks further havoc on their demographic profile and local municipal stability as millions of Christians are internally displaced. According to the UNHCR, more than 3.7 million people are currently refugees in the Sahel region of Africa, creating human suffering that defies economic calculation.
While the numbers are difficult to isolate precisely, no serious scholars doubt that Christians represent the single most persecuted group on the planet. Estimates vary, but generally, about 14% of Christians in the world currently suffer high levels of persecution. On the continent of Africa, the situation is worse, with about 20% of the Christian population suffering intensely. Across Asian countries, the problem is worse still, with about 29% of Christians in Asia suffering intense persecution.
When these numbers are added together, hundreds of millions of people across the planet suffer intensely for little reason other than their beliefs. Beyond the existential threat to life and well-being for these millions of families, the broader threat of not seeing these sufferers, not hearing their cries, not amplifying their voices allows a dehumanizing cancer to grow unabated. Persecution dehumanizes the persecuted and their persecutors, as the latter pretend to sit in judgment (like God) over human thoughts and intentions. That is a seat too high for their all-too-human anatomy.
One may excuse the Associated Press, Reuters, or The New York Times for having a kind of confident bias that begets a blind spot of ignorance for the persecuted church, but what about Christian media? How much attention is paid to President-Elect Donald Trump in contrast with the attention given to how the Fulani target Christian villages and worship services in Plateau state? And Fulani violence in Nigeria is covered much more readily than the suffering of Christians in Somalia or Eritrea.
What does all this negligence of reporting signify? At its most basic, the first lesson must be learned at home, as it were, meaning that Christians should be less concerned with media bias (ignorance) and more concerned with our global Christian family suffering for Christ. Churches and organizations representing Christians must elevate their concern for the church, raising awareness of the scope of the problem and prioritizing the production of political and practical solutions. Perhaps Christian media could produce articles on Trump about Nigeria being returned to the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list.
In short, Christians should fulfill Scriptures such as Galatians 6:9-10, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. So then, as we have the opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” Or, to stay consistent with the blind spot metaphor, Christians should “adjust the mirrors of our faith to eliminate whatever blind spots we have inherited from our culture concerning Christian persecution.”
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