Christophobia on The Rise

Contemporary paranoia and persecution of Christians

Photo by Federico Tasin on Unsplash

Bullied by a Berkeley professor

When I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, I sat in a humanities class listening to a professor drone on about why Christianity had been such a destructive force in history.

That wasn’t unusual. Berkeley was Berkeley.

What I remember, though, was the moment the lecture shifted from criticism to mockery.

He read the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” and used them to illustrate what he considered one of Christianity’s failures. Why, he asked, would anyone embrace a religion that teaches people they are “wretches”?

Christianity, he argued, survives by convincing ordinary people that they are broken and worthless so that the Church can control and manipulate them.

The class then laughed.

I remember one thing clearly. Nobody spoke up. Not a single Christian in the room defended the hymn or offered an alternative interpretation. Nor did any of these supposed liberals stand up for a group that was being targeting by a person in power.

Nobody pointed out that “Amazing Grace” was written by a former slave trader reflecting on his own moral guilt. Nobody suggested that humility and self-knowledge are not the same thing as self-hatred.

The laughter accomplished what no argument could have accomplished on its own. It created a chilling effect. Far worse than mistaken, Christianity was ridiculous. Defending it would come at a social cost and potential ramifications from the notoriously subjective grading of humanities classes.

That memory returned to me recently as I watch a growing pattern across much of the Western world. Christians are frequently told that they remain culturally dominant and socially secure, but we increasingly experience public suspicion, professional marginalization, and social exclusion.

You can’t have it both ways. Are we this dominant majority that should be deplatformed, or an eccentric minority whose voice doesn’t belong in the public sphere?

Christophobia is on the rise.

Western societies are becoming increasingly comfortable treating traditional Christian beliefs not simply as wrong, but as morally suspect and potentially dangerous.

Spain

Consider Spain. In 2022, the Spanish priest Father Custodio Ballester faced legal proceedings after comments critical of Islam and immigration policies drew accusations of hate speech. When expressing views about religion can lead to years of legal scrutiny, the process itself becomes part of the punishment. He was ultimately acquitted, but not before the damage was done.

The UK

The United Kingdom is producing even more striking examples. In 2022, Army veteran and Christian activist Adam Smith-Connor was prosecuted for silently praying near an abortion clinic in Bournemouth after violating a local buffer-zone order. He was not protesting, carrying signs, or speaking to anyone. He was standing silently. Regardless of where one stands on abortion, the image of the state interrogating a citizen about the content of his prayers struck many of us as something that belonged to another century.

This year, Pastor Steve Maile was arrested for criticizing Islam. Note the details. He reported, “Then the copper that threw me into the car, my head was banged against the thing, and she said this with great cynicism and delight and mocking, ‘In the name of Jesus, get in the car!’” In British law, a person can be found guilty of a Section 5 offense for, among other things, using words that “cause distress.” The absurd subjectivity makes the law an ideological cudgel. Maile awaits trial.

Canada

Canada has seen similar tensions emerge. In 2021, Pastor Artur Pawlowski of Calgary became internationally known after confrontations with authorities over public health restrictions on worship services. Many Canadians supported the restrictions and viewed his actions as political theater. Others saw the hypocrisy of liquor stores remaining open while churches faced severe limitations and pastors were arrested for holding services. The debate was not merely about public health policy, but about whether religious worship occupied an essential place in public life or a discretionary one.

Canada has just changed a hate crime law to remove religious exemptions, potentially making religious people in violation for expressing their religious viewpoints. They’re following European countries like Finland, where a member of Parliament was found guilty for expressing her religious views about human sexuality.

The USA

The United States also is not immune. In 2018, the Supreme Court heard the case of Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, who declined to create a custom wedding cake for a same-sex wedding because of his religious convictions. Whatever one thinks of Phillips’s decision, the case revealed a growing cultural assumption that traditional Christian moral views are uniquely illegitimate in the public square. Increasingly, the expectation is not merely that Christians obey the law but that they surrender moral disagreement itself. The Supreme Court overthrew the Colorado courts with both liberal and conservative-appointed justices joining the majority opinion.

The upshot of Christophobia

None of these examples compare to the suffering of Christians in Nigeria, Pakistan, or parts of the Middle East, where believers are imprisoned, attacked, and killed for their faith. But keep in mind, countries that systematically oppress Christians take cues from a Western world that mistreats Christians.

Societies rarely move directly from tolerance to imprisonment. More often the progression is slower and subtler. First comes ridicule, then social penalties, then professional consequences, then legal consequences. Long before laws change, people learn which opinions are safe to express and which are better left unsaid.

I’m thinking it’s time for so-called liberals to go back and read (I’m going to guess it’s for the first time for most of them) John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration.

For most of Western history, Christianity occupied the cultural center. Today it increasingly occupies the position of an eccentric and unwelcome relative at the family dinner table, tolerated so long as it remains quiet, private, and nonjudgmental.

The difficulty, of course, is that Christianity has never been any of those things.

Christianity makes claims about truth, morality, justice, power, sexuality, economics, and human flourishing, and in no way leaves room for these things to be merely private and personal. It insists that there is a reality beyond politics and beyond the state. Every age finds such claims inconvenient eventually because every age has its own sacred cows and untouchable assumptions.

What concerns me is not that Christianity is losing cultural privilege. Privilege comes and goes. The Church survived Nero, the French Revolution, and Soviet communism, and it has spread aggressively in communist China. It will survive social media.

What concerns me is that liberal societies seem increasingly willing to answer unpopular ideas not with argument and reason but with intimidation and a cancel culture. You know, those things that used to be considered the opposite of liberal.

I learned that lesson in a Berkeley classroom years ago while a room laughed at “Amazing Grace.” The laughter itself didn’t matter. The silence that followed did.