There are parts of the world today where to be a Christian is to put your life in danger. From continent to continent, Christians are facing discrimination, ostracism, torture, even murder, simply for the faith they follow. The pages of this newspaper regularly chart the plight of the persecuted, from the scores of worshippers killed recently by bombers at All Saints Church in Pakistan to the Coptic congregation sprayed with bullets by gunmen in Egypt.
Christian populations are plummeting and the religion is being driven out of some of its historic heartlands. There is even talk of Christianity becoming extinct in places where it has existed for generations – where the faith was born. In Iraq, the Christian community has fallen from 1.2 million in 1990 to 200,000 today. In Syria, the horrific bloodshed has masked the haemorrhaging of its Christian population.
Perpetrators range from states to terrorists to people's neighbours. And victimhood is not exclusive to Christians; Hazara Shias in Pakistan, Baha'is in Iran, Rohingya Muslims in Burma – all have long been singled out and hounded out because of the faith they follow.
While religious persecution may not be a new concept, today the fault lines between faiths and within faiths are ever more volatile. Collective punishment is becoming more common, with people being attacked for the alleged crimes, connections or connotations of their coreligionists, often in response to events taking place thousands of miles away.
This has become a global crisis, and in Washington D.C. today I will be making the case for an international response. Speaking at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations, I want to call for cross-faith, cross-continent unity on this issue – for a response which isn't itself sectarian. Because a bomb going off in a Pakistani church shouldn't just reverberate through Christian communities; it should stir the world. » | Baroness Warsi *, Minister for Faith | Thursday, November 14, 2013
* Baroness Warsi is Senior Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office & the UK’s first Minister for Faith. Follow her on twitter @sayeedawarsi
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