AS Covid-19 compelled us to confront our mortality, the ongoing human rights abuses in other places seemed more distant and less important. Perhaps that’s why a remarkable speech just prior to the pandemic by Jeremy Hunt passed relatively unremarked.

The then UK Foreign Secretary was responding to a report by Anglican Bishop Philip Mountstephen of Truro urging Foreign and Commonwealth office support for persecuted Christians. Mr Hunt’s observations, had they been about Islam or Judaism, or about the rights of sexual minorities would have been greeted with shock and commitments to address the matter urgently.

He said: “The number of countries where Christians suffer because of their faith rose from 128 in 2015 to 144 a year later. In the Middle East, the very survival of Christianity as a living religion is in doubt. A century ago, 20% of the region’s people were Christians; today the figure is below 5%.”

In the report itself, Bishop Mountstephen highlighted what he called the “decimation” of some of “Christianity’s oldest and most enduring communities. He wrote: “If one minority is on the receiving end of 80% of religiously motivated discrimination, it is simply not just that they should receive so little attention.”

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The Foreign Secretary’s comments came not long after Islamist terrorists marked the worldwide celebration of Easter with a murderous attack on Christian worshippers in Sri Lanka which killed more than 250 people: the third successive year in which Christianity’s greatest occasion was marked by such bloodshed somewhere on the planet.

Last Sunday, as the world continued tentatively to emerge from the pandemic another atrocity was visited upon Christians, this time in Nigeria. It was the latest in a sequence of attacks where death-squads attached to militias loosely-aligned with Muslim fundamentalism or Boko Haram routinely target worshippers as they attend Mass. This one, at St Francis Catholic Church in the town of Oho, 200 miles north of Lagos, was especially barbaric.

By the middle of this week the death toll, initially thought to have been 50 had risen to 82 and is likely to rise beyond 100. Gunmen posing as worshippers detonated explosives inside the church and as people began to flee outside they were cut down by waiting shooters using high-velocity weapons which inflicted appalling wounds on entire families.

Local outrage over this slaughter of Christian innocents was intensified by the conduct of the Nigerian Government leadership in the aftermath. Pictures showed Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari and other senior government figures dining at a state banquet hours after the attack. The BBC reported: “In one of the pictures, the politicians dressed in colourful robes are smiling. A convention to elect the party's presidential candidate for next year's general elections is underway in Abuja.”

Despite its brutality and the large death toll, the attack – like Jeremy Hunt’s 2019 speech – seemed to escape more than a passing mention in most of the UK’s newsrooms, with a few honourable exceptions. Within three days, its aftermath and rising death toll have already been consigned to a footnote. The Nigerian government, like other British Commonwealth and UN countries which host such attacks, has thus escaped much scrutiny over its response to anti-Christian pogroms and so it will continue to be open-house on believers.

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Open Doors, the organisation which monitors the global persecution of Christians, says that 360 million believers face discrimination and persecution for their faith. They report: “A staggering 260m Christians in the top 50 countries on the World Watch List face high or extreme levels of persecution for their faith: in the previous year, it was 245m. Open Doors estimates that there are another 50 million Christians facing high levels of persecution in a further 23 countries. This includes Mexico, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

In 2018 an American Jesuit magazine was reporting on the abnormally high number of assassinations of priests, many of whom were involved in peaceful, anti-corruption protests around the world. Nor are attacks on Christians (Catholics are considered especially fair game) confined to the sub-Sahara regimes. Last year, left-wing militants attacked church processions in Paris which were being held to mark the murders of Catholics 150 years ago during the week of the Paris Commune in May, 1871.

In the US, attacks on churches and statues have been continuing with some Catholic and Irish organisations asking why these have gone unreported. In China, the Catholic Church has been the main target of the government’s racist policy of Sinicization which seeks to impose state control of faith organisations by imposing loyalty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. In South America, in the 1980s and 1990s Catholic clergy and relief workers were targets of CIA-backed, right-wing murder squads.

Christians are often regarded as safe and reasonable targets for totalitarian regimes as a means of channelling anti-western resentment. In the absence of any military or trade retributions or much adverse publicity they are either covertly encouraged by regimes or go unpunished.

In western countries, perhaps owing to Catholic Church leaders’ shame over decades of clerical sex abuse and the cover-ups which followed, Catholic customs and beliefs are routinely subjected to discrimination that’s often cloaked in the argot of secular ‘progressiveness’.

In Scotland, in recent years, the simple act of wearing a crucifix has been subject to civic sanction. The rights of Christian midwives to refuse to participate in abortion according to their faith-based belief that all human life is sacred have been removed. In influential SNP circles there is a steady slew of anti-Christian sewage that’s manifest in opposition to Catholic schools and to individual politicians’ fitness for office owing to their problem faith.

It would be absurd to compare any of this to global, anti-Christian violence but there is a chilling authoritarianism implicit in much of it that seems designed to remove Christian voices from public discourse.

Some Christian organisations such as the Church of Scotland have opted for a comfortable life and fly with the prevailing winds. Others, like the Catholic Church in Scotland, rudderless and utterly devoid of leadership, have opted for a vow of silence.

Thus, the steady drumbeat of intolerance and secular totalitarianism proceeds uncontested. And all of it imposed by silent acclamation of the nation’s self-appointed and covert, civic Star Chamber.