Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali is one of the leading international advocates on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide. He addressed a meeting of The Iona Institute and Skellig on the topic in Booterstown parish centre, Dublin. He discussed the various forms anti-Christian persecution takes, and why it is largely ignored in the West. The talk took place on May 4, 2022.

You can watch the talk by clicking here.

Below, you can read the transcript of what he had to say about growing threats to religious freedom and freedom of conscience in the West today, which particularly come into force when Christians defy modern norms about abortion or sexuality.

THE WEST AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

“I was also asked to say something about the secular West. When I began my work with Oxtrad about helping persecuted churches develop their leadership, I thought that my work would be in Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Northern Nigeria and so on. And it has been, but then people in Britain started asking me: what are you going to do about what’s happening here? People are losing their jobs because of their beliefs. They are being excluded from public life like sitting on magistrates’ benches because of their beliefs. There are certain professions they can’t enter. For example, if they if they refuse to take any part in the procedure for abortion or with IVF, or a whole number of other things, what are you going to do about that? I very reluctantly become involved in this and I began to see what the reasons were, just as there are reasons in the Islamic world, so there are reasons in the West.

How the secular West has distorted Christian values

The first thing that struck me was that many of the values that the secular west promotes are sort of pale shadows of Judeo-Christian values that have been told by the Church for two millennia. But they’re pale shadows, they’re not the real thing and not only are they pale shadows, but the secular West holds them without having any ground. What if you say well, why do you believe for instance in inalienable human dignity? An atheist said to me that’s because I believe in Man. So, I said well you’re going to be very disappointed because I’d rather believe in God.

There’s no grounding. They are freestanding values.  Like the Cheshire Cat, the cat disappears, and the smile also will eventually disappear in the aftermath of the Judeo-Christian culture but also these values have mutated. Inalienable dignity of all human beings has become autonomy, radical autonomy, so [many] things are justified. For example, [there is] the whole argument about assisted suicide. The Christian understanding of personhood is that of a relationship not only with God but with family, with friends, with society but human autonomy is radical individualism.  The Christian idea has been changed into this liberty. Let’s take equality first.

I was once invited to speak to the Equality Commission and I said to my secretary, are you sure they want me? I’m not the sort of person. Anyway, I went and they are wonderful people, all beavering away at equality but with no idea why human beings should be equal. I mean, why do we believe human beings to be equal?  On the face of that they’re not equal, they’re rich and poor, they’re physically able or not. They’re intellectually differently gifted [or not] and so on. On the face of it, they’re not equal. And of course, the answer is that human beings are regarded as equal because the Bible teaches that they have a common origin, a common origin, created in God’s image and so much flows from that.

This idea of the equality of a person created in God’s image has mutated into the equality of all kinds of lifestyles and preferences for living and so forth. That is what they were working at. A lot of what they were doing had nothing to do with the equality of persons but the equality of people living in certain kinds of ways and of course there is no end to this. The more you include, the more there will be to include. Take one example, LGBTQI, you will run out of the alphabet.

We have mutated liberty: the idea that people should not be coerced. Pope Benedict was once asked about this. The hostile journalist said: your holiness, for hundreds of years the Roman Catholic Church has been teaching that error has no rights, it is now promoting religious freedom. Why how did that happen? He said: in this we’ve gone back to the earliest form of the tradition. The journalist said: well, what’s that? He said: the teaching of Jesus.

I thought it was a very good answer. Jesus never coerced anybody and in fact there is a long tradition, particularly the Dominican tradition going back to Saint Thomas Aquinas of course, but explicitly expressed in the work of Bartholomew Las Casas [the Dominican friar and later bishop] on the fundamental rights of the so-called Indian people. They were sacrosanct because they were made in God’s image and they could not be compelled to become Catholics. That’s a Catholic bishop saying this in the 16th century. This idea of religious liberty of fundamental freedoms of human rights was debated in the University of Salamanca in Europe and that is how it got into human rights discourse in Europe. If you read John Locke, he reads from the Salamanca. So-called Enlightenment scholars won’t admit this, but it can’t just be a coincidence. The main plank of John Locke’s argument about human rights is that people are made in God’s image.

The idea about liberty has mutated into Libertarianism, indifference about what happens in society. Sir Simon Jenkins, I worked with him on a public committee once, he’s a libertarian, his basic view is that everything should be allowed to happen and I had many battles with him because he had no idea of what restraints are necessary to ensure that the basics of society are respected. That brings me to the last great thing which is safety from harm.  This is of course a Christian idea, that people should not be made to fight the games in the Roman stadium and people have certain basic rights to safety which have to be respected but it’s become individualised, so safety from harm means safety from harm of the individual, not of the basic institutions of society. But without safety from harm of the basic institutions of society there can be no guarantee of safety from harm of the individual, particularly when the individual cannot defend himself or herself. When they are too weak, whether that is at the earliest stages of life or the later stages of life, or if they happen to be in a coma, the withdrawal of hydration and nutrition. All of these, how are you going to defend that if the institutions themselves have been corrupted?

Secular individualism vs Christian personhood

So, I began to see that these were the reasons that have led to the attack on the person, the Christian understanding of personhood or family. Why has there been this incredible attack on the basic unit of society which is the family? All the research shows, for example, that children relate differently to mothers and to fathers, children play differently with their fathers than they do with their mothers. They learn differently from each pair so in the strict sense there is no such thing as parenting, there is mothering and there is father and yet we are now being sold this idea that it doesn’t make any difference. All kinds of research purporting to show that children have no kind of biological relationship with their parents and that the surrogates of various kinds can be made to fulfill fathering and mothering function well. We know this is a big lie, but this is one of the reasons for the attack on Christian conscience. Christian conscience, consent of the person, these again have arisen because of Christian ideas about personhood and once you dispense with those ideas then conscience will no longer be respected.

In Britain, it’s probably very similar here, but in Britain there was a long tradition of respect for conscience even in times of war. I know many people who refuse to serve in the army or the armed forces in the Second World War. They were given other jobs to do but their conscience was respected. Even the abortion act of 1967 in Britain respected conscience for those people who because of their religious beliefs or whatever their beliefs, generally could not take part in any procedures leading to abortion or with abortion taking place. But a recent legislation on for example, so-called equality legislation takes no account of conscience and again and again it has been denied when an appeal has been made on conscience, the courts have not upheld them.

This is a very dangerous development because it will once again restrict religious liberty. I know about 100 cases where people’s freedom of conscience or belief, of expression of belief of taking part in worship, gender related abortion … There was proof that doctors were providing gender related abortion in Britain and the public prosecutors refused to act, in the public interest well what public interest is being served by refusing to act against such a practice?

The other idea which is [that] the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has American origins. In their Bill of rights and the amendments to the Constitution and in civil rights legislation. It is reasonable accommodation that an employer, private or public, has an obligation to accommodate the religious beliefs of the employee if that does not damage the particular trade or service that the organisation is offering, and it is widely applied in the US, but in Britain it is widely ignored by employers and by courts who have to decide whether employers need to provide for religious accommodation. It may be that you have cases here but respect for well-formed conscience and religious accommodation are two key issues in making sure that Christians continue to have freedoms in the secular West, I’m sure this is happening here in Ireland as well, it’s certainly the case in Britain and every opportunity should be taken to test whether these freedoms do exist now.”