OPINION:
The Christmas season, with its lustrous traditions, highlights the preeminence of faith. Yet despite its universality, Christianity faces the same pervasive restrictions and hostilities that hinder other religions across the globe. As Christians parry opprobrium with the celebration of their savior’s birth, they can take heart in the transformational nature of their faith.
The Pew Research Center recently published an update of its periodic survey of global hostility toward religion, including government restrictions and societal animus. It finds institutional restraints on faith generally centered in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East-North Africa regions, while hostile social attitudes prevail mostly in the Americas and Europe.
The United States, despite its reputation as “the land of the free,” earns only moderate scores in both the Government Restrictions Index (GRI) and the Social Hostilities Index (SRI). Disturbingly, its SRI rank trended into the “high” range during the studied period of 2007-20. Americans can only envy such otherwise unremarkable societies as Slovenia and Gabon, which rank freer for faith in the Pew survey.
For a people who pledge allegiance to “one nation, under God,” Americans demonstrate a glaring contradiction in their attitudes toward the foundational role of Christianity. Pew finds in a separate poll that 60% of U.S. adults “think the founders of America originally intended for the U.S. to be a ‘Christian nation.’” Only 45%, however, “think the U.S. should actually be a ‘Christian nation.’” Sadly, the uniquely religious roots of the nation — rightfully credited to its founders — are viewed by an increasing proportion of respondents as useless in today’s America.
By contrast, Japan leads all 198 nations examined in religious freedom, garnering the lightest scores for both government restrictions and social hostilities. Recent developments in the Land of the Rising Sun, though, could threaten its exalted status. The Japanese Communist Party, with links to its counterparts in China, is weaponizing the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a gunman with a religious grudge as the reason for a general crackdown on faith communities.
Indeed, it is not unusual for believers to be beleaguered by bullies. Most downtrodden are adherents in Afghanistan, where government restrictions match social hostilities for contempt. In contrast, Indians face greater religious enmity from their social environment than they do from their government. Perhaps most surprisingly, China’s faithful suffer the world’s tightest constraints from authorities, but they show little religious animosity toward one another.
As belief in a bond of heart between the Creator and members of the human family flicker, an enlarging array of boutique beliefs spring up that shred those shared bonds: environmentalism, transgenderism and even “catgenderism” — an absurdity in which a person identifies as a cat.
Celebrants of Christmas can offer no better justification for their faith than the practice of the Commandments that Jesus held most dear: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all they soul, and all thy mind”; and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” These illuminating Christian tenets, along with similarly wise words from other global faiths, defy attempts to extinguish them.
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