Christians in danger

We’ve heard the stories about the threat to Christians from Muslim radicals to convert to Islam or flee, under threat of death. AsiaNews is reporting on a similar threat, in India, from Hindu extremists.

Christians in the Southern Karnataka state “must immediately abandon Indian territory, or return to the mother religion which is Hinduism”.  If they do not “they will be killed by all good Indians, who by doing so will show their virility and their love of the country”.

These threats are contained in leaflets given out yesterday by the thousands in Chitradurga district. Written in the local kanada dialect, the text lists” the “crimes” the Christians commit: Treating everyone with love and showing compassion to the helpless, helping the poor and converting them, educating the orphans and converting them, promoting freedom to marry, organising free medical care and ignoring the cast system”.

In other words, honoring the dignity of every human person, and sacrificing for them. The sacrifice is much greater than we in the West know.

Sajan K. George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians, told AsiaNews: “These handbills are being widely circulated, but it is only the last in a series of anti Christian acts that have long plagued the State…Regularly pastors are being beaten up and prayer meetings being disrupted and our scared books are burned.  Certainly this most recent act is cause for deeper concern because it incites people to murder us”.

This is why he concludes, “all right-thinking persons, the media and the government must cry a halt to the violent hate-mongering being engaged in the name of religion”.

That’s the first order of business for addressing this problem. The second is calling a halt to media spreading alarm over what they claim is a moral equivalence between one or two groups of religious fanatics and religion in general, ‘proving’ (they conclude) that religion equals fanatacism.

People of goodwill can’t be silent about this and hope that somebody will do something. Here’s a group that’s doing something, and they have plenty of resources.