How Willing Are We to Defend the Victims of Religious Persecution Worldwide?

[Michie]

COMMENTARY: It's time to remind ourselves that the cause of international religious freedom is a foreign-policy priority.

EWTN anchor Tracy Sabol moderates a panel discussion at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington on July 15. (photo: Screenshot from EWTN News Twitter, last visited 7/19/21)

“If you were put on trial because of your faith, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” This is a question every person of faith should ask themselves. For a growing number of people, the first part of the question is no longer hypothetical. Religious persecution is spreadingacross the globe. How willing are we — as people of faith and as a country — to defend its victims?

In the middle of July, hundreds of people gathered together in our nation’s capital, and many more were connected virtually, to discuss religious freedom. The International Religious Freedom Summit wasn’t partisan: Its organizers represented a bipartisan group of American leaders and politicians. Participants came from a variety of faith traditions. This was not a gathering of Washington insiders. The persecuted were also invited.

Continued below.
How Willing Are We to Defend the Victims of Religious Persecution Worldwide?

 

[Ignatius the Kiwi]

If we really wanted to defend religious minorities in other countries we might petition governments to offer guarantees of those specific populations. The old idea of defending the faith, like how France and Russia competed for influence within the Ottoman Empire to defend Empire's Christians.

Besides talk, what of note is actually accomplished out of these summits? Christian minorities in the middle east are becoming nearly extinct and many seek to escape to the West. Which to my mind just means they and their children will be corrupted by the West.

Promoting religious freedom won't solve the problem either.

 

[BrAndreyu]

Which to my mind just means they and their children will be corrupted by the West.

Not necessarily. Some of the holiest people I know who take their faith the most seriously are immigrants from the Middle East and China. The West definitely has the tendency to corrupt, but when those people come here a lot of the time they're just happy to be able to practice Christianity without being harassed or killed, so they take it a lot more seriously than people who were born here and take the freedom of religion (well, what's left of it anyway) for granted.