Elizabeth Kendal has worked for eleven years with the World Evangelical Alliance’s Religious Liberty Commission, including seven years as its Principal Researcher and Writer. In addition to issuing weekly Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletins, Elizabeth, who is now working independently, writes both public articles and and confidential analyses on religious liberty and the persecution of Christians in many parts of the world. She also serves as an adviser to other international religious liberty advocates.

Elizabeth recently told a chaplaincy breakfast in Melbourne that the West is rapidly evolving from a Judeo-Christian culture into a post-Christian culture, which is in effect a non-Christian culture. As a result, religious liberty, which had its origins in the Judeo-Christian teachings of the Bible, is disappearing along with the Judeo-Christian culture on which it was founded.

Elizabeth said the two main sources of threat to religious freedom in the West are from the growing influence of Islam; and from anti-discrimination legislation which purports to promote human rights and equal opportunity, but which in reality has the effect of marginalizing and discriminating against Christianity and Christians.

Regarding the growing influence of Islam, Elizabeth said the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) dominates three key United Nations bodies — the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). She said the OIC had gained this position of domination by buying the votes of African nations, and that the OIC has a ten-year plan to Islamise human rights, including the criminalisation of any so-called defamation of Islam.

In addition, the OIC, having rejected the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a “Judeo-Christian construct”, sought to replace it in 1991 with the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). Subsequently, most Muslim States have amended their Constitutions to include the proviso: “No law shall be passed that is contrary to Sharia law”, which renders religious liberty illusory.

Elizabeth said that under this version of so-called religious freedom, everyone is free to be Muslim, but blasphemy and apostasy (as defined by Sharia law, of course) are punishable by death, and that includes being converted to another religion.

She added that just as true religious liberty is anathema to Islam, so Hinduism and Buddhism also have no theological grounds for religious freedom as we understand it.

Elizabeth said the second main threat to Christianity in the West comes from legislation purporting to promote human rights and equal opportunity. On April the 15th this year, the Victorian State Labor Government passed the controversial amended Victorian Equal Opportunity Act.

This has the effect of both broadening and tightening the legislation by removing exemptions that were hitherto considered valid and reasonable, such as the right of a Christian school to conscientiously object to employing an openly homosexual teacher, or the right of a church to refuse to employ an openly homosexual person as a youth leader.

Under the legislation, the State determines what is a “core” religious activity such that religion must be an “inherent requirement” (eg in schools), and the onus falls on the Christian body in question to prove that it is reasonable to discriminate.

Elizabeth described a visit by herself and the Rev.Dr.Mark Durie to meet the Melbourne University academics who had drafted the relevant Options Paper on which the legislation was based. In the course of the conversation, Elizabeth and Mark suggested some school principals may be willing to go to jail rather than comply with the legislation. This met with the response from one of the academics, “Don’t you dare threaten me with martyrdom!” The female academic went on to say, “Don’t worry, there’ll be no prisoners of conscience. They’ll just have their doors closed or their funding withdrawn.”

And Elizabeth added that the law has been drafted in such a way that they won’t be shut down on religious grounds — rather, it will be because they’ve broken the law.

But however disturbing the growing encroachments upon religious freedom may be in the West, there’s no comparison with the severity of persecution in many other countries, which Elizabeth described as pervasive and violent.

In this context, she quoted the remarkable statistic that 80-percent of all Christians now live in the non-Western world, compared with only 20-percent as recently as 50 years ago. This means that only 20-percent of all Christians now live in the West.

Elizabeth presented an alarmingly long list of countries where violent persecution of Christians is rife, including Pakistan, India, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sudan, Burma, Bangladesh and many more.

Perhaps most movingly and most chillingly, Elizabeth cited the cases of seven Christian martyrs who had been put to death in six different countries in recent years. These included Australia’s Graham Staines, who was burned to death with his two young sons by Hindu extremists in India in 1999. The other martyrs she mentioned died in Yemen, China, Northern Iraq, Somalia, India and Russia.

Elizabeth said that as religious freedom diminishes, persecution will continue to intensify, intolerance will escalate, authoritarianism will rise, and religious liberty will be traded for so-called “peace”.

Therefore, she said, we in the West must stop living in denial. “We need to develop some spine, and not be ashamed of the Gospel. As God exhorts Jeremiah, ‘let he who has My word speak it boldly’ (Jer 23:28). We must no longer be private about our faith and quiet about what we believe.”

We must also be prepared to be persecuted. Jesus says in John 15:20, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. And Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:12, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ will be persecuted.”

Elizabeth concluded: “We must engage with the persecuted church, for their sake and for ours. Instead of desperately denying, we must realise and accept that we are already part of them. We must stand alongside them as part of the great cloud of witnesses referred to in Hebrews 12:1. And we must not overlook the utmost importance of prayer. As Paul says in Romans 15:30, “Join me in my struggle by praying to God for me.”

To subscribe to Elizabeth Kendal’s religious liberty prayer bulletins, send a blank email to join-rlpb[at]hub.xc.org

Elizabeth’s Religious Liberty Monitoring blog site is http://elizabethkendal.blogspot.com