Easter attack spotlights Christian persecution

American Christians feel safe in the United States - religious freedom, after all, was one of the rights the American experiment was all about. That freedom, and the way it tended to extend its sway into the rest of the world, came to mean to Americans that Christianity would be safe everywhere.

Missionaries, supported generously by believers at home in the U.S., spilled out across the world in the last two centuries to convert nonbelievers, and the missionaries often left footprints of education and change in their wake. How many universities in other countries were started by those faithful souls!

Even today, in a China that has gone through repeated hells under the communists, Christians are a thriving community.

Yet this Easter was witness to changes in this drama of faith and politics, for now it is Christianity that is being pushed back from - and out of - places around the world where for centuries small groups of believers flourished. Even more remarkable is the fact that the America born on New England's shores five centuries ago is paying little or no attention to this development.

Perhaps the events of this holy weekend will wake up some of the slothful, for many newspaper front pages headlined stories about one of the sad tidings of this new age. "Christians on Edge After Attack," The Washington Times' headline read, and the paper then detailed the "deadly Easter Sunday attack by a suicide bomber in Pakistan" and how it had "sent fears soaring of an expanding war on Christianity globally." As of this writing, 70 have died and dozens are wounded.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Taliban faction that struck in Pakistan's most sophisticated and cultured city, told Agence France-Press, "We carried out the Lahore attack as Christians are our target," and said new attacks on schools and colleges are planned.

Pope Francis, who has been a champion of the Christian minorities under attack from radical Islamists, was relentless in his critique. "Easter Sunday," he told those gathered in St. Peter's Square, "was bloodied by an abominable attack that massacred so many innocent people, for the most part families of the Christian minority, especially women and children, gathered in a public park to joyfully pass the Easter holiday."

These targeted attacks on Middle East Christians have been going on for many years, but until about 15 years ago, groups of Christians lived in relative peace, especially in Palestine, where they had large numbers.

Then the American-led Iraq and Afghan wars came and, in addition to all their other depredations, turned Muslim extremists more fervently against minorities - from Christians, to Yazidis, to Shiites or Sunnis or Kurds, as the shoe fit.

One might have thought that majority-Christian America would have moved to aid those Christians (and the other minorities, of course), but strangely enough, it did not, in great part because U.S. immigration policy was totally - and disastrously - transformed in the immigration act of 1965, pushed by Teddy Kennedy.

Before 1965, the U.S. took in numbers of immigrants from any one country equivalent to the percentage of its citizens already here. Naturally, that meant that most of those taken in were from Europe and fewer from Latin America. After 1965, the majority was taken from the Third World of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

This meant that more immigrants were taken who were not Christian but who, indeed, came from countries where Christian worship was not even permitted. When our troops were in Saudi Arabia in 1991 to free Kuwait, for instance, the Saudis would not permit Christian worship. Most Arab countries have Islam as the official religion.

So now we find ourselves in the abnormal situation in which Christians are being killed because of their faith, while the U.S. is leaning over backward so as not to be seen as even minimally critical of Islam. Groups like the Taliban or ISIS very quickly learn that Christians are theirs for the taking.

You don't believe it's that bad? In February 2015, the Pew Research Center reported on violence targeting religious groups and found that Christians remained the most persecuted religion as measured by the number of countries in which they face harassment; Muslims were harassed in 99 of 198 countries studied, while Christians were discriminated against and attacked in 102 of 198 countries.

Faith communities across the Middle East that date back to the time of Christ are under attack. Surely there must be leaders in the Christian communities here and overseas who can figure out ways to help their fellow believers. Surely our government can figure out that Christians overseas deserve AT LEAST the attention it is giving Muslims here.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal