A silent night was broken in Nigeria on Christmas Eve when Muslim terrorists raided Christian villages and murdered at least 140 people. Some reports suggest over 200 people were killed.
Grace Goodwin was preparing a Christmas meal for her family when her husband rushed into the kitchen and told her and the children to run into the bush to escape approaching gunmen. After they returned in the morning their village was deserted and houses had been burned. In harrowing tales, victims bled for hours from gunshot wounds before help arrived. One man had his hand chopped off by a machete.
The abhorrent violence was reminiscent of the October 7 attacks near Gaza last year but unlike that atrocity, there has almost been zero international coverage of the barbarity perpetuated by radical Muslim groups in Nigeria.
It is not an isolated oversight, however. Christians are the most persecuted of all religious believers yet there is almost no media reporting of their suffering. A Reuters report on the Nigerian Christmas Eve massacres astoundingly claimed that climate change was a reason for the attacks even though the attacks were launched by Muslim herdsmen on Christmas Eve, and they followed an earlier attack last year on worshippers in the St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Nigeria.
The violence in Nigeria is clearly anti-Christian not anti-coal, and it is not just in Nigeria. Indeed, according to the human rights organisation Open Doors, Nigeria is only the sixth most dangerous country to be a Christian. In North Korea, the Government regularly raids house-churches and arrests those praying.
China has been using increasingly sophisticated digital surveillance technology and a social credit score system to persecute Christians.
Last year the Azerbaijan military forcibly removed over 100,000 Armenian Christians from their homes as part of an ongoing war.
According to Open Doors, one in seven Christians across the world faces some form of persecution.
Why are authoritarian governments so threatened by the celebration of the birth of a baby in a stable more than 2000 years ago? King Herod was so threatened that he ordered the murdering of young innocents just days after the first Christmas in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the new King who challenged his throne.
The paranoia of Herod continues for modern day rulers because Christianity offers a message of hope and faith that weakens the fear used by totalitarian regimes to control their populations.
Because of the threat Christians pose to dictators we will unfortunately never eradicate their persecution. However, more can be done to highlight their plight and expose those governments that engage in it. The world has rightly and widely condemned the terrorism of Hamas last year. There should be an equal condemnation of the regular and vicious attacks on Christians too.
And, in our own country we can do more to protect religious freedom including that of Christians. While there is not the physical violence directed at Christians in Australia, there is a creeping bigotry emerging that is forcing Christians to unjustly hide their faith.
In recent years, Christians have lost their jobs for simply expressing their faith. Christian schools have come under attack for teaching their faith. And even Christian bishops have faced legal action for simply preaching in accordance with their doctrines.
These increasing threats to religious freedom are why both the Liberal-National Party and the Labor Party support new religious freedom laws. Just before the new year, the Government released a framework for these new laws. The Government plans to release draft laws by June.
With an election due in the first half of next year, it is hard to see how these laws could be in place before then. There will most likely be a Parliamentary Committee inquiry into the laws. Any finalised law probably could not be considered by the parliament until next year.
That would put the consideration of these laws just months out from an election, exactly what derailed the laws in the last Liberal-National government. There are many powerful voices that do not wish to see Christians and other religious people receive protection for their faith.
If the Government is serious about delivering on its election commitment to enact new religious freedom laws it should accelerate its timeline. Given the years of work that has preceded this point, there should be no reason that we cannot have in place new religious freedom protections by Christmas this year.
