Sri Lanka attacks: Post-colonial guilt stops UK helping persecuted Christians, says bishop

Apr 22, 2019 by

by Kaya Burgess and Philip Willan, The Times:

A sense of “post-colonial guilt” and a belief that Christianity is the religion of the rich and powerful have held Britain back from supporting persecuted Christians around the globe, according to the bishop leading a government review into their plight.

The Bishop of Truro, the Right Rev Philip Mounstephen, has been asked to examine the extent of oppression faced by Christians and critique the Foreign Office’s response. He will publish the first phase of his review next week and a full report is due in June. Speaking before the attacks in Sri Lanka, Bishop Mounstephen told The Times that Britain had “something of a blind spot to the persecution of Christians”.

Bishop Mounstephen, 59, said: “There is a lot of post-colonial guilt around a residual sense that the Christian faith is an expression of white western privilege. Whereas actually the Christian faith is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the . . . global poor and people who, by their very socio-economic status, are vulnerable.”

Read here

Anglican Mainstream notes that news reports that the sites of the attacks in the hotels were all restaurants. Two visitors to Sri Lanka just before Easter report that “The hotels were being used by Christians who were having breakfast after their vigil” and “according to one report a suicide bomber came up to the top of the queue at breakfast that was in the restaurant on the first floor and detonated the bomb to cause maximum casualties.”

These two reports indicate that a connection between the churches and the hotels is  the presence of Christians.

Chris Sugden

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