Christian persecution in the United Kingdom

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It is incredibly unfashionable nowadays to be a Christian in the United Kingdom. Very few biological women want to date a Christian biological male, because they think that we will be uptight or unwilling to have sex before marriage, that you are a racist bigot if you are a Christian and so on. There is a while host of preconceptions, misconceptions and prejudice regarding Christians in the UK and in my experience, a lot of it comes from the woke 'left'.

The BBC, the national broadcasting corporation, funded by the tax payer to the tune of nearly 4 billion pounds a year, rolls out continuous propaganda about how those of other faiths need acceptance or at least tolerance - which no Christian even argues with.

But the coverage of Christians & Christianity as a faith and the theology associated with it, by the BBC, is pretty much non-existent. There have been scandals where people have had to sue for not being able to pray like Muslims do. Muslims have prayer rooms at some workplaces and Christians have no place to pray at work, anywhere in the country as far as I can gather.

Then there is the idea of rural American, republican Christians people stereotype you with as a British Christian. Most British Christians are LGBTQ+ friendly/accepting, yet we are lumbered with misconceptions, such as Christians not knowing about general culture.

Worse, everybody treats you like you don't know s**t or are lowly educated, even when you have a high level of education - postgraduate education, even.

Christians are the most persecuted group in the United Kingdom, in my opinion.

In God, we trust.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/are-christians-being-persecuted-in-britain-

Last edited by blitzkrieg on 02 Jan 2022, 9:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Jesus speaks: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to them.  Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you falsely on account of me.  Rejoice and be glad because your reward is great in Heaven, for they persecuted the prophets before you in the same way." -- Matthew 5:10-12

Real Christians know this already.

I know a woman writing her doctoral thesis in Philosophy on this topic: the fact that academics or any public intellectuals who reference religion, are not taken seriously. The study of Ethics, and STEM subjects are particularly disadvantaged.

My guess is that it’s because to younger people (gen-z, millennials, etc), particularly those with left-leaning political views, Christianity represents part of the “establishment” (Baby Boomer-era American society, like one would see on shows like Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best).

It’s probably more because of that than it is anti-theism.

This is true.

Yeah, that does seem to be the culture at the university I am studying at, currently (religion isn't exactly considered to be trendy).

I am not at PhD level (I am doing the second year of a two-year Masters degree programme) & it is a taught MSc, not a research degree (you can do MRes here in the United Kingdom).

I have gotten the impression that STEM subjects in my country (the United Kingdom) have been better funded in the past decade or so, since there is a shortage of such students, especially for the hard sciences like Physics, Biology, Chemistry and the associated sub-categories & domains of those fields?

Perhaps this situation is different, where you are from? I cannot see your location on your profile.

There do exist PhD studies in theology & even specific theological domains such as bible studies, but they aren't very common. My personal opinion for why this is the case, is that there really isn't any money in the United Kingdom to be made from such domains, since Christianity is more of a fringe religion than it is in the United States.

Being a Christian these days is more anti-establishment in the United Kingdom than most other belief-based denominations.

Nonsense. The BBC broadcasts carols at Christmas, Songs of Praise and Thought for the Day are routine, and Christian perspectives are given priority on things like that Sunday morning debate programme. Sometimes people from other faiths will be invited to do Thought For The Day, but no other faith receives the attention that Christianity does.

Every place of work I have worked at that has had a prayer room has had a multi-faith one, just as suitable for Christians as for Muslims or Sikhs.


This hardly rises to the level of "persecution".

I am unsure to what extent you are being ironic, considering you have linked to an article by a conservative commentator who doesn't even agree with your point. No, Christians aren't as persecuted as Muslims, Jews, travellers, disabled people, refugees, homeless people, or trans people, or a number of other groups. Christians aren't even as persecuted as women, Asians, black people, or European immigrants. There have been no major scandals about anti-Christian bigotry in major political parties, no councils go out of their way to make it harder to be Christian, no judges have banned people under the age of 16 from attending church.

I'm not referring to theological debates or discussions, but rather any intellectual discussion on any topic.

If the audience knows that the speaker has religious faith, they are discredited as less knowledgeable. This happens even when the speaker hasn't made allusions to religion or faith in their argument, or in unrelated fields.

This bias is largely based on stereotype and a preconceived, prejudicial, if not antiquated belief that religious people are delusional and hysterical, or that they dismiss and deemphasise empirical research standards.

It's a form of gaslighting and bigotry, with serious repercussions in academia.

The fact that the conservative commentator doesn't agree that Christians are persecuted, and doesn't defend Christianity, really does prove the point that Christianity is an underdog in the United Kingdom. Even the people you would expect to defend it, do not.

Christians are persecuted more than any of those groups, because they don't have any voice in the United Kingdom, whereas all of those other groups do have a significant voice, apart from disabled people and homeless people, within UK, mainstream media.

Refugees have been blithered on about since I have been a child, on the BBC. Muslims too.

It's all the more insulting considering that the entire history of the United Kingdom is based on Christianity and as such, Christianity should be the number one priority with a greater weighting than any of those character groups.

I know there have been cases where B & Bs (Bed and Breakfast), hotels and other establishments in this country run by Christian owners have turned homosexual people and probably other people away because they didn't want them staying there and that it goes against their religious convictions and there was even a case where a christian couple running a bakery turned down making a cake for a gay couple. In this case the couple won their case in court and I think in some cases with some business owners they've lost because of discrimination but I don't feel christians are being persecuted in the UK.

Although I was christened, I don't follow any religion but I do think it should be all about tolerance. It does make my blood boil when even to this day some christians do and say things which I feel are un-christian. There have been people abusing their children because believed they are possessed or they've sinned against God and try to ''exorcise'' them, there has been racism, there have been some churches that appear to do more for the rich and not the poor when I feel the christian message is to help the poor and also in some countries that have christian majority you can been sentenced to death or life in prison if you are gay, atheist or whatever.

See, I think that this shows a bit of a persecution complex, where all the talk about being accepting of other groups is actually hiding feelings of thinking that Christianity is more important than them still, and any special treatment of other groups or lessening of nay special privileges is somehow persecution. I don't think that you realise how much privileges Christianity has in your culture, especially if you think that it is somehow an underdog in comparison to other groups.

You said that "Christians are LGBTQ+ friendly/accepting", that there are a bunch anti-trans problems that have especially been prominent in Britain, that it has become a bit of a meme in online spaces to call it TERF Island, and that anti-trans stuff is coming from the more conservative people, which is a lot of the Christians. I think that you might be deluding yourself into believing that Christians are some of underdogs that are friendly to all the other groups and don't get the same back. And as for being looked down on within STEM, do you think that it might really just be the sciences just in general don't look favourably at faith based approaches, with the same reaction to really any religion? Perhaps an only difference being that Christians thinking that they are persecuted if they are not given all the special treatment.

This generally seems to be the case. They've been treated special for so long, that being treated like everyone else feels like "persecution".

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." -- Clay Shirky, July 2016

Christians in the US have existed in a bubble of "privilege", falsely believing that the USA was founded on Christianity.  Thus they also believed that they were the only "real" American citizens.

Christian Americans are discovering that more and more of them have have neighbors who are Atheist, Buddhist, Jew, Islam, Sikh, et cetera; that many of those "blasphemous" people are healthier, wealthier, and better-educated; and that American Christians are no longer G^Ds "chosen people" (as if they ever were).

Nothing screams "Christians under attack" more than seeing a Methodist church's run-down property getting sold to a wealthy Buddhist sect.

I think the reason Christians (as well as people of other religious faiths) are being discredited in intellectual discussions, is not because of prejudice or discrimination, but because people who do have a faith, by that very thing, has accepted to have others (holy scripture) do the thinking for them, instead of arriving at the logical reasoning and conclusions themselves.

Example:

In Ethics, Christians won't accept euthanasia because of the Christian command not to kill a human being.
They haven't arrived at the reasons why not to kill even in special circumstances by the means of their own thoughts, rather they let scriptures, books etc. do the thinking for them.

Of course you can always quote something. Non-theists do this all the time, but the difference is that they quote from a large variety of authors across many decades, so as to not invent the wheel twice, so to speak.
But ultimately, they make their very own conclusions.

Christians tends to only quote other Christian authors, or their scriptures from The Bible.
This is why they're being discredited, and for good reason.

There's nothing wrong with being a Christian/Theist, but there's definitely something wrong with not doing the thinking of your own and placing your brain in the parking lot while attending a religious service.

Theism is like people who only go for Apple or Android products.

Non-theism is like someone who buy the best technology at the cheapest price. They may have an Iphone, an Android TV and a Windows PC connected to a Linux server.

Theism choose one package from the same brand.
Non-theism don't buy a package solution, rather they create their own package.

The latter is proof of individual thinking, which is crucial for any intellectual discussion.

I think you are operating to your own definition of 'persecution' rather than the consensus version because nothing that I see or that you have said amounts to persecution or anywhere near as far as I can see

Christianity is in decline culturally I would say in the UK (don't know about numbers) but if anything I would suggest that that would give food for thought to Christians as to why that is the case rather than bleating about perceived persecution
and I speak as one who is sympathetic towards many faiths, Christianity included