ROME — Anti-Christian bigotry in Europe and the U.S. is more often caused by militant secularism than religious extremism, Catholic League president Bill Donohue said Friday.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. are experiencing “growing intolerance for Christianity,” Donohue wrote, citing a survey by Lifeway Research that says that “nearly 60% agreed that ‘Christians increasingly are confronted by intolerance in America today.’”
Moreover, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE) found that anti-Christian hate crimes had increased in Europe by 70 percent between 2019 and 2020, Donohue noted, and the crimes tend to be most severe in Spain and France, “due to a reactionary form of secularism.”
“Secular intolerance and discrimination against Christianity seem to be based on the opposition against more traditional and conservative moral view of Christians,” OIDACE found, noting also that “there is a high rate of religious illiteracy among state authorities, public officials and journalists.”
In a Rome address last July, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito also underscored a “growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors,” Donohue observed.
“Christian bashing is sport in the very Western nations that gave birth to Christianity,” Donohue concluded. “That those doing the bashing fancy themselves as the tolerant ones — the ‘open-minded’ secularists — makes the situation all the more perverse.”
Thomas D. Williams is Breitbart News’s Rome Bureau Chief and the author of The Coming Christian Persecution.
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