Book review: 'The Global War on Christians'

"No book ranges quite as widely as Allen’s in his portrait of the persecuted church today and the benefits that should accrue to all who pay attention to this underreported phenomenon."

WORLD WATCH MONITOR

It has been an astonishing last 12 months for books on the persecution of Christians when there has been such silence on the issue for so long. 

First came ‘Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack’ in late 2012; then the more simply titled, ‘Persecuted: the Global Assault on Christians’ in March of 2013; and now on November 1 the latest and longest of the titles so far: ‘The Global War on Christians: Despatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution’.

The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution.John L Allen Jr.

Of the three, two are written by journalists with little history of reporting on the religious liberty arena – Rupert Short writing Christianophobia and John L Allen Jr., penning the latest book – as opposed to the battle hardened trio of Paul Marshall, Leila Gilbert and Nina Shea. 

This is not always a fault of course, as they bring a bug-eyed enthusiasm to exposing statistics and trends that others in the field may have grown accustomed to tolerating, but what is fascinating is how similarly all three books read – they are all essentially journalistic briefings and round ups of countries and regions where persecution of Christians is rife.
Of the three, it is Allen’s that stands out as the most comprehensive and well written, showing a nodding acquaintance with a far wider range of source material than the two previous books, and bringing a deep knowledge of Roman Catholic sources into play, which is most welcome.
At times, Allen can be a little too generous, and his adoption of the controversially high martyrdom statistics of Todd Johnston’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity – most significantly the claim that the number of Christian martyrs runs at 100,000 per year – can land him into unnecessary trouble when recourse to more sober statistics would have made the point just as well.