Youth Column: Through a Christian Lens

Monday July 13 2020

George Young, a student at New College, Edinburgh and member of Canongate Kirk offers his perspective on the threats facing Christianity worldwide

“To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. Until recently, I had always misunderstood the final line of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses.

Ulysses, the mythical King of Ithaca, is of course affirming in the hearts of his soldiers that they are bound by “one equal temper” of resilience - unyielding to an enemy across the seas and as yet unknown - but I had understood it to mean that after the conquest, there would be nothing to gain.

I have attended many British church services where the congregation has been asked to pray for Uyghurs in China, Sikhs in India, Muslims in Burma and yet the most persecuted of them all - our Christian brothers and sisters - frequently go unmentioned, I think on the presumption that because we are in church, they are already well accounted for.

In a world that feels fragmented yet looks homogenised, it is important to know where we belong. For Christians, this means the Church. But the forces that most corrode The Faith today - terrorism, unspoken intimidation, political correctness - have an unnerving effect on Christians; for they try to dislocate our True North: our faith in God. Where these forces are prevalent, they tend to set the tone, and so it can be difficult to confront inconvenient truths. A Greek Orthodox chapel on the island of Lesbos trashed and besmeared with faeces; consecrated Catholic sacraments stolen from rural French churches and strewn in gutters; a Virgin Mary statue from a Swedish church hammered to pieces - these are just some of the recent and widely unreported cases of persecution against Christians in Europe. If we are led to seek outside the Church in our prayer, it is only logical that we might find ourselves neglecting those closest to us and perhaps, praying for things we might not really understand. As Britain’s belfries are still, let us not contribute to the deafening silence by neglecting those in prayer with whom we share a temper of heart and faith.

I find that statistics seldom have the effect that those who employ them intend; they are played like drums and can numb us out of feeling genuine compassion for their subjects. But a statistic that did stay with me was the Open Doors census of Christians in Iraq: in 2003, they numbered around 1.5 million, but in 2019, the number stood at around 250,000. Here lies another convenient silence for us to hold: the question is largely left unasked and so the answer we would rather not contemplate. But such are the values that these forces hold on our modern world: inhumanity, but convenience, and so it blindly rumbles on.

But, there is hope. Above all, we have our Faith, many of us have our Bibles and some of us, under normal circumstances, still have our churches. There is hope to be found also in our governments. In Nicola Sturgeon’s Easter address, Christians were singled out for “demonstrating the kindness, compassion and love which are central to Christianity, and which are also fundamental to any decent society”. Here, the First Minister affirmed the “one equal temper” of heart that Tennyson’s Ulysses proclaims, but also confirms that Christian values are the basis of the society in which we live. I found these words encouraging and the fact that they were said, even more so.

Where convenient silence sounds out, we might do well to reconsider Tennyson’s final line - this time, through a Christian lens. To strive through prayer, to seek out our fellow Christians, to find the Lord in darkened corners. And when these incompletable tasks are done, to lay down our weapons – ‘not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds’ (2 Corinthians 10:4) - and have compassion for our enemy, and yield nothing.

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