Eric Metaxas: An Ironic Ecumenism: The Global War on Christians (Part 2)

If I asked you to name the country that has witnessed the single greatest outburst of anti-Christian violence in recent years, you'd probably guess somewhere like North Korea or an Islamic country such as Egypt.\

You'd be wrong. The answer is India. As John L. Allen tells us in his new book, "The Global War on Christians," in 2008, "a series of riots [in the state of Orissa] ended with as many as five hundred Christians killed." Even more shocking than the number of those killed was the way they were killed: "many were hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals."

By the time the violence ended, "thousands more were injured, and at least fifty thousand were left homeless."

Unlike North Korea or Saudi Arabia, the perpetrators were not government officials but private individuals and groups, acting with the implicit and sometimes explicit approval of local officials.

Thus, after a nun was "raped, marched naked through the streets and beaten," local "police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report and declined to arrest her attackers."

This was not the first or even the greatest example of violence perpetrated by Hindu radicals against an Indian religious minority. Similar violence in the state of Gujarat in 2002 claimed the lives of an estimated 2,000 Muslims. Keep reading