South Sudan refugee camp, 2011. Maximilian Norz/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Judging by the millions protesting against president Trump’s policies on behalf of the vulnerable and voiceless, empathy is alive and well. Or is it? Trump’s recent immigration ban exempts Christians from Muslim-majority countries, recognizing their status as the world’s most persecuted faith. But how much empathy do Christians feel for their brothers and sisters in Africa? And why do Muslims who care about the plight of the Palestinians lose so little sleep over the systematic elimination of their black African co-religionists in Darfur? Is skin colour still a significant stumbling block to empathy?
Who exactly is my neighbour?
For years, African Christians have been persecuted for their faith. For the purposes of this article, persecution is not litigation against bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay weddings, or pharmacists declining to sell contraceptives. Rather, persecution is the deliberate and deadly targeting of Christians because of their religious identity, whether it is the terrorist group Boko Haram bombing churches in northern Nigeria, or the Sudanese armed forces killing their non-Muslim citizens, or Islamic State brutally erasing 2000 years of Middle East sectarian diversity.
Occasionally, the western media reports on Egyptian mobs destroying Coptic Churches, or ISIS beheading Syrian and Iraqi Christians. But coverage of Africans being subjected to massive ethnic cleansing is relatively rare. African Christians are left wondering if their co-religionists in the comparatively wealthy white world take the commandment about loving their neighbour so literally that they empathise only with people like themselves, as Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene.
