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Christians in the West must ‘stand strong’ or risk losing religious freedoms: humanitarian activist – LifeSite

(LifeSiteNews) — Today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is an encore of my interview last September with humanitarian activist Gia Chacón, who regularly travels around the world to speak with persecuted Christians. Below is a re-posted summary of the show.

As the founder and leader of For the Martyrs, Chacón devotes her life to raising awareness on the persecution of Christians worldwide — a “human rights crisis” that the mainstream media and even the world itself largely ignores.

Why is this ignored? In Chacón’s eyes, it’s precisely because they’re Christians.

“Christian persecution is a human rights crisis. The only reason that people don’t talk about this issue is because of the mere fact that they are Christian, and that it’s Christians who are the ones who are suffering,” she says. “And it’s seen as an issue for the church. But Christian persecution should be seen as, and treated with the same level of urgency as, any other human rights crisis.”

I also ask Chacón what she thinks about the increasing anti-Christian rhetoric in America. She believes the government response to COVID served as a “testing period” to see how compliant the churches were in following their dictates.

Chacón then makes a salient point about the true meaning of religious freedom and warns what will happen if Christians don’t fight to safeguard it.

“We have to realize that religious freedom does not mean that we have the ability to go to church, okay? Religious freedom doesn’t mean that we can wake up on Sunday and go to church and no one’s going to bother us,” she says. “Religious freedom means that we have the ability to practice our deeply held religious beliefs in every area of society.”

“If Christians do not stand strong now in the West, these kinds of anti-Christian movements and attacks will only get worse, and we will soon lose our religious freedom.”

The John-Henry Westen Show is available by video on the show’s YouTube channel and right here on my LifeSite blog.

You can send me feedback, or ideas for show topics by emailing [email protected].

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