Confronting the New Contempt for Christ’s Little Ones
Christian Persecution From Colombia’s Jungle Graves to Texas’s Rising Waters.
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated Me before it hated you.”
— John 15:18
The first week of July offered a grim triptych of anti-Christian cruelty. In Colombia, eight evangelical leaders — pastors, catechists, youth mentors — were hauled into the forest and shot, their bodies dumped in a mass grave later uncovered by investigators.
Across the globe in Pakistan, a teenaged Salvation Army girl finally slipped through the door of her captor’s house after two years of rape, beatings with an iron rod, and a sham conversion to Islam that a pliant court had rubber-stamped.
And a wall of rain roared through Texas Hill Country, sweeping away cabins at Camp Mystic and leaving scores of girls on a Christian youth camp dead or missing. While families clawed at debris for their daughters’ bodies, social-media partisans chortled—“Texas deserves every flood…,” “Cry harder…,” “Good, I’m glad!”—because the victims happened to live in a red state and were Christian.
Three continents, one pathology: open season on Christians and a culture that no longer blushes when it mocks the innocent dead.
A Martyr’s Grave in the Green Inferno
Colombia’s guerrilla war never quite ended; it merely fragmented. Dissident Revolutionary Armed Forced of Columbian (FARC) units and their National Liberation Army (ELN) rivals now extort pastors, kidnap catechists, and gun down anyone who dares shepherd young men away from coca fields and into church pews. The eight leaders slaughtered in Caquetá were unarmed, on their way to a prayer visit. Their crime? Preaching a kingdom that will not tithe to the cartels. President Gustavo Petro called the massacre a “grave human rights violation,” yet in many hinterland valleys, the state’s writ stops at the last army checkpoint. The Church, once again, is left to bury her own and keep singing the Psalms over fresh earth.
Tertullian’s mordant promise still holds: the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. But seed sown in Colombian soil is watered with the tears of widows who must now raise children under armed threat. Our solidarity cannot remain sentimental. Open Doors and the Confederation of Evangelical Churches in Colombia plead for prayer and for funds to relocate pastors whose faces are pinned to cartel noticeboards. We dare not turn the page and move on.
“Chuhri!”—The Slur Behind the Veil
In Pakistan, the persecution is as old as the Partition. What shocked even weary advocates was the duration of 14-year-old Muskan Liaqat’s captivity. Forced “marriages” of Christian girls, some only ten, have become a cynical jurisdictional shelter for rapists who know that lower courts often capitulate once a conversion certificate appears. Muskan’s gaunt escape photo, arm in cast, tells the story: her bones broken, her spirit somehow not. CTS lawyers now battle both trauma and an Islamic-legal machine primed to return her to bondage. The Apostle’s exhortation rings across twenty centuries: “Remember those in prison, as though in prison with them” (Heb 13:3). Remember, and act.
Letters to Pakistan’s embassy, monthly gifts to frontline ministries, and unflinching insistence that trade talks include religious-freedom benchmarks: these are not optional for Christians who enjoy the rule of law.
America’s New Blood Sport: Dancing on Graves
We expect brutality from narco-warlords and Islamist zealots. More chilling is the sneer that rose on domestic screens as the Guadalupe River swallowed Texan cabins. Verified accounts with tens of thousands of followers rejoiced that “redneck reject states” were reaping divine judgment. One blue-check foodie even declared herself “kinda happy” the National Weather Service missed its forecast so that more children would drown. The digital mob rendered an instant verdict: wrong politics forfeits compassion.
Chesterton warned that the modern world “is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Justice, severed from charity, curdles into vengeance. Environmental concern untethered from the imago Dei becomes misanthropy: let the floods cleanse the deplorables. Behind the edgy sarcasm lurks the oldest heresy of all; the belief that some lives are unworthy of mourning.
But Christians cannot reply in kind. When the early pagans left plague victims to die, the Church nursed them; when Roman governors executed bishops, the faithful gathered at the tombs to pray for their persecutors. The Lord who forgave from the Cross leaves us no softer alternative.
The Thread That Binds
What, then, unites a Colombian mass grave, a Pakistani safe-house, and a Texan riverbank? Each is a battlefield where the civitas terrena, Augustine’s city of man, flexes against the civitas Dei. The weapons differ: bullets in the jungle, forced certificates in a Lahore courtroom, hashtags flung from air-conditioned lofts. Yet the animating spirit is identical: hatred of the Name, and of those who bear it.
Saint John Chrysostom urged his flock: “No matter how many waves and how high they rise, they cannot sink the ship of Christ.” The waves are rising, literal and figurative, but the hull is sound. Our task is to man the pumps:
Intercede and inform. Make the plight of persecuted believers a fixture of family prayer and parish bulletins. Subscribe to field-tested watchdogs like Open Doors and Voice of the Martyrs.
Give until it costs. Relief for Kerr County families, legal aid for Muskan’s counsel, relocation funds for Colombian pastors; each is a concrete act of mercy that stores treasure where rust cannot corrode.
Build resilient communities. Homeschool co-ops, classical Christian schools, parish emergency teams, and local arks against cultural floodwaters.
Speak the truth in public spaces. Charity is not silence. When mockers cheer children’s deaths, rebut with reasoned words and visible lament, refusing the easy cruelty of our age.
Hope That Does Not Mock the Hurting
The novelist François Mauriac once said that amid the collapse of civilizations, “the only thing that saves us from the abyss is tenderness for those who suffer.” Christian tenderness is not mere sentiment; it is cruciform action rooted in the Resurrection.
Let the world measure us not by trending hashtags but by the graves we tend, the daughters we shelter, and the flood-soaked neighbors we serve. Against the sneer of Babylon we set the canticle of Mary: He casts down the mighty, He lifts up the lowly. And He will, in the end, wipe away every tear, including those shed this week in Colombia’s forests, Lahore’s shelters, and the suburbanite homes of Kerrville. Until that day, we watch, we work, we weep; never alone.
Words fail to describe the disbelief of the cruelty of man… come Lord Jesus 😢🙏🏻