Christians Should be Concerned with Refugee Resettlement, Says Religious Freedom Advocate

A Christian religious freedom advocate has asserted that Christians ought to be concerned with the refugee crisis and how the U.S. is resettling refugees.

The Christian Post reports that Faith McDonnell, the director of Religious Liberty Programs and the Church Alliance for a New Sudan at the Washington-based think tank Institute on Religion and Democracy, believes that Christians should have a voice in the way governments resettle refugees.

McDonnell has called out Mark Soerens, the U.S. director of church mobilization for the evangelical refugee resettlement organization World Relief.

Soerens had asserted that the State Department in no way had an “anti-Christian bias” when it comes to refugees of different religious affiliations.

McDonnell, however, begs to differ. She points to the fact that, although the U.S. has resettled many Christians refugees, they are beginning to welcome more and more Muslim refugees who come from terrorist hot spots in the Middle East.

The U.S., she says, is now accepting more Muslim than Christian refugees. In the last year, the U.S. has resettled almost 29,000 Christian refugees, but over 30,500 Muslim refugees.

Also, McDonnell points out, the U.S. has welcomed 9,077 Muslim refugees from the conflict in Syria, but only 47 Christian Syrian refugees.

McDonnell said U.S. officials should have anticipated the refugee crisis better: “[B]oth Syrian and Iraqi Christians had been suffering for a long time, even before the Syrian war with Assad and everything started,” she said. “We should have been prepared for that. If you are refugee resettlement people and you are seeing what is on the radar screen, if you had any thought in your mind at all that Christians are being persecuted because they are Christians, then they would have been on their radar screen already."

Publication date: August 24, 2016