You can easily see this around the world. When the media starts to demonise Christians then you know what is coming up. It's a sort of brainwashing. A lot of secular media is trying to do that against Bible-believing Christians.
Christians who have no morals at all are not targeted because they are not dangerous to secularists. It is the believers who are really dangerous to secularist fundamentalism.
CT: Is that changing the nature of your work within Europe?
JC: The European Evangelical Alliance is doing good work from Brussels and the European Union and they are doing what they can. Secularisation is really a strong trend in the western parts of Europe.
The new thing of course is that the countries from the east that have joined the European Union, the countries with a strong Catholic tradition will play an interesting role in the future.
I think in the future it's actually the Catholic Church in Europe that will be the strong voice for the Christian faith and the Bible while the Protestants are very split and very weak and we are unfortunately very quiet.
CT: Looking to the future and to regions like the Holy Land or countries like Iraq, is there a chance of these areas re-populating with Christians?
JC: No. I think that the war in Iraq has created the biggest movement of people in the Middle East since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. And I think there is no turning back. I think Iraq is a lost area for Christians and I think Christianity is a lost treasure for Iraq - unfortunately. I do not see democracy in Iraq for the next 20 or 30 years. In fact I think there will be democracy in Iran before there is democracy in Iraq.
CT: What is the Religious Liberty Commission going to focus on now?
JC: I think there are several areas where we have to concentrate our work. One will be to build good relations with groups and people inside the Muslim world who do not approve of radical Islam. A second thing will be to promote the religious freedom of Muslims in Europe. There are many attacks against Muslims every year, in Germany for instance. We need to speak for them and that is not easy for evangelicals because we love to only speak about ourselves.
A third thing will be to activate our work at the United Nations because that is a strong platform to speak for religious freedom for all. We want religious freedom for all, not only for Christians. The fourth thing will be to continue to work on individual cases, where Christians are about to be tortured or imprisoned or killed. We need to ring the alarm bells to see what we can do to protect them.
