That Christian who was turned down for asylum

You might have seen the story, reported in various places, about the Iranian Christian convert who said that they had turned from Islam to Christianity because Christianity is a religion of peace, only to be met by a letter from the Home Office quoting violent bits of the Bible (e.g., Jesus saying "I come not bring peace but a sword" and parts of Revelation) and saying that that shows the supposed convert to be insincere.

My sympathies are with the Home Office. Why shouldn't immigration officials take an interest in the content of people's religious beliefs? If someone had said that they became a Christian because they valued the chance to form a closer relationship with their local Druid and that their devotion to the faith could be seen by the fact they never missed the chance to sacrifice a hare to Baal come Equinox-tide then we would hope (wouldn't we?) that the immigration official would see that that person is not a genuine Christian. But making that kind of call entails having some grasp of what Christianity is all about. Christianity is a big topic and over-worked civil servants are going to make mistakes from time to time as they try to grasp its nuances, but I don't see why they shouldn't try.

Nor can I see why any such inquiry is necessarily offensive. No doubt genuine and sincere believers will be aggrieved at having their faith questioned but, equally, genuinely devoted loving spouses will be aggrieved at having their marriages questioned. Checks have to be made. The dark mountain of fraud casts its sad shadow across the valley of the honest.

And was this case a mistake? What we are told is that the applicant converted from Islam to Christianity on discovering that Christianity is peaceful while Islam contains violence. That's not the most convincing story, is it? We're not talking about becoming a Jain. Islam is pretty similar to Christianity and Judaism in many ways, including having been around for a long time (with all the historical baggage that brings), having peaceful adherents and having not so peaceful adherents, having been involved in wars as well as in ending them, using vivid metaphorical violence to describe the struggles of the soul, and by and large not being inherently pacifist in worldly affairs. It makes about as much sense to describe Christianity or Islam as a "religion of peace" as it does to describe the UK or Turkey as a "country of peace": sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. There are much bigger doctrinal differences between Islam and Christianity than on the question of peace.

Christians do Christianity no favours by trying to claim for it a position beyond reproach, or suggesting that it is a private matter that cannot be questioned without causing offence. When Jesus called Pharisees hypocrites, his followers didn't tell him off for causing needless offence to deeply religious men. His followers today should be exposed to the same scrutiny.