All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom or Religion or Belief says converts are being denied asylum for failing to know Bible trivia
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom or Religion or Belief (APPG) has said that Christian converts are being denied asylum in the UK for failing to know the answers to trivia questions about their new faith, news media reported.
According to BBC News, the APPG says that too often Home Office officials are asking Bible trivia questions, rather than probing what someone really believes.
Image credit: WikipediaThe Daily Telegraph noted that converts seeking asylum in Britain must attend an asylum interview with assessors on arrival, where they are asked "basic knowledge questions" about their new faith.
An Iranian asylum seeker told the BBC: "One question they asked me was very strange - what colour was the cover of the Bible. I knew there were different colours. The one I had was red. They asked me questions I was not able to answer - for example, what are the Ten Commandments. I could not name them all from memory."
According to the Christian Post, other cases of rejected asylum applications reportedly included individuals who were unable to detail the various books and chapters of the New Testament, an Indian Christian who did not know about the Catholic rule of abstinence on Fridays, and another Iranian who was asked to name the last book of the Bible, Revelation, with his correct answer in the Farsi language being misunderstood.
Baroness Berridge, who heads the APPG, told the BBC: "The problem with those questions is that if you are not genuine you can learn the answers, and if you are genuine, you may not know the answers … When the system did move on to ask about the lived reality of people's faith, we then found that caseworkers, who are making decisions which can be life or death for people, were not properly supported and trained properly."
Reverend Mark Miller, who has a large congregation of Iranian converts in Stockton-on-Tees, told the BBC that Home Office staff should be "trying to understand the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge."
"They should be asking questions that help them to understand why someone has left behind the faith of their upbringing and the faith of their family," he said.
The British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA) said yesterday that converts to Christianity seeking asylum in the UK are being rejected on very spurious grounds.
Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the BPCA, said: "Our expertise is in the area of Pakistani Christians who make up less than 120 applicants for asylum in the UK each year. Less than 50% attain leave to remain in the UK on initial application and appeals yield little success. This is largely due to the failure of the UK authorities to recognise Pakistan as a country in which Christians face persecution, despite 700 Christian girls being kidnapped, raped and forced into Islamic marriage every year, 4 major bomb attacks targeting Christians in 5 years, a dark history of mob attacks on Christian communities after false blasphemy charges to say the least."