Let us set the scene. A monk from North Korea, one might imagine, devoted to prayer and the meditative art of kung fu, finds himself behind bars in a Chinese prison. The charge? Embezzlement from a Shaolin temple. The reaction? A chorus of British religious freedom groups, ever vigilant, crying persecution. And I, Arthur Penhaligon, must ask: have we lost all sense of proportion?
This is not the story of a man persecuted for his faith. This is the story of a man who allegedly stole from a religious institution, and is now facing the music. Yet the reflexive Western response is to frame it as yet another assault on religious liberty. It is a tired script, one that plays out with the predictability of a Victorian melodrama. The villain: the Chinese state. The victim: a pious monk. The chorus: British do-gooders who have not the faintest understanding of the context.
Consider the historical parallels. In the late Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity brought with it a host of new moral panics. Christians were accused of everything from incest to cannibalism. Today, the West is gripped by its own moral panics, but now the accused are states that do not conform to our liberal orthodoxies. We have become a society of scolds, ever ready to cluck our tongues at the failings of others while ignoring our own decadence.
The monk in question is no saint. He is an alleged embezzler. Yet somehow, in the eyes of his defenders, his nationality and his religion render him above reproach. This is the sort of intellectual decadence that rots a society from within. We have forgotten that justice is not about identity; it is about acts. A thief is a thief, whether he wears a saffron robe or a business suit.
And what of North Korea? A regime so grotesque that it makes the medieval Inquisition look like a garden party. Its citizens are starved, worked to death in camps, and denied even the most basic human rights. Yet a North Korean monk, a representative of that hellish state, becomes a cause célèbre. The irony would be comical if it were not so depressing.
The British groups who have condemned this verdict would do well to turn their gaze inward. Look at the state of religious freedom in Britain. A Christian baker is hauled before the courts for refusing to bake a cake with a political message. A Muslim woman is vilified for wearing a veil. Our own record is hardly spotless, yet we presume to lecture others.
This is the narcissism of small differences. We obsess over the mote in China's eye while ignoring the beam in our own. The decline of the West is not a matter of economics or military might; it is a decline of the intellect. We have lost the ability to think clearly, to distinguish between persecution and punishment, between a martyr and a criminal.
Let us not forget the kung fu temple itself. Shaolin, a place of martial discipline and spiritual refinement, has been dragged into a geopolitical circus. Its reputation is tarnished, not by the Chinese government, but by a monk who forgot his vows. Yet in the Western narrative, the temple is a victim of state oppression. Nonsense. It is a victim of one man's greed.
I propose a different approach. Let us judge each case on its merits. If the monk stole, let him be punished. If he was framed, let him be freed. But let us not wrap every incident in the mantle of religious freedom. That word, 'freedom', has been so debased by overuse that it now means nothing more than 'something I happen to like'.
The real tragedy is not the imprisonment of a single monk. It is the intellectual laziness that leads us to see a complex world in simple terms. We have become a society of people who would rather moralise than think. And that, my friends, is the path to ruin.
As the Roman historian Tacitus might have said: the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. And the more moralising the commentariat, the less likely we are to find the truth. The next time you hear about a 'persecuted' monk, ask yourself: what did he actually do? The answer, more often than not, will be a great deal more worldly than you imagine.
