A controversy has erupted in the United Kingdom over Christian converts seeking asylum having their claims assessed on the basis of their ability to recite “Bible trivia”.

An all-party parliamentary group on international religious freedom in the UK parliament says asylum claims being made by Christians were being dealt with unfairly by officials.

They blamed a “lack of understanding of religion and belief” for the wrong people being rejected and said some people could be deported when they were at genuine risk of persecution.

One Iranian asylum seeker who had converted to Christianity had his claim was rejected following his asylum interview.

“One question they asked me was very strange: ‘what colour was the cover of the Bible?’,” he told the BBC.

“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.”

Questions such as, “What are the Ten commandments?”, “When is Pentecost?” and “How many books are there in the Bible?”, are being put to asylum seekers in an attempt to test claims of religious conversion, says a report published by the all-party group.

The report says factual questioning of asylum seekers is “too simplistic a way to judge if an individual is, for example, a genuine convert. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence has shown that some people are learning as much as they can so they can be prepared for the Home Office interview.”

Although religious persecution constitutes grounds for asylum, assessment through question and answer sessions fails to reflect the “inherently internal and personal nature of religion and belief”, the report says.

“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, said Baroness Elizabeth Berridge, who led the all-party group’s inquiry.

“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,” she said

There are no official figures on asylum claims on religious grounds in the UK but there is evidence that the majority are former Muslims who have turned to Christianity.

Ethics Professor Ian Pringle says that many people who convert to Christianity in strictly Islamic countries may not have access to Christian theology or even current copies of the Bible.

“If you’ve come to faith in an underground house church in Iran, where you’ve been able to borrow a New Testament for a week, you’re probably not going to know the Ten Commandments off by heart,” Prof Pringle said.

“They should be trying to understand the difference between rote learning and what’s in people’s hearts,” he said.

An AMES Australia random street survey of 30 people in Melbourne found only two could recite the Ten Commandments, three knew the number of books in the Bible (Ans: 46 Catholic, 39 Protestant) and none knew the date of Pentecost this year (Ans: 50 days after Easter Sunday).

Sarah Gilmour
AMES Australia Staff Writer