At the same time, it cheapens the witness of legions of victims of persecution and violence to suggest their suffering doesn’t count as “religious” simply because their oppressors aren’t directly motivated by religious concerns. There are signs that many Christian churches are moving toward a more balanced understanding. On May 25, 2013, Fr. Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi was beatified by the Catholic Church as a martyr, having been killed in 1993 for challenging the Mafia’s hold on his Palermo neighborhood, Brancaccio. The motives of his assassins may not have had anything to do with Christianity, but Puglisi’s certainly did.
Here’s the bottom line, expressed in a sound bite: in assessing the scope and scale of today’s war on Christians, it’s not enough to consider what was in the mind of the person pulling the trigger—we also have to ponder what was in the heart of the believer getting shot.
WHY THE SILENCE?
Back in 1997, American author Paul Marshall said that anti-Christian persecution had been “all but totally ignored by the world at large.” To be sure, the situation has changed in the sixteen years since Marshall’s classic work Their Blood Cries Out. A cluster of advocacy groups and relief organizations has emerged, and from time to time anti-Christian persecution has drawn coverage in major news outlets such as the Economist, Newsweek, and Commentary. On the whole, however, the war on Christians remains the world’s best-kept secret. As recently as 2011, Italian journalist Francesca Paci—who writes for the Italian media market, which probably pays more attention to Christian topics than almost any other culture on earth, given the massive footprint of the Vatican—said about the fate of persecuted Christians in places such as Iraq, Algeria, and India: “We ignore too many things, and even more indefensibly, we pretend not to see too many things.”
In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, addressed the crisis facing Arab Christianity in the Middle East during a conference in London. He bluntly asked: “Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?” Those are questions that deserve answers, and understanding the motives for the silence about the global war on Christians is a good place to begin.
Explaining the Silence in the Secular Milieu
In the secular milieu, several factors intersect to explain the relative indifference toward the global persecution of Christians. First is the basic point that some secularists have little personal experience of religion and can be strikingly ignorant on religious subjects. There’s also a reflexive hostility to institutional religion, especially Christianity, in some sectors of secular opinion. People conditioned by such views are inclined to see Christianity as the agent of repression, not its victim. Say “religious persecution,” and the images that come to mind are the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion, Bruno and Savonarola, the Salem witch trials—all chapters of history in which Christianity is cast as the villain. For many such folks today, “Christianity” means an all-male gerontocracy in Rome cracking down on progressive American nuns, or intemperate evangelicals seeking to restrict a woman’s right to choose or a gay’s right to marry.
Victims of the global war on Christians challenge this narrative head-on, because they show Christianity not as the oppressor but as the oppressed. By 2012, almost two-thirds of the 2.2 billion Christians in the world lived outside of the West, and that share should reach three-quarters by midcentury. These Christians often carry a double or triple stigma, representing not only a faith that arouses suspicion but also an oppressed ethnic group (such as the Karen or Chin in Burma) or social class (such as Dalit converts in India, who may be as much as 60 percent of the country’s Christian population). Given the facts on the ground, it’s time for secular thought to get past the Da Vinci Code. Today’s Christians aren’t the ones dispatching mad assassins; more often than not, they’re the ones fleeing the assassins others have dispatched.
For many people, the war on Christians is also simply too far away. Today’s martyrs often go to their deaths in Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands, and Sudan—places that many people in the West would struggle to find on a map, to say nothing of feeling a personal investment in what’s happening there. The war on Christians is also incredibly complex, with no simple explanation and no simple remedy to advocate. What might work to combat Buddhist extremism in Bangladesh may be unsuited to deal with narcoterrorists in Colombia.
A further reason for paralysis is suggested by French intellectual Régis Debray, a veteran leftist who fought alongside Che Guevara. Debray observes that anti-Christian persecution falls squarely into the political blind spot of the West. The victims, Debray argues, are “too Christian” to excite the left, “too foreign” to interest the right. Western politics also encourages people to see only part of the picture. Conservatives pounce on every outrage by Islamic radicals but shrink from condemning the way Israeli security policies often suck the life out of Arab Christianity. Liberals celebrate the martyrs to right-wing regimes in Latin America but are often unwilling to acknowledge the reality of anti-Christian hatred in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, or the way that leftist regimes often make Christians their first targets.
Explaining the Silence in the Churches
It might be disappointing that secular circles haven’t seized on anti-Christian persecution, but it’s probably not terribly surprising. What’s less obvious is why mainstream Western Christianity hasn’t focused on it. It’s probably a safe bet that one could visit a variety of different Christian denominations over an extended period of time before hearing a sermon devoted to the subject of the global war on Christians, or finding an adult faith formation group studying it, or reading about it while browsing the collection of literature in the back of a church. At the political and social levels, the churches of the West have not yet driven anti-Christian persecution to the top of anybody’s to-do list, despite expending enormous resources on other questions.
How do we account for the apparent paradox that the most compelling Christian narrative of the early twenty-first century has seemingly been lost on a broad swath of Christian consciousness?
One reason has already been mentioned, which is that Christians in Western societies generally have no personal experience of persecution. I’m a good example. I grew up a Catholic in western Kansas during the 1970s and 1980s, and the closest I ever came to suffering for the faith was eating fish sticks or macaroni and cheese on Fridays during Lent. When I first began to encounter reports about anti-Christian violence, my initial reaction was to regard them as rare and exceptional, not as evidence of something pervasive or systematic. Though we won’t pursue the point here, there may be a parallel with the climate of denial many victims of sexual abuse in Christian churches experienced when they first came forward; even when people believed the individual reports, they had a hard time seeing them as part of a larger pattern.
There’s also a broad tendency in Western societies, one that has reached inside many Christian denominations as well, to see the primary function of religion as promoting inner peace and tranquility. Hearing accounts of how Muslim radicals in Egypt pour sulfuric acid on the wrists of Coptic Christians in order to eviscerate the tattooed crosses most Copts wear is not exactly conducive to inner peace. It’s disturbing and uncomfortable, and perhaps not what some Christians in the West are seeking.
Christians are also shaped by the societies in which they live, and American Christians in particular often reflect the somewhat myopically domestic outlook of the broader culture. When most American Christians talk about “the church,” what they usually mean is the American church. When they say “the clergy,” they mean American clergy, and when they say “the laity,” they mean American laity. Browse a collection of recent titles by Christian authors in the United States, and whether their sympathies lie on the left, on the right, or in the center, the common denominator is often that their imaginations end at the water’s edge.
On a more practical note, most churches are nonprofit opera
tions facing chronically limited resources, and the need to pay the electric bill, fix the roof, and pay the pastor’s salary sometimes overwhelms everything else. Further, there’s “good-cause fatigue” among many church-goers, who are routinely hit up to support every humanitarian and spiritual endeavor under the sun, and after a while they simply start tuning out anything that strikes them as another sales pitch.
As an additional factor, most Christian denominations have expended enormous resources in recent decades on building interfaith dialogues. That’s a welcome advance from the antagonism and fear toward other faiths that once dominated Christian psychology, but it also runs the risk of “interfaith correctness.” Some Christians may be reluctant to speak out about the difficulties facing Arab Christians in Israel for fear of disrupting Christian/Jewish relations; others may be hesitant to challenge Muslims about the oppression of Christians in Islamic societies for fear of stoking a “clash of civilizations.” While responsibility for the global war on Christians should not be imputed to entire religions, timidity about putting real issues on the table in interfaith dialogue is also a factor in explaining why Christians don’t engage the global war with greater verve.
Finally, there’s one more force at work. A distressing share of Christian time and treasure today is eaten up by internal battles, making it difficult to galvanize a unified response on anything. Not only is that point true across denominational lines, but it’s become increasingly the case even within denominations. If Christians are to come together to respond effectively to the global war on their sisters and brothers in the faith, one preliminary challenge will be to break through tribalization—to foster a “post-tribal” mind-set in which the things that unite Christians are seen as more important than the fractures that divide them.
TIME TO WAKE UP
These factors may amount to explanations, but they’re not excuses. It’s well past time for the world, especially its Christians, to wake up.
No faith commitment is required to see the plight of persecuted Christians as an urgent human rights priority. Just as one didn’t need to be Jewish to be concerned with the fate of dissident Soviet Jews in the 1960s and 1970s, and one didn’t need to be black to feel outrage over South African apartheid in the 1980s, one doesn’t have to be a Christian today to be appalled by the widespread torture and murder of Christians.
Yet for Christians, there’s a special obligation. In theological parlance, one might say that Christians have a “vocation” to come to the aid of their suffering sisters and brothers. Though the various denominations understand baptism somewhat differently, all share a conviction that through baptism we’re incorporated into the Body of Christ, so that the suffering of any part of that body, anywhere, is our pain too. St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians issues this charge: “So then, while we have the opportunity, let us do good to all, but especially to those who belong to the family of the faith.” The question facing the Christian conscience today is, does that mean anything, or is it just a bit of pious rhetoric?
At a more practical level, Christians also have a responsibility because in many cases they’re the only ones in a position to do anything. Victims of the global war on Christians are often reluctant to report what’s happened, to press legal charges, or to reveal their suffering to the media. They fear blowback for speaking out and will only discuss their experiences with people they trust, meaning fellow believers. Christians are often the only people in a position to collect reports of what’s really happening on the ground, and the only ones who can build relationships with victims in order to bring them into the conversation about the most effective way to respond.
Aside from the moral and spiritual imperatives, there are three other reasons why making this a core concern in the early twenty-first century would be good for the Christian soul.
First, the defense of persecuted Christians could be a major boon to the ecumenical movement, meaning the push to put the divided Christian family back together again. In the twentieth century, pioneers of the ecumenical movement were powerfully influenced by the experience of the Soviet gulags and the Nazi concentration camps, where Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians formed a common fellowship of suffering. The same experience is unfolding today, and it could have a similarly dramatic ecumenical impact. Second, the defense of persecuted Christians could also help believers in the West get past their internal fights. Third, the testimony of the martyrs has a unique spiritual power, so the better known their stories are in popular Christian consciousness, the healthier global Christianity will be.
HOPE AND PERSPECTIVE
My first personal taste of this spiritual punch came in June 2001, while I was covering Pope John Paul II’s trip to Ukraine. During the Soviet era, the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine was the largest illegal religious body in the world, and in percentage terms no nation produced more martyrs. John Paul went to Ukraine in part to honor their memory and in part to celebrate the church’s renaissance following the collapse of the Soviet system. On June 26, he celebrated a huge outdoor Mass in an arena normally used for horse races, which on this day was packed with a million people who had braved strong rain and mud.
Before I reached the heart of the crowd, I happened to see a young woman off by herself weeping quietly. Curious, I approached and asked if she would mind telling me what she was feeling. In halting English, she told me that her grandfather had been a Greek Catholic priest. (The Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine is one of twenty-two Eastern churches in communion with Rome, and most have married clergy.) He had been rounded up and packed off to the gulags, and because he refused to renounce his faith, he was beaten, starved, and tortured, and he eventually died in prison. He was actually nailed upside down to the prison wall, in a grotesque parody of the crucifixion. After telling me the story, the young woman explained why she was crying: “I’m imagining what my grandfather must be feeling today looking down from heaven and seeing the Holy Father standing on Ukrainian soil.”
That moment had a lasting impact. What she brought home for me is that beyond all the frustrations Christians feel—beyond the scandals, crises, and failures that frequently mar the churches—there’s something so precious about faith in Christ and membership in the church that, when push comes to shove, ordinary people will pay in blood rather than let it go. That insight has sustained me when I’ve been tempted to despair, and it’s also given me a deeper sense of what’s truly important. I know that similar experiences have had the same impact on others. The martyrs, in other words, offer us the two most precious commodities in the spiritual life: hope and perspective.
In the end, I can do no better to drive home the case than to quote Francesa Paci from her book Dove muoiono i Cristiani (Where Christians are dying). Her reference to the Vatican reflects its centrality in Italian psychology, but otherwise her points are universally applicable.
Christians are dying in Orissa, in Iraq, in the Brazilian Amazon, but above all they’re dying in the indifference of so many who, not wanting to seem clericalist, simply minimize what’s happening. Their response is predictable: “Why doesn’t the Vatican do something about it?” If that’s the case, I ask my conscience, then why should I worry about the fate of the Gypsies instead of referring the problem to Romania or the former Yugoslavia? Why should I concern myself with child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa who are so far away from me? Why should I support campaigns against hunger or AIDS, or express solidarity with peoples without a homeland such as the Palestinians? Neither does the attempt work to justify this scant attention with the contradictions of the Church, beginning with the awful stories of pedophile priests. What do Pakistani Christians condemned to death for preferring the Gospel over the Qur’an have to do with the evil desires of those priests, or the omertà that for a long time shamefully protected them? It would be like ignoring the desperation of the immigrants who arrive at our shores in search of a better life with the argument that some of them will end up as delinquents.
Paci has it exactly right. This book’s burden is to tell the stories of the global war on Christians and to debunk the myths that too often surround it.
PART ONE
Anti-Christian Persecution Around the World
This section begins with an overview of the threats facing Christians and offers a series of snapshots from the front lines of the global war. The focus is limited to the past twenty years, meaning since 1993, and in most cases the examples date from the opening years of this century. To be clear, this is far from a comprehensive account. As the next chapter illustrates, estimates of the annual casualties in this global war range from a high of 100,000 to a low of 7,300. Even if we take the low-end number, it would work out to 146,000 new Christian martyrs over the past twenty years. If the higher end estimates turn out to be closer to the truth, then we’re talking about 2 million. In either case, telling all these stories would be impossible. Moreover, one doesn’t have to die to be a victim of the global war. Helen Berhane and other inmates lucky enough to survive Eritrea’s Me’eter concentration camp are not literally martyrs, but they are victims—and once again, the count of such folks is simply too high to be captured in its entirety.
Instead, this section provides representative examples of the kinds of suffering Christians around the world endure—legal harassment, social discrimination, arbitrary detention and imprisonment, torture, physical assault and injury, and, all too often, death. The aim is to strike a balance between telling a sufficient number of stories that the scale of the global war becomes clear, without compounding examples to such a degree that readers become numb to the human realities. In every case, the stories are intended to offer pieces of a bigger picture, and the omission of certain victims or atrocities should not suggest that those people do not count.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 3
