The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  Chávez liked to quote from the Bible to suggest that Jesus was a proto-socialist, and he had supporters and advisors in the clerical ranks, such as Fr. Jesús Gazo, a Jesuit who says that Venezuela’s ruler had “a strong theological formation.” Despite that, Chávez also repeatedly lashed out against his Christian opposition. Hundreds of Christian missionaries have been expelled from the country, accused of contaminating the cultures of indigenous populations. The government’s Ministry of Interior revoked their permission to serve in the Venezuelan jungles or run schools, clinics, and nutrition centers that had been in operation for decades. Chávez called the missionaries “imperialists” and proclaimed he felt “ashamed” at their presence. Spokespeople for the government routinely accuse Christian leaders in Venezuela of conspiring with the United States against the regime.

  A Protestant group called New Tribes Ministries has been singled out for special harassment. One of Latin America’s biggest missionary organizations, its leaders were forced to leave remote tribal areas after government officials warned that they would be expelled and banned from working with indigenous tribes. Chávez called them “part of a broader conspiracy in Washington to topple a president whose regional influence is growing thanks to massive oil revenues.”

  Occasionally the anti-religious backlash turns violent. In 2004, Joel Briceño, twenty-seven, a minister for an evangelical church in Cabudare, was shot to death by Venezuelan police, who claimed they had mistaken him and his companions for criminals. Local observers said the willingness of the police to open fire on a car carrying Briceño and a friend suggested a fairly open contempt for Christian leaders, especially those known to be critical of the regime’s record on religious freedom.

  In January 2009, members of the government-affiliated La Piedrita militia launched a tear-gas assault on the residence of the Apostolic Nuncio, the pope’s ambassador in Venezuela, marking the sixth such attack in the previous two years. The attackers left behind pamphlets denouncing priests who had criticized the government. The 2009 attack was believed to have been motivated by a decision by the nuncio to grant temporary asylum to members of the political opposition, as well as an anti-Chávez student activist.

  In late April 2010, an elderly American priest named Fr. Esteban Woods was found dead at his home in the state of Bolívar, where he had served for nearly half his life. The missionary priest had been gagged and stabbed multiple times. Although local officials attributed the killing to a robbery gone wrong, the bishop of Ciudad Guayana, Mariano Parra, said Woods’s death was a “sign of the violence” being experienced throughout Venezuela.

  In May 2010, a Catholic church in Caracas was assaulted by vandals who painted crude renderings of weapons of war on images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, in an incident widely taken as a warning of violence against religious leaders who give aid and comfort to the political opposition. A leader of the Catholic bishops’ conference in Venezuela described the acts “as a way of sowing hatred and death” among the people. Later that year, in July, Chávez went on national television to describe Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino as a “Neanderthal” and the other Catholic bishops of the country as “a bunch of cavemen.”

  There’s little sign these tensions are about to ebb. In early January 2013, after Chávez had been reelected to another six-year term but questions about his health were rampant, the Catholic bishops of Venezuela criticized the government for making shifting and incomplete statements about the president’s health, saying that “the government hasn’t told the nation all of the truth” and warning that “the nation’s political and social stability is at serious risk.” Several government officials responding by telling the bishops to stay out of politics and warning of possible reprisals should they continue attempting to “destabilize” the country.

  Profile: Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso

  Catholics are not the only ones in Latin America who have their martyrs to social justice. Although not quite as celebrated as Sr. Dorothy Stang, a sixteen-year-old Pentecostal named Manuel Gutiérrez inadvertently gave his life to defend the poor during a tumultuous series of protests that gripped Chile from 2010 to 2012.

  Popularly known as the “Chilean Winter,” and also referred to as the “Chilean Education Conflict,” these student-Sed protests began with demands for a new educational framework in the country, including more direct state support for secondary education and an end to subsidies for a for-profit model in higher education. More broadly, the uprisings reflected Chilean young people’s deep discontent with the country’s entrenched economic inequalities. Chile has the highest per capita income of any country in South America, but also the continent’s widest income gap between rich and poor. As they developed, the student protests linked up with similar movements among the working classes, especially the country’s all-important mining sector.

  Manuel Gutiérrez was among those Chilean youth pressing for a more just future. He was an active member of the Methodist Pentecostal Church in the Villa Jaime Eyzaguirre neighborhood of Santiago, the national capital. (Pentecostalism in Chile was born within the Methodist Church and retains much of its heritage, although the Methodist powers that be, appalled by the shouting and speaking in tongues, kicked out the rowdy Pentecostals in 1910.) Manuel was described as a cheerful and deeply faithful member of the congregation; his dream was to enter the seminary and become a Pentecostal pastor. He told friends he hoped to mobilize the church to become an agent for change. Friends and relatives described him as a quiet teenager who was not part of a gang or any radical political groups, and who never had any difficulties with the law.

  On August 25, 2011, Manuel took his brother Gersón, who is confined to a wheelchair, to take part in a two-day national strike that had been called by a union known as the Workers United Center of Chile. Four separate marches took place in Santiago over those two days, along with additional demonstrations in other parts of the country, reportedly involving six hundred thousand people. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and scores injured in conflicts with police, who used tear gas and water cannons in an effort to disperse the crowds. Eventually panicked police officers opened fire on one such crowd, discharging their weapons at least three times. One of those bullets struck Manuel Gutiérrez in the chest, leaving him dead on the spot.

  The death inflamed an already tense situation, and outrage swept across the country. Five policemen were detained for questioning, and charges were eventually filed against Officer Miguel Millacura, who was found by an investigation to have fired the fatal shot. As pressure mounted, a total of eight officers were dismissed and the chief of Chile’s national police force resigned. The scandal marked a turning point, as just days later the Education Committee of the Chilean Senate approved a reform package that included several of the protestors’ key demands. The memory of the incident has not been lost. On the one-year anniversary of his death, a group called the Committee for Justice for Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso continued its battle to reform the way charges against police are handled in Chilean courts.

  By all accounts, Manuel Gutiérrez was not killed for religious motives, and he wasn’t anyone’s explicit target. The police officer charged with the shooting, Millacura, apologized to the family and insisted that he hadn’t meant to kill anyone. At the same time, there’s little reason to doubt that Gutiérrez chose to attend that August 25 protest for reasons rooted in his Christian faith. By that stage, it was already clear that things had turned violent, and Manuel knew that he and his wheelchair-bound brother could be caught up in the mayhem. He chose to go anyway, because he believed that’s what an authentic Christian and a future pastor would do. We’ll return to this point in chapter 10, but the death of Manuel Gutiérrez is a classic example of a broader point: in evaluating whether an act falls within the scope of the global war on Christians, it’s not enough to focus on the motives of the perpetrator—one has to bring the motives of the victim into view as well.

  Gutiérrez was buried in a Protestant cemetery
called Road to Canaan on the outskirts of Santiago, in a service attended by hundreds of fellow Pentecostals as well as students, laborers, and other leaders in the protest movement. His disabled brother, Gersón, described Manuel as a “martyr.”

  5

  THE MIDDLE EAST

  Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has become an international symbol of the press for human rights in Iran. Amnesty International and other NGOs have rallied to his cause, while heads of state and foreign ministers have warned Iran of serious consequences should a death sentence passed against the thirty-five-year-old Protestant pastor be carried out. Christian groups have made Nadarkhani into an emblem of the threats not only in Iran but across the Middle East. Vicissitudes in Nadarkhani’s case make international headlines, and in the ultimate proof of celebrity status in the twenty-first century, he’s got his own Wikipedia page.

  In part, this visibility is due to the fact that, like Asia Bibi, Nadarkhani seems to be experiencing a slow-motion form of martyrdom. He’s been arrested, sentenced to death, allowed to stew in prison, released, then rearrested and released anew. In part too, Nadarkhani’s fate is intertwined with Western ferment over Iran itself. His situation is reported not only in terms of anti-Christian oppression but also as a politics story about tensions with a potential nuclear power. Furthermore, the Iranians have helped make Nadarkhani a star by handling his case in a deliberately provocative fashion—releasing him in September 2012, only to take him back into custody three months later on Christmas Day, a choice calculated to elicit outrage. He was released again in early January 2013, though in a grotesque hint of how precarious his situation continues to be, false rumors of his execution swept the blogosphere in March 2013.

  Born in Rasht, in Gilan province in northern Iran, Nadarkhani grew up in a Shi’ite Muslim family, though he says he never practiced the faith. Court documents say that Nadarkhani converted to Christianity when he was nineteen, and he exuded the typical zeal of the convert, becoming an active member of his church and moving into a position of leadership. Although he’s described as a member of the Protestant Evangelical Church of Iran, his particular brand of Christianity is more akin to Pentecostalism than what most Americans think of as evangelical Protestantism. His church upholds a “oneness” doctrine of God, meaning they reject the Trinity, and they emphasize speaking in tongues and other “fruits of the Spirit.” Nadarkhani is married with two sons, aged eleven and nine.

  Although Iranian law does not include a crime of “apostasy,” judges may still find people guilty of the offense based on religious fatwas, recognized by Iranian courts as legitimate sources of case law. That custom reflects popular sentiment, confirmed by a June 2013 Pew Forum survey that found 83 percent of Iranians favor the use of shariah and only 37 percent believe that the country adheres closely enough to Islamic law.

  Nadarkhani was first arrested in December 2006 and charged with both apostasy and proselytizing. (Iran recognizes several Christian churches, but that means that only Iranians born into these churches are permitted to practice their faith. The country does not tolerate missionary activity.) Nadarkhani was released two weeks later, receiving a warning about engaging in evangelism. He got in hot water again in 2009, when Iran revised its educational policies to require all students to take courses in the Qur’an. Nadarkhani went to a school to protest on the grounds that the law violated constitutional protections of freedom of religion, an action that led to his being rearrested in October 2009. His wife, Fatemeh Pasandideh, was also charged with apostasy and sentenced to life in prison. She was later released in October 2010, after serving four months in the Lakan prison near their hometown of Rasht.

  As furor over the treatment of Nadarkhani began to build, government officials briefly said that he had been accused of rape and extortion, but those charges never figured in any official proceedings and most observers regard them as a smokescreen. He eventually came to trial in September 2010, facing charges of apostasy and proselytism. Although his attorney claims there were numerous procedural errors, Nadarkhani was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death by hanging.

  After the verdict, Nadarkhani was placed in a jail for political prisoners and denied access to his family and his attorney. Officials repeatedly delayed the death sentence, apparently wanting to give the pastor an opportunity to save himself by reconverting to Islam. Meanwhile, his attorneys pursued an appeal to the Iranian Supreme Court, which upheld the death sentence in July 2011 but offered Nadarkhani a reprieve should he embrace Islam. In September 2012, another court retried Nadarkhani and acquitted him on the charge of apostasy. He was still found guilty of proselytizing and sentenced to three years in jail, but was released on the basis of time already served.

  That seemed to be the end of Nadarkhani’s ordeal, but it was not to be so. Officials rearrested Nadarkhani on Christmas Day in 2012, insisting that the paperwork for his release had been improperly filled out and that he actually had another forty days left on his sentence. Most people saw the decision to jail him during Christmas as a fairly blatant reminder that Christians who evangelize are not welcome. Nadarkhani was eventually released the following month.

  Nadarkhani, to be sure, is hardly the only pastor in Iran to land in jail. There’s also Saeed Abedini, a Christian convert who once aspired to be a Shi’ite suicide bomber. He and his wife moved to America in 2005 but continued to support Christian missions in Iran, and during a missionary trip in July 2012 he was arrested by Iranian authorities and shipped off to Evin prison in the country’s northwest, where activists claim he has been beaten and abused. His wife remains in Boise, Idaho, while he awaits trial on unspecified charges. During Christmas 2012, activists in the West urged Christians to leave an honorary place at their Christmas tables for Abedini. There’s also Vruir Avanessian, an Iranian Armenian Christian minister who was interrogated at the notorious Evin prison after being placed under arrest along with several other Christians for gathering at a home in northern Tehran for a prayer service. Avanessian was released after spending fifteen days in prison, and he was required to post bail of roughly $60,000.

  Even if geopolitical reasons temporarily induce officials to grant a reprieve, Christians in Iran face a constant sword of Damocles in the risk of being rearrested. In essence, they either have to abandon the country or live in a state of perpetual fear. To date, Nadarkhani is the only Christian figure formally designated for capital punishment. Metaphorically, however, any Christian in the country who insists on the right to normal pastoral life, including the ability to share the faith, is at least potentially facing a death sentence.

  THE MIDDLE EAST: OVERVIEW

  The term “Middle East” can include as few as sixteen states and as many as thirty-eight, depending on how expansive a notion one adopts. Here, we’ll use it to designate the Islamic-dominated stretch of the globe that extends from North Africa and the Fertile Crescent all the way into portions of Central Asia. For our purposes, places such as Egypt, Somalia, Algeria, and Afghanistan will count as part of the Middle East, as well as the usual countries such as Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

  Across the board, Christianity in the region faces steep challenges. In the early twentieth century, Arab Christians represented 20 percent of the population. They had an outsize social footprint, running the lion’s share of the area’s schools, hospitals, and social service centers. Christians were overrepresented among the professional and educated classes, and they played significant roles in both the Arab Renaissance and the pan-Arab nationalist movement. Leading lights included George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Syrian intellectual Constantin Zureiq, among the first to popularize Arab nationalism. Both came from Greek Orthodox families.

  Today, however, that vibrant Arab Christianity feels like a dying species. Christianity now represents just 5 percent of the population, no more than twelve million people, and current projections show that number dropping to six million by the middle of the cen
tury. The Christian population began to drop in the early twentieth century, due to factors such as lower birth rates and immigration. In the last three decades, the decline has accelerated due to armed conflict, political and economic stagnation, and a rising tide of religious persecution.

  At the same time, things aren’t entirely gloom and doom. In the Gulf States there’s a burgeoning Christian presence, formed mostly by guest workers from countries such as the Philippines, Korea, India, Lebanon, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Looking just at Catholics, there are now believed to be 350,000 Catholics in Kuwait, 300,000 in Qatar, 150,000 in Bahrain, and 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia, which includes 1.2 million Filipinos in the Saudi kingdom. For the most part they work in either the petroleum or domestic services industries, and most will be in their host countries only temporarily. These workers face a wide range of difficulties, from abusive working conditions and a lack of legal protection to a fairly complete absence of religious freedom. Some Western embassies allow them to gather for prayer, as do compounds operated by the oil companies. Apart from those protected spaces, Christians are at risk, and even “house church” services are routinely raided and harassed. As these migrant workers continue to make their way in the region, they represent tempting new targets in the global war on Christians.

  AFGHANISTAN

  Open Doors rates Afghanistan among the top two or three countries in the world in terms of dangers to Christians. Ten years after the Taliban was swept from power by U.S.-led forces, the situation remains chaotic for minority groups, including the small Christian community, estimated at perhaps no more than twenty-five hundred out of a national population of twenty-nine million. Although the Afghan government has signed agreements promising to respect religious freedom, its ability to project control is limited.