Perhaps the best contemporary example of the church’s political muscle is the role the late John Paul II played in the collapse of Communism. It is, however, far from an isolated case. From the People Power movement in the Philippines that deposed Ferdinand Marcos in 1989 to the independence of East Timor in 2002 and the birth of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, in 2011, Christians have played lead roles in a staggering share of political turning points across the developing world.
Whenever a new issue or concern seems to be rippling across the Christian world, savvy political thinkers take notice. In 1980, for instance, the Council for Inter-American Security produced a report that came to be known as the “Santa Fe Document,” and which was influential in shaping the foreign policy agenda of the incoming Reagan administration. Among other points, the Santa Fe Document warned against the growing influence of liberation theology among Catholics in Central America. During the 1980s and 1990s, the emergence of the “culture wars” in the West over issues such as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research have confirmed Christianity’s political relevance.
For those reasons, it’s not only legitimate, but very smart, to consider what the political implications might be of the emergence of the global war on Christians as a signature concern in the twenty-first century. Though prediction is a hazardous business, three such consequences seem plausible as this transition plays itself out.
THE AGENDA OF THE DEVELOPING WORLD
As the stories of the new martyrs begin to exercise a tighter grip on the Christian imagination, this new awareness about what it means to be a believer today in Mali, Honduras, and Indonesia should have ripple effects in several zones.
First, Christians in the West will become more accustomed to thinking of themselves as members of a global family of faith, because they will be privy to greater insight about the previously hidden lives of their fellow believers from other corners of the planet. Some share of those Western Christians will become more inclined to factor the experiences and perspectives of their coreligionists into their thinking about social and political matters, as well as taking them into greater consideration on ecclesiastical questions.
Second, clerical stars from the developing world will play a steadily more influential role in terms of leadership inside their own denominations and church organizations. That process is already under way; for instance, Samuel Koiba, a Methodist from Kenya, served as president of the World Council of Churches from 2004 to 2009. In November 2012, Pope Benedict XVI took the unprecedented step of holding a consistory, the event in which a pope creates new cardinals, in which there wasn’t a single European and only one Westerner (an American). The new cardinals came from Lebanon, India, Nigeria, Colombia, and the Philippines. Not long afterward, in March 2013, the cardinals of the Catholic Church elected the first pope from the developing world in Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, who took the name Francis. The election of a Latin American to the most visible and consequential leadership position in all of Christianity is a perfect illustration of this trend.
Third, a variety of different grassroots Christian actors, from committed individuals to movements, associations. and spiritual groups, will find a more receptive audience for their messages in the West, and will become bolder about proposing them. There is a mounting conviction among Christians in the global South that their historical moment to lead has arrived, which means they are progressively shedding what has sometimes been a reluctance to project themselves as equals in the global Christian conversation. No longer content to act as branch officers of a multinational enterprise, they’re ready to join the board of directors. Today’s tools of social communication mean it’s easier for people to reach large audiences, and growing sensitivity to the martyrs means that Christians in the developing world are more likely to find fellow believers in the West open to what they have to say.
The cumulative effect of these three developments should be enormous, and it won’t end with implications for internal ecclesiastical life, such as who’s chosen to lead denominations or which liturgical styles are permitted. The rise of the developing world also means that the social and political outlook of Christians in the global South will have greater influence in their churches.
What might we expect to see and hear from Christians in the global South when it comes to the intersection of faith and politics?
Naturally, generalizations are dangerous. To suggest that a massive bloc of 1.5 billion people hold identical views would be ridiculous. For every assertion one can make about Christians in the global South, there are millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions, of exceptions. Further, Western categories of “liberal” and “conservative” are often misleading when applied to the developing world, because they presume a taxonomy that is an artifact of Western culture (“left wing” and “right wing” are terms that date from the French Revolution) and that doesn’t always occur naturally to the people we’re trying to describe.
Nevertheless, with allowances both for the overgeneralization and for imposing artificial categories, one could say that Christianity in the developing world tends to be “morally conservative and politically liberal.”
By Northern standards, Southern Christians typically hold conservative attitudes on moral questions such as abortion, homosexuality, and the family. This dynamic is clear within the Anglican Communion, where a minority of liberal Anglicans in the North, especially the United States and Canada, is pressing ahead with the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions, against a determined majority in the developing world which strongly opposes such measures. That opposition is concentrated above all in Africa. Today, there are an estimated forty million Anglicans in Africa, more than half the global total of seventy-six million, and African prelates have been extending ecclesiastical recognition to traditionalist Anglican communities in many parts of the West. The Convocation of Anglicans in North America, for instance, under the authority of the Anglican hierarchy in Nigeria, claimed sixty-nine congregations as of 2012.
Across much of Asia and Latin America, similar attitudes on sexual ethics often prevail. According to a 2006 Pew Forum survey, 72 percent of Indians, 78 percent of South Koreans, and 56 percent of Filipinos believe that homosexuality is “never justified.” Even in sexually liberal Brazil, a strong 49 percent of the population agrees that homosexuality is “never justified.” In Guatemala, 63 percent of the population takes that view. On the abortion issue, 79 percent of Brazilians, 85 percent of Guatemalans, 68 percent of Indians, and 97 percent of Filipinos are opposed to abortion, and solid majorities in almost every country want abortion to be against the civil law. In general, the rise of Christianity in the developing world seems destined, at least in the short run, to bolster the conservative position on the Western culture wars. It will make Christian churches more committed to defending traditional positions and less inclined to make accommodations for dissent.
Yet when one leaves the ambit of personal morality and enters the terrain of economic, political, and military matters, the typical attitudes of Southern Christians often strike Northern observers as remarkably “liberal.” To be specific, Christian clergy and laity in the developing world often are:
• Skeptical of capitalism and globalization.
• Wary about the global influence of the United States.
• Abolitionist on the death penalty.
• Favorable to the defense of immigrant rights and concerned about the fate of their countrymen in Western societies.
• Pro-Palestinian and, by implication, often critical of Israel and the Western powers that back Israel.
• Pro-United Nations and in favor of a strong multilateralism in foreign policy, as opposed to domination of global affairs by a handful of wealthy and powerful states.
• Antiwar, including overwhelming opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
• In favor of a robust role for the state in the economy and suspicious of n
eoliberal, laissez-faire economic models.
These views can be found embedded in both official statements of church bodies in the global South as well as in their working structures. For instance, in a 127-page report issued in 2004, the Catholic bishops of Asia declared that “neoliberal economic globalization” destroys Asian families because it is the primary cause of poverty on the continent. In June 2005, a group of Catholic bishops from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Somalia, and Djibouti declared, “We are particularly horrified by the ravages of unbridled capitalism, which has taken away and stifled local ownership of economic initiatives and is leading to a dangerous gap between the rich few and the poor majority.”
The Association of Evangelicals in Africa is one of the continent’s leading Protestant bodies, representing an estimated one hundred million evangelicals who belong to thirty-six national evangelical fellowships made up of numerous local churches. The group has become an outspoken force on behalf of peace, poverty relief, and broad economic justice, despite the irony that many of its clergy would be seen as staunch conservatives on other matters, such as whether their churches and denominations ought to be more receptive to homosexuality or women clergy.
For a broad swath of Christian opinion across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, these views do not seem “liberal” or “progressive.” Rather, they reflect a meat-and-potatoes social consensus that holds across most of the usual ideological, linguistic, geographical, and ethnic divides. Of course there are prominent dissenters and critics of this consensus, but they fall mostly into the category of exceptions that prove the rule.
In other words, the political agenda of Christianity in the developing world tends to defy the political dichotomies of the West. It’s highly conservative on some matters, strikingly liberal on others. It tends to cut through the frequent division in Western Christianity between pro-life forces and the peace-and-justice camp, toward something like what some Catholics refer to as a “consistent ethic of life,” suggesting that Christianity’s pro-life and peace-and-justice commitments belong together. In any event, this mixture of highly traditional positions on the “culture wars” and highly progressive stances on the economy, war and peace, the death penalty, immigration, and so on seems poised to exercise greater influence in shaping the agenda of global Christianity. That’s in part the result of simple demographics, but also too because the stories of the martyrs will foster a climate of growing sympathy and solidarity with the developing world.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AS THE SIGNATURE CAUSE
Even if there were no such thing as the global war on Christians, the defense of religious freedom would still be a source of mounting concern for Christianity. For one thing, mounting restrictions on religious freedom affect the followers of other faiths too, people with whom Christians are in long-standing dialogues and whose fate matters to them.
A September 2012 report by the Pew Forum concluded that “a rising tide of restrictions on religion [has] spread around the world.” Among other points, the study found that 37 percent of nations in the world have high or very high restrictions on religion, up from 31 percent a year ago, a six-point spike in just twelve months, and that three-quarters of the world’s population of 7 billion, meaning 5.25 billion people, live in countries with high or very high restrictions on religion. That’s up from 70 percent in the previous year. Facing those trends, any person of conscience, including the leadership of the various branches of Christianity, would obviously be concerned.
For another thing, many Christian leaders in the West are deeply worried about what they perceive as a rising tide of restrictions on religious liberty, with the dispute between the Obama administration and a cross section of religious organizations in America over insurance mandates being merely the tip of the iceberg.
When Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the Catholic bishops’ new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in October 2012, he said that “the bishops of the United States have watched with increasing alarm as this great national legacy of religious liberty … has been subject to ever more frequent assault and ever more rapid erosion.” (At the time, Lori was still the diocesan bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut.) Beyond the insurance mandates, Lori cited several other causes for alarm:
• Directives from the Department of Health and Human Services requiring faith-based relief agencies to offer a “full range” of reproductive services in anti-trafficking and migrant care programs that receive federal funding.
• A similar requirement from the United States Agency for International Development that contraception be included as part of international relief and development programs promoted by all nongovernmental groups that received federal funding, including faith-based agencies.
• A brief filed by the Department of Justice in opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which labeled opposition to same-sex marriage as a form of “bias” and “prejudice.” (That language raised fears among some religious groups that their resistance to gay marriage, even in terms of their internal practice, might eventually be prosecuted as a form of prejudice.)
• Another brief filed by the Department of Justice, this one arguing for reversal of the “ministerial exception” to federal employment laws in the case of Hosanna Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which could have eroded the ability of faith-based groups to hire and fire in keeping with the tenets of their faith. (The Supreme Court eventually upheld the ministerial exception in its ruling.)
• The absence of strong conscience protections as part of gay marriage laws at the state level, which among other things could threaten the ability of faith-based social service providers, such as adoption agencies, to decline to serve same-sex couples. Already a handful of conscientious objectors in New York who work in county clerks’ offices and who declined to register gay marriages have been fired, and in locations such as Boston, Illinois, San Francisco, and the District of Columbia, Catholic Charities effectively has been driven out of the adoption and foster care business.
Most observers would say that these sorts of church/state tensions are even more frequent in Europe. In the United Kingdom, the 2006 Equality Act made it illegal for adoption agencies to refuse to place children with same-sex couples. The English government announced that private adoption agencies refusing to serve gay couples would no longer receive reimbursements for their services, resulting in the loss of over $9 million in annual payments to Catholic charities in the United Kingdom. At least eleven Catholic adoption agencies have closed their doors in the United Kingdom while others cut their ties to the church and reincorporated as a civil entity. Critics of this aspect of the law saw it as especially tragic, given that Catholic adoption agencies had a reputation for serving the poorest sectors of English society and finding homes for children considered the hardest to place, such as children with Down syndrome and other disabilities.
Such pressures are multiplying, especially around the issue of homosexuality. In 2004, a Pentecostal pastor was convicted in Sweden under laws against hate speech for declaring that homosexuality is “a deep, cancerous tumor on all of society.” The country’s Supreme Court later set aside the conviction, under provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights concerning freedom of religion. Swedish prosecutors, however, have vowed to revisit the issue. In British Columbia, Canada, in 2005, a local branch of the Knights of Columbus was taken before a regional Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to rent a hall to a lesbian couple for a wedding reception. Their right to refuse the rental was eventually upheld, but the Knights were ordered to pay each woman $1,000 for offense to their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.” In France in 2004, a new federal law added “anti-gay comments” to a class of prohibited speech that already includes racist and anti-Semitic insults. Though no religious figure has yet been prosecuted, French Catholic leaders have expressed concern that the law might prevent bishops from oppo
sing gay marriage.
In light of these trends, some Christians today view the idea of going to prison for defending traditional positions on issues such as gay marriage somewhat the way their predecessors in Eastern Europe once looked at the possible consequences of defying the Soviets, or the way that Chinese priests and pastors do today for spurning the official government-sponsored Catholic association—nothing to be desired, but have your affairs in order just in case.
The global war on Christians is destined to turbocharge this preoccupation with religious freedom. What’s at work is a triple whammy: growing pressure on Christian institutions in the West, the suffering of other faiths, and the staggering global scale of anti-Christian violence and persecution. These three forces are combining today to make religious freedom a Christian idée fixe.
The three prongs of this whammy will reinforce one another. Someone already persuaded that there’s a “war on religion” in the West, for instance, is more likely to be concerned about the victims of such a war in other parts of the world, where the cost is measured not in lawsuits and ballot measures but in human lives. Likewise, someone concerned about assaults on the religious freedom of believers in other cultures may be more inclined to ponder whether Western societies really can be counted upon, in the long run, to uphold the liberty of believers—or whether today’s debates over insurance mandates and hiring exemptions may be the beginnings of a slippery slope that has its logical conclusion in martyrdom. Religious freedom advocates in the West will likely find that their strongest argument is to tell the stories of the victims of the global war on Christians, pointing to their suffering as a harbinger of where things may be headed.
As religious freedom becomes set in cement as a defining Christian preoccupation, it will likely be styled not as a confessional exercise on behalf of beleaguered Christians but as a principled defense of the rights of all—even if there’s a “preferential option” for Christians because Christians are the world’s most persecuted religious group.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 28
