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

by John L. Allen

  At the end of our conversation, I asked the typical Western question: What can we do? I was expecting them to suggest sending money, helping them to get visas, or tell the American government to do more to stop the violence. All those points came up, but by far the most common response was much simpler: “Don’t forget about us.” Over and over, these refugees said that the core reason they chose to leave Syria was because of a sense that they had been forgotten by the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves—that no one cares about their fate or is even paying attention.

  One concrete response to the global war on Christians, therefore, is for individuals in the West to do whatever they can to raise consciousness, ensuring that the victims of the war are not forgotten. That might mean volunteering to lead an adult faith formation group in one’s local parish or congregation. It might mean volunteering to deliver a sermon on the subject during a Sunday service. It might mean asking a Bible study group or a Marian sodality to introduce a special prayer for persecuted Christians into their devotions. It might mean writing a letter to the editor of a church newspaper, or to the leadership of one’s denomination, calling for greater attention to the issue. It might simply mean making a point of talking about persecuted Christians within one’s own spheres of influence, such as one’s school, neighborhood, and workplace. Whatever form it takes, such small efforts can help break the silence.

  Another form that speaking out can take, especially in the new world of social media, is reaching out to persecuted Christians directly. There are numerous websites, for example, set up by congregations and religious communities that still have a presence in Syria, which provide an opportunity for people from around the world to post messages of solidarity and support. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have a significant presence in social media such as Twitter and Facebook, which creates channels of communication with the outside world. Various organizations that assist embattled Christians also have means of communicating directly with the people on the front lines of this global war, and are generally delighted to pass along expressions of sympathy and concern. As hollow as it may sound, sometimes simply reassuring the victims of violence that their pain has not occurred in a vacuum, that someone is paying attention, can be enormously reassuring.

  THINKING GLOBALLY ABOUT THE CHURCH

  Though individual Christians can’t control how the leadership of their denominations responds to the global war on Christians, let alone what politicians and bureaucrats do, they at least have power over their own thinking—which issues to pay attention to, what they care about, and what they see as the real priorities. In the context of twenty-first-century Christianity, that means one thing above all: learning to think globally about the church.

  As we’ve seen, adopting a global perspective in the first instance is no more than a simple reflection of the realities of Christianity on the ground today. The United States, with roughly 225 million Christians, is conventionally described as the largest Christian nation in the world. Yet the United States represents only 10 percent of the 2.2 billion Christians in the world, which means that 90 percent of the Christians on the planet aren’t necessarily like Americans. They have different experiences, different perspectives, and different needs. In this era, Christians really only have two choices when it comes to how they think about the issues facing their churches. They can learn to think globally, or they will think dysfunctionally.

  Given the drama of the global war on Christians, the urgency of shifting to a global perspective becomes even clearer. It’s one thing, perhaps, to focus entirely on domestic concerns and debates when people are basically safe and sound in other parts of the world. When leading estimates indicate that some one hundred million Christians around the world face the threat of interrogation, arrest, torture, and death on the basis of their faith, such insularity becomes much harder to defend.

  In part, taking a global perspective means appreciating that the issues dominating Christian conversation in the West do not always loom so large elsewhere. Debates over gay marriage and female clergy, for instance, raise important questions about Christian tradition, ecclesiastical justice, sexual morality, and other matters, and there’s certainly a need for reflection on them. However, to allow one’s attention to be entirely consumed by such matters, either advocating for them or opposing them, would strike most victims of the global war on Christians as either ridiculous or tragic, and perhaps both at once.

  As an American Catholic, I have often been struck by the juxtaposition over the last decade and a half of the unraveling of the Christian community in Iraq and the “liturgy wars” that have gripped English-speaking Catholicism, which pivoted on the best way to render the original Latin of texts for worship into English. Those debates dominated Catholic attention in the United States at the same time that U.S.-led military interventions in Iraq were creating a context in which Christians have become an endangered species. With no disrespect to liturgists, and without taking a position on the new translation of the Mass, I will just say this: if we American Catholics had invested in gestures of solidarity with our fellow Christians in Iraq one-tenth of the time and treasure we have spent over the last fifteen years debating whether we should say “And also with you” or “And with your Spirit,” we could have changed the world.

  MICRO-CHARITY

  It’s the perennial question that haunts anyone moved by reports of tragedy half a world away, when something awful happens to people they’ve never met and in places they’ve never been: It’s terrible, yes, but what can I possibly do about it? Fortunately for forty poor and illiterate widows whose husbands were killed during a ferocious anti-Christian pogrom in the Indian state of Orissa in 2008, Rita Larrivee wasn’t daunted by the challenge of finding an answer. Her response illustrates the power of what some experts call “micro-charity,” meaning relief efforts that aren’t organized by governments or large NGOs but by individuals acting under their own steam and aimed to address specific, manageable problems.

  A Catholic physician now living in Greensville, South Carolina, Larrivee immigrated to the United States from India as a young doctor. She’s a devout believer, and heard about the anti-Christian violence in India by watching a report on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). Even though she felt an immediate connection to the story, at first she was stumped about what she could possibly do. She grew up in southern India, while Orissa is in the northeast, where she didn’t know anyone and still doesn’t speak the local language. Eventually Larrivee set out to make contacts, with the idea of trying to meet what she calls a “bite-sized portion” of need. The result is a modest and eminently practical program that provides goats, chickens, and vegetable seed to forty widows who lost their husbands in the pogroms, to ensure a source of food for them and their families. It also provides microloans to help them bring small local crafts to market and scholarships to send twenty-five of their children to Catholic schools.

  In Orissa, a local congregation of religious women, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Annecy, runs the effort, coordinated with the help of a Divine Word missionary, Fr. Richard Vaz. They call the project “Widows of Persecution,” aimed at helping Christian women in Orissa whose husbands died amid the rampage of violence in 2008, and who now face the challenge of caring for themselves and their children alone. Against that backdrop, Larrivee decided she had to do something, initially contributing her own money and whatever she could raise from family and friends.

  Through the sisters who run the Widows of Persecution project, Larrivee said she’s received a crash course in how to run a humanitarian program—including the insight that good intentions, by themselves, aren’t enough. For instance, she said, she learned it’s not enough to help poor women in rural areas develop crafts or produce for sale. It’s also critical to help get those products to market, because otherwise middlemen will suck up most of the modest profits. In addition, she said, it’s also been important to extend some parts of the program, such as the crafts tra
ining, to Hindu women too. Otherwise, the effort might have boomeranged and produced additional hostility toward Christians.

  Now that she’s reaching retirement, Larrivee said she plans to make solidarity with India’s persecuted Christians her “lifelong project.” In the first place, she wants to extend the existing program to sixty additional widows. Eventually, she said, she’d like to help rebuild some of the churches and community centers that were destroyed.

  Larrivee’s experience teaches two important lessons about bringing relief to the global war on Christians. First, one doesn’t need a large pool of resources or a massive infrastructure. Gumption will do. Second, it’s not true that simple individuals are powerless, incapable of doing something to effect change. Although few may be willing to invest the time and effort that Larrivee has, her example illustrates that one doesn’t always have to wait for the train to leave the station. Sometimes the better strategy is to build your own train.

  INSTITUTIONAL HUMANITARIAN RELIEF

  People motivated to do something on behalf of persecuted Christians around the world can also support one of the many organizations devoted to humanitarian relief on behalf of suffering believers. To offer simply one example among many, there’s a Catholic organization called the Catholic Near East Welfare Association that has a sparkling record of identifying the most pressing needs of Christian groups in the Middle East, organizing effective programs, and ensuring that resources are actually directed to the people on the ground, as opposed to being consumed by administration and overhead.

  A compelling example of their efforts that was unfolding at the time this book was written was the group’s emergency appeal on behalf of Christians in Syria. As we have seen, the situation facing Christians in the country is harrowing, especially in Aleppo and Homs, where the carnage has been the most intense. Among other nightmares, one challenge facing many Christian congregations in Syria is to come up with enough money to ransom the mounting number of Christians kidnapped by militant groups, who see extortion as a way to finance their mayhem. The spike in kidnappings is also, naturally, another force driving Christians out of the country.

  The Catholic Near East Welfare Association is among the largest providers of aid to Christians in Syria, if not the largest. Realizing the urgency of immediate relief, their first priority is to help Christian refugees get through the winter. The idea is to deliver “winter survival kits” to two thousand families, at a cost of $210 each. Issam Bishara, a representative of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association in Lebanon, said in October 2012 that because Syria’s Christians generally have not headed for massive refugee camps in Turkey or Jordan, they’re not getting help from international relief agencies. Fearing exposure to further hostility, they’ve headed to other parts of Syria and to Lebanon, taking refuge with family and friends, but in many cases those folks are running out of food, water, heating oil, and other supplies. Without the help provided by CNEWA and other groups, these Christian refugees faced the prospect of a long, cold, and deadly winter.

  In the Catholic world, Aid to the Church in Need is another such leading supplier of humanitarian assistance to suffering Christians. Among Protestants, groups such as Barnabas Aid, Christian Freedom International, Open Doors, and Voice of the Martyrs play a similar role. Most mainstream Christian denominations have some organization or relief agency that provides aid to persecuted and impoverished Christians in locations around the world, and all are chronically in need of resources. Many of these groups also blend direct humanitarian efforts with other aims, such as political advocacy, consciousness-raising, support for evangelization, and church-building in various regions of the world. Christians of various stripes will likely find some of these organizations more appealing than others, depending on how aggressive a missionary posture they strike, for instance, or whether their emphasis is more on immediate aid or long-term policy strategies. As always, careful discernment is in order before making a decision about which outfit one may choose to support.

  The point is that there are options at hand for people wanting to be part of the solution to the global war on Christians. These groups generally do heroic work with little fanfare and with perennially limited resources. Donating $210 online to aid one Christian family in Syria may seem a drop in the bucket, but change often begins with such small steps.

  POLITICAL ADVOCACY

  Beyond trying to put out the immediate fires of persecution, Christians obviously should be involved in crafting better fire containment strategies to prevent them from forming in the first place. That means using the usual tools of political life to bring pressure to bear on leaders to make the defense of religious freedom a priority, and to give special attention to members of the world’s most persecuted religious body. Sixteen years ago Paul Marshall argued that since Catholics and Protestants together make up a strong majority of the American population, it is “neither unreasonable nor unachievable” that they could mobilize political opinion in the country to make protecting Christians at risk a priority. That diagnosis remains as true today as it was then.

  These efforts at advocacy vis-à-vis the global war on Christians can take at least five forms.

  First, Christians can stand in the front lines of insisting that political debates in the West generally take more cognizance of the international situation, especially the fate of suffering peoples whether they’re Christians or not. The famous adage has it that all politics is local, which is perhaps especially true of political discourse in the United States. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the 2012 election in the United States was the most expensive in history, with a final bill of around $6 billion. Beginning in late October, spending on behalf of the two American presidential candidates reached an astronomic level of $70 million per week. Yet despite those enormous sums, the foreign policy discussion during the race was remarkably impoverished. Aside from some skirmishing over places where American troops are engaged, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, a casual observer of the 2012 race could be forgiven for concluding that, in political terms, the rest of the world didn’t even exist. Simply as a matter of global justice, not to mention spiritual solidarity, Christians ought to be the first to insist on a broader vision of what’s at stake in political life.

  Second, Christians can insist that the defense of religious freedom internationally becomes a more central element of the foreign policy of Western governments. In part, that means ensuring that governments do more than pay lip service to the cause, and not backtrack on their commitments. In 2011, for instance, the American Congress reauthorized the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom just hours before it was scheduled to go out of business, a delay that had left both staff and those invested in the commission’s work uncertain for months about its fate. Symbolically, such dithering sends a signal that the United States isn’t truly serious about the issue. Christians can also hold policymakers’ feet to the fire when hard choices have to be made—demanding, for example, that China not get a free pass for its oppression of religious minorities simply because it’s in the perceived economic and geopolitical interests of the West. At the same time, Christians should also insist that the rhetoric of religious freedom not be exploited to advance ideological interests—that criticism of Iran for its treatment of Christians, for instance, not be swept up into broader debates about nuclear policy or anything else, and that any sanctions be commensurate with measures imposed on other states with a similar track record.

  Third, Christians in the West can also insist that their leaders take the perspectives of Christians on the ground into consideration when crafting foreign policy. For instance, they could find ways to bring the voices of Syria’s Christian minority more thoroughly into debates about Western policy with regard to the Assad regime and Syria’s ongoing civil war. Many of those Syrian Christians are less enthused about the prospect of regime change than some in the Western foreign policy establishment. While listening to them doesn’t nece
ssarily mean endorsing their position, it at least ought to be part of the conversation—if for no other reason than because they’re the ones who will have to live with the consequences. In late July 2013, I interviewed Bashar Khoury, a twenty-nine-year-old Latin rite Catholic from Syria, during the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day gathering in Brazil. He told me that if the Assad regime falls he’ll leave Syria for good, on the conviction that Christians will have no place in a country led by the opposition. Whatever one makes of his diagnosis, voices such as Khoury’s should be heard.

  Fourth, Christians in the West can also mobilize when disaster strikes to ensure that their governments bring their resources to bear in situations of special need. In Nigeria at the moment, for instance, many Christian leaders are asking Western governments to offer military and law enforcement resources to assist the Nigerian authorities in combatting the militant Boko Haram movement—identifying its leadership, tracking its financial support, ascertaining who precisely is responsible for its various attacks, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and offering security to vulnerable Christian communities, especially in the country’s north. Christian advocates in the West can demand that their governments make those resources available, in dialogue with Nigeria’s Christian leadership, and even engage in some gentle arm-twisting to convince potentially reluctant Nigerian officials that they actually need the help.