In similar fashion, these chapters do not deal with all the countries in a given continent, but simply offer a few examples of the more intense conflict zones. The omission of a certain nation or region should not suggest that it’s trouble free, or that the sufferings endured by its Christians don’t count as part of the global war. For instance, there’s no chapter on the Pacific Islands, but that doesn’t make Pastor Ruimar Duarte DePaiva, his wife, Margareth, and their son, Larisson, any less noteworthy as victims of anti-Christian violence. Members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, they were hacked to death with machetes in Palaua, Micronesia, in 2003. Similarly, the omission of the Pacific Islands doesn’t mean that a standoff in 2005 between the Methodist Church and the Fijian army, when commanders threatened to order soldiers to stop being Methodists because of church leaders’ support for a national reconciliation commission intended to establish the truth about a 2000 coup, wasn’t a potentially dramatic chapter in this global war.
If my aim had been to present a comprehensive list of anti-Christian harassment, this book would never have been finished. Every day I worked on it, fresh accounts from various parts of the world arrived in emails, letters, news accounts, and phone calls. I was often reminded of the ending of the Gospel of John: “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” Much the same could be said about the individual stories that make up the global war on Christians.
I do not provide individual footnotes with the original sources of the reports for the cases described in the chapters that follow. There are too many, and publishing all the bibliographical information documenting these accounts would become unwieldy. In virtually every instance, all one has to do is to enter the name of the victim, or keywords about the incident, into any Internet search engine, and the original source material will come up quickly. The problem in the global war on Christians is not that no one is reporting what’s happening. It’s rather that far too few people are paying attention.
1
OVERVIEW
Having recalled the story of Abu Ghraib in the introduction, here’s another echo from the “war on terror”: waterboarding. Though the procedure is nobody’s idea of a good time, officials of the Bush administration famously insisted that it’s not a form of torture after it was revealed that American interrogators were using it on extrajudicial prisoners—even though Japanese soldiers actually had been hanged by the United States during World War II for using similar techniques on American prisoners. Waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration in 2009, yet to this day some experts continue to defend it. More broadly, “torture” remains a tricky word to define with precision, with most people falling back on the classic Potter Stewart test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
If it’s tough to achieve consensus about what constitutes torture, agreement is even more elusive with terms such as “repression,” “persecution,” “harassment,” and “discrimination.” If we’re going to try to document a global war on Christians that includes such terminology, we’d best begin with as much clarity as we can reasonably achieve about what those words mean, although forewarned is forearmed: in determining whether a particular incident counts as part of the global war on Christians, quite often we’ll still be operating on the premise of knowing it when we see it.
To begin, here’s what many experts regard as the best generalized definition of anti-Christian persecution, which was crafted by Protestant scholar Charles L. Tieszen in 2008: “Any unjust action of mild to intense levels of hostility, directed at Christians of varying levels of commitment and resulting in varying levels of harm, with religion, namely the identification of its victims as ‘Christian,’ as the primary motivator.”
What exactly does that “mild to intense” hostility look like? The Barnabas Fund is a U.K.-based international, interdenominational body founded in 1993 to support persecuted Christians. In 2006, the fund attempted to classify the main categories of persecution faced by Christians, especially in societies in which they’re a minority. In effect, these ten forms of harassment and persecution are the primary weapons in the global war on Christians.
1. Societal discrimination. In general, “societal discrimination” refers to de facto, rather than de jure, restrictions on religious freedom. For instance, social pressures are often directed at Christian women in majority-Muslim societies to convert to Islam if they marry a Muslim man. Reports from the Gaza Strip, to take one example, indicate that the pressure against mixed Muslim/Christian marriages has become so intense in recent years that such couples are often having children out of wedlock, and in some cases subsequently abandoning them, rather than enduring the backlash of becoming legally married.
2. Institutional discrimination. For instance, difficulties in obtaining zoning permits to either build or repair Christian churches, as a means of trying to inhibit the normal pastoral life of Christianity. In Belarus, for instance, ordinances prohibit any religious activity in a building if it’s not’s zoned for it, and Pentecostal pastors have said that officials generally refuse permission to zone their buildings for worship.
3. Employment discrimination. The number of Christians eligible for certain categories of employment is often limited, if they’re not shut out altogether. In Egypt, for instance, it’s long been difficult for members of the Coptic Christian minority to obtain senior positions either in the military or in the public sector. As of 2010, there was no Coptic university president or dean in Egypt.
4. Legal discrimination. Denying Christians and other religious minorities access to the courts, denying them legal representation when charged with crimes, or making it difficult for Christians to make reports and pursue justice when a crime has been committed against them. In certain Indian states, for instance, there are chronic complaints that police and prosecutors are slow to investigate offenses committed against Christians by Hindu radicals.
5. Suppression of Christian missionary activity. In some cases, Christians may be tolerated if they keep to themselves, but any effort to spread the Christian message or to expand Christianity’s footprint in a region will meet with persecution. That’s often the case in societies in which national or cultural identity is tied to another religion, or where there’s a strong undercurrent of suspicion about the West. Iran, for instance, routinely arrests Christian missionaries and deports or incarcerates them. Theoretically, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians are free to practice their faith, but any proselytism is forbidden.
6. Suppression of conversion to Christianity. Most common in countries with “blasphemy” or “apostasy” laws, these legal measures effectively criminalize conversion from one religion to another, typically Islam to Christianity. In such societies, converts often live a sort of catacomb existence, hesitant to reveal their new religious affiliation even to family and close friends.
7. Forced conversion from Christianity. The use of force to compel someone to renounce the Christian faith may be done formally by the state, informally by social actors, or through a combination of both. In India, for instance, Hindu radicals have staged massive “reconversion” ceremonies in rural areas in which Christians are effectively compelled to embrace Hinduism, and these events are often organized in cooperation with local police and security authorities.
8. Suppression of corporate worship. This form of intimidation refers to restricting the ability of Christians to worship together, either in a formal church setting or informally in public areas or in private homes. Authorities both in China and in Saudi Arabia, for instance, routinely raid the services of Christian “house churches”—unregistered churches that typically meet in someone’s private home—usually tossing the pastors into jail (before deporting them if they’re foreign nationals) and subjecting the congregation to various sanctions and forms of harassment.
9. Violence against individuals. Violence directed at individual bel
ievers can be delivered either through the power of the state—arrest, isolation, torture of both the physical and the psychological sort, execution, and so on—or through social actors, such as the radical Boko Haram movement in Nigeria. This is the most common form of the global war on Christians, as well as the most lethal.
10. Community oppression. This refers to violence directed at an entire community, such as the assault on Our Lady of Salvation Syrian Catholic cathedral in Baghdad, Iraq, on October 31, 2010, which left fifty-eight people dead. Violence at the community level can be carried out either by the state or by social forces, the latter sometimes with the connivance of the state.
THE MOST PERSECUTED GROUP
Two of the world’s leading demographers of religion, David B. Barrett and Todd Johnson, have performed an exhaustive statistical analysis of Christian martyrdom, reaching the conclusion that there have been seventy million martyrs since the time of Christ. Of that total, fully half, or forty-five million, went to their deaths in the twentieth century, most of them falling victim to either Communism or National Socialism. More Christians were killed because of their faith in the twentieth century than in all previous centuries combined.
This boom in religious violence is still very much a growth industry. Christians today are, by some order of magnitude, the most persecuted religious body on the planet, suffering not just martyrdom but all the forms of intimidation and oppression mentioned above in record numbers. That’s not a hunch, or a theory, or an anecdotal impression, but an undisputed empirical fact of life. Confirmation comes from multiple sources, all respected observers of either the human rights scene or the global religious landscape.
Christians Are the Target of 80 Percent of All Discrimination
The Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (International Society for Human Rights) is a Frankfurt, Germany-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded in 1972 to track human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Today the organization has approximately thirty thousand members in thirty-eight countries and has expanded its brief to cover other sorts of human rights issues. In 2011, for instance, the society issued a report documenting how German technology was being used by authoritarian regimes in various parts of the world to monitor and harass their dissidents, including in cyberspace. Notably, this is a secular NGO, not a confessional outfit operated by a Christian denomination or a consortium of churches.
In September 2009, the chairman of the International Society for Human Rights, Martin Lessenthin, estimated that 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed against Christians, citing the results of a survey carried out among staff and members of his organization, and saying those findings dovetail with conclusions reached by his colleagues at other human rights observatories. Lessenthin emphasized that the raw numbers of Christians experiencing discrimination are higher in part simply because Christianity is the largest religious body on earth, with 2.2 billion adherents, and even where Christians are most taking it on the chin, such as China, followers of other religious traditions also are suffering—members of Falun Gong, for instance, and Muslim Uyghurs. Nonetheless, Lessenthin predicted that as several worrying trends continue to unfold, such as the press in many Muslim societies for the application of shariah law, the number of Christians suffering some form of discrimination is likely to continue to grow.
Discrimination Occurs in 139 Countries
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is a widely respected secular think tank in Washington, D.C., not sponsored by any church or confessional organization. In September 2012, the Pew Forum issued a report documenting what it described as a “rising tide of restrictions on religion” around the world. Among other things, the report concluded that Christians faced harassment, either de jure or de facto, in a higher number of countries than the followers of any other religion. At some point between 2006 and 2010, according to the report, Christians had been harassed in a total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. Muslims, by way of contrast, faced harassment in 121 nations, Jews in 85, followers of folk religions in 43, Hindus in 30, and Buddhists in 21.
According to the Pew analysis, Christians were harassed by government officials or organizations in 95 countries during the year ending in mid-2010, while they faced discrimination by nonstate actors, either groups or individuals, in 77 nations. Muslims were also more likely to be harassed by governments than by social actors, but Jews were more likely to face social discrimination (64 nations) than state-sponsored harassment (only 21 nations.) In terms of trends over time, the Pew analysis found a slight increase in the number of nations where Christians suffered social harassment (from 74 in 2007 and 70 in 2009 to 77 in 2010), and a more sizable increase in countries where Christians faced government harassment (from 79 in 2007 and 71 in 2009 to 95 in 2010—that 24-nation jump from 2009 to 2010 represents a fairly impressive 33 percent growth).
Overall, the Pew Forum report found that restrictions on religious freedom are rising in each of the five major regions of the world, and that 37 percent of nations have “high” or “very high” restrictions, up from 31 percent a year ago, representing a six-point spike in just twelve months. Three-quarters of the world’s population, meaning 5.25 billion people, live in countries with significant restrictions on religious freedom. That too was up from the previous year, when 70 percent of the world’s population lived in such societies. Notably, the Pew findings suggest that restrictions are rising not only in countries that already had a tough climate for religious freedom, such as North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but also in places that previously had a pretty good track record, such as Switzerland and the United States. America was one of sixteen nations whose scores for government and social restrictions jumped by more than a point.
Sixteen for Sixteen
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is a bipartisan federal commission set up in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Its mandate is to track violations of religious freedom around the world, and each year it publishes a report on May 1 flagging a list of countries of special concern. In its 2012 document, the commission identified sixteen such nations, which it charged with “heinous and systematic” offenses, including torture, imprisonment, and murder. While all sorts of different religious communities suffered in these countries, according to the report, only one group found itself under attack in all sixteen of the world’s worst offenders: Christians.
The countries flagged by the commission were Burma, China, North Korea, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Aside from imprisonment, arrest, and torture, the report documented multiple other ways in which religious freedom was under assault in these countries, including discriminatory policies in housing and employment, pervasive monitoring and surveillance by security agencies, school textbooks that include crudely bigoted depictions of minority religious groups, and the discriminatory enforcement of “blasphemy laws” to charge members of certain religions with criminal offenses. Overall, the commission’s bottom line was that in each of these societies, religious minorities are “to a chilling extent, in trouble.”
Attacks Have Jumped by 309 Percent
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (known by the acronym START) was established in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is based at the University of Maryland. Obviously not a religious outfit, it tries to understand the origins of terrorism as well as its social and psychological impact, and among other things the consortium tracks patterns in terrorist violence around the world. In 2011, the consortium concluded that in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, Christians outpaced all other groups in terms of the frequency with which they faced terrorist attacks.
In 2003, the consortium found, Christians were explicitly attacked by terrorists in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East eleven times, while
in 2010 Christians faced forty-five such assaults. As the START analysis points out, that represents a fairly stunning growth rate of 309 percent in just seven years. Those findings have since made the rounds: they were cited by the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, during a high-profile speech in March 2012, and were also made into a chart and published alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s provocative February 13, 2012, cover story for Newsweek magazine, titled “The Rise of Christophobia.”
One Hundred Million Have Been Persecuted
The evangelical advocacy and relief organization Open Doors has been providing aid to persecuted Christians since it was founded in 1955 by a Dutch Protestant named Andrew van der Bijl, better known as “Brother Andrew,” who began by smuggling Bibles into the Soviet sphere. Today it’s become one of the world’s best-known organizations tracking anti-Christian persecution, issuing each January an annual watch list of the top fifty countries in which Christians are at risk. The Open Doors estimate, based on decades of tracking the realities of persecution in some of the darkest corners of the earth, is that roughly one hundred million Christians today suffer interrogation, arrest, and even death for their faith, with the bulk located in Asia and the Middle East. The overall total makes Christians the most at-risk group for violations of religious freedom.
Hundreds of Millions More Suffer Discrimination
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 4