As for his wounds, Mulinde said that he’s proud “to bear the marks of Jesus” in his own body.
“I am not happy about getting hurt,” he said. “But it’s a price I’m happy to pay in order to be faithful to what I believe.”
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ASIA
Aasiya Noreen Bibi, better known to the world as “Asia Bibi,” is almost certainly the most famous illiterate Punjabi farm worker and mother of five on the planet. She’s the classic exception that proves the rule—the rare celebrity victim of the global war on Christians in a universe of folks whose suffering typically unfolds under the cover of neglect.
Forty-three years old at the time of this writing, Bibi first came onto the radar screen back in June 2009, when she was charged with the offense of “blasphemy” under Pakistani law. As she would later describe it, the dispute began when Bibi, a Catholic who regularly attended the Church of St. Teresa in the nearby town of Sheikhupura, was harvesting berries in scorching 100-degree heat to support her family. She became thirsty and drank from a well, thereby defiling the water source in the eyes of some local Muslim women. As things escalated, she and some of the Muslim women began trading barbs about Jesus and Muhammad. Although Bibi insisted she meant no disrespect, the women used her words as a pretext to have her arrested.
Bibi remained in jail while an investigation and trial unfolded, which ended with her being sentenced to death by hanging in November 2010. If the death sentence is carried out, she would become the first woman to be executed under Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Illustrating the depth of feeling that blasphemy cases arouse, two prominent Pakistani politicians, one Christian and one Muslim, have already gone to their deaths for supporting Bibi and for opposing the law. To add insult to injury, Bibi was also fined 300,000 Pakistani rupees, the equivalent of about $3,000, a staggering sum by rural standards.
Against all odds, Bibi’s fate went viral and has become a cause célèbre in Christian activist circles around the world. Documentaries have been made about Bibi, concerts organized in support of her, websites and Twitter campaigns mobilized, books published, and petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures delivered to the Pakistani authorities.
Bibi comes from a peasant family in Ittan Wali, a tiny village in Punjab. As of this writing she remains in prison, in a windowless cell, while her appeals to the Lahore high court play out. Bibi is in solitary confinement, able to be seen only by her husband and her lawyer. Her family hopes an international pressure campaign will eventually see her freed, but in the meantime, one mullah in Pakistan has offered a reward of roughly $10,000 to anyone who kills her—enough to purchase a three-room house with all the modern conveniences. The mullah might well find a taker if Bibi doesn’t make it out of the country first; according to one survey, at least ten million Pakistanis say they would be willing to kill Bibi with their bare hands, either out of religious conviction, for the money, or both.
“I was a good wife, a good mother and a good Christian,” Bibi said. “Now it seems I’m only good to hang.”
That comment came in a 2011 book titled Blasphemy: The True, Heart-Breaking Story of the Woman Sentenced to Death over a Cup of Water, which was written clandestinely with a French journalist who passed questions to Bibi’s husband, Ashiq, and then waited for hours outside the prison gates to collect Bibi’s answers, relying on the help of an Urdu-English interpreter.
According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, as of 2011 nearly half the countries in the world, 47 percent, have laws or policies that criminalize apostasy, blasphemy, or defamation of religion. Anti-apostasy and anti-blasphemy laws tend to be most common in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific; in the eyes of critics, such laws usually penalize religious minorities at the expense of the socially dominant tradition. To be sure, Christians are not the only victims. In India, a man who describes himself as a religious skeptic found himself facing blasphemy charges in 2012 because he claimed that a statue of Jesus venerated by Mumbai’s Catholic community for its miraculous qualities is a fake. In Greece around the same time, a man was arrested and charged with blasphemy after he posted satirical references to an Orthodox Christian monk on Facebook.
Another Pakistani case from late 2012 illustrates how the application of the blasphemy law is typically a thin disguise for religious prejudice. A fourteen-year-old Christian girl named Rimsha Masih, who comes from an impoverished family of sweepers, was charged with blasphemy after accusations that she had torn pages out of a Muslim textbook used to teach the Qur’an. Relatives and human rights workers claimed that the girl has Down syndrome and should therefore be exempt, and the charges were dismissed in November 2012. In the meantime, her family went into hiding out of fears for their physical safety.
Perhaps the global pressure campaign that has crested around Bibi will succeed and eventually shame the Pakistani authorities into cutting her loose. That would be an important symbolic breakthrough, but it would not mark any definitive armistice or truce in the global war on Christians. The victims of that conflict will continue to suffer the same fate as Asia Bibi, only without her notoriety.
ASIA: OVERVIEW
Although Christianity represents just around 10 percent of Asia’s population, that’s still an enormous pool of almost four hundred million people. In 2010, for the first time, the estimate is that Christians in Asia actually outnumbered Buddhists, a mind-bending reversal of popular stereotypes about the continent’s preferred religion. Christianity is the dominant religion in two Asian societies, the Philippines and East Timor. In two other Asian countries, Vietnam and South Korea, Christianity is probably the largest and best-organized religious option, even though the majority in both countries does not profess a religious affiliation.
Christianity is growing rapidly in many parts of Asia, including Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Mongolia. Just twenty years ago, there were essentially no Christians in Mongolia, whereas today there are more than five hundred Protestant churches, mostly of the evangelical and Pentecostal sort, and an established Catholic presence. There are now more Pentecostals in Asia, according to scholar Paul Freston, than in North America and Europe. One estimate is that there are forty-seven million Pentecostals in China alone, despite the best efforts of the officially atheistic government to rein in their expansion. The largest single Christian congregation anywhere in the world is thought to be the Yoido Full Gospel Church, a Pentecostal church located on an island within the city limits of Seoul, South Korea. Every Sunday, something like 250,000 worshippers show up for nine services simultaneously translated into sixteen languages.
China is perhaps the most eye-popping instance of Christian expansion. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, there were roughly 900,000 Protestants in the country. Today, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which issues the much-consulted World Christian Database, says there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant. That would make China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil. The center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world’s second-largest Christian nation. According to the center, there are ten thousand conversions every day.
Not everyone accepts these estimates. In the 2006 update of his book Jesus in Beijing, former Time Beijing bureau chief David Aikman puts the number of Protestants at 70 million. Richard Madsen, a former Maryknoll missionary and author of China’s Catholics, puts the number still lower, at 40 million. That’s in line with the CIA World Factbook. Even those conservative estimates, however, would mean that Protestantism in China experienced roughly 4,300 percent growth over the last half century, most of it since the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s. Notably, Protestantism took off after the expulsion of foreign missionaries, so most of this expansion has been home-grown
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Despite Asia’s popular reputation for religious tolerance, it’s also home to a wide range of fronts in the global war on Christians. It includes old-style police states, such as North Korea and Myanmar; one-party states struggling to foster economic liberalization without political reform, such as China and Vietnam; societies where Muslims or Christians form a majority vis-à-vis the other group, such as Indonesia and the Philippines; and cultures where other religious traditions define national identity, sometimes to the detriment of religious minorities, such as India and Sri Lanka. In each case, there are impressive stories of interreligious harmony and solidarity, but there are also horrific examples of the war on Christians.
One can make a compelling case that as Asia goes, so goes the overall fate of religious freedom and the global war on Christians in the early twenty-first century. Asia contains both of the world’s major emerging new superpowers, China and India, and both have troubled track records. The ability of religious freedom advocates to intercede with these great Asian societies to promote greater protection for minorities, in particular for their beleaguered Christian populations, will have much to say about whether Christianity continues to generate new martyrs at the same rapid clip.
CHINA
Legally speaking, China recognizes only four forms of religious expression: Buddhism, Taoism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Adherents of those religions are tolerated, but they are expected to worship under the auspices of a state-approved and state-controlled body that manages the affairs of those denominations. For Catholics, this means the Catholic Patriotic Association; for Protestants, it is the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Many Chinese Christians, however, refuse to submit to these official structures, ending up in what are often regarded as “underground” or “catacomb” churches. In truth, the boundaries between the recognized structures and the unofficial church communities are sometimes fuzzy; an estimated 90 percent of Catholics belonging to the state-sponsored bodies are thought to be loyal to Rome, just as roughly 90 percent of the “official” clergy are actually in good standing with the pope. In recent years, the Vatican has promoted a policy of détente with the Chinese government and of healing the gap between the official and underground churches. Most experts say that policy has, so far, met with mixed results.
Unregistered communities and missionaries face severe difficulties. According to the NGO ChinaAid, in 2011 more than a thousand Protestants in the country were detained for unauthorized religious activity and given prison sentences in excess of a year. Government officials have also stepped up their demands for “theological reconstruction,” meaning purging Christianity of elements that the ruling Communist Party regards as incompatible with its methods and priorities.
The Kafkaesque situation facing Christians is illustrated by the Shouwang house church in Beijing, a massive Protestant house church subject to constant surveillance and harassment by government officials. Founded in 1993, the church was estimated to have a following in excess of a thousand people in June 2011. Its members are drawn from the middle and upper classes of Chinese society, including doctors, lawyers, students, and even, ironically enough, government officials. In early 2011, the leaders of the Shouwang congregation made arrangements to purchase a building for a worship venue but were denied permission by the government. As a result, they began to meet outdoors, facing weekly arrests for “unauthorized” worship services. Congregants are typically forced to sign loyalty statements before being released, and at least six church leaders have been placed under house arrest. Experts say the idea isn’t so much to drive the Shouwang church out of business as it is to cow the congregation into submission.
The same pattern of harassment is directed at the smaller but politically influential Catholic presence. As of this writing, there were four Catholic bishops in detention in China, while ten more were under surveillance by security agents and not able to travel or to speak freely. These include Bishop James Su Zhimin, seventy-seven, the ordinary of Baoding, who disappeared in 1996, and Bishop Cosmas Shi Enxiang, eighty-eight, of Yixian, who disappeared in 2001. Given the periods of imprisonment and house arrest they suffered prior to their disappearances—and presuming they are still alive—Bishop Zhimin will have spent forty years in captivity, and Bishop Enxiang will have endured at least fifty-one years.
The story of Catholic auxiliary bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin of Shanghai illustrates the dynamics. Daqin was ordained as a new bishop in July 2012, with the consent of both the government and the Vatican. Government officials, however, insisted that an illegitimate bishop, meaning one not recognized by the Vatican, take part in the ceremony in order to underscore the requirement of deference to the state. When the time came for the illegitimate bishop to lay hands on Ma, Ma got up and embraced him, thereby preventing the bishop not recognized by Rome from taking part in the sacramental rite. At the end of the ceremony, Ma publicly announced that he wanted to be the bishop of all, including those Chinese Catholics fiercely loyal to Rome. As a result, Ma said, he would not join the Patriotic Association. It was the first time in memory, and perhaps ever, that a bishop of the “open” church had made such an audacious statement at his ordination. Government authorities at the ceremony were reportedly stunned, interpreting his words as a direct challenge to their sixty-four-year-old system of control of the church.
Ma was swiftly placed under house arrest in the Shanghai seminary, which has been closed down by the government and now functions as a kind of prison. The few local Catholics who have been able to visit him report that Ma has lost weight and is very pale. According to Fr. Gianni Criveller, an Italian who is a leading Catholic expert on China, his contacts in the country are “very concerned” about his fate.
Since his arrest, Ma’s only way of communicating with the outside world has been through his blog. In November 2012, he published an entry called “The Faith of a Child.” In it, he revealed that his father did not want him to become a priest, because, he wrote, “his father, his younger brother and he himself were all jailed because of their Catholic faith,” and “he did not wish to see his beloved son suffering the same hardship.”
But when Ma insisted on entering the seminary, his father said: “If you are determined to go, do not come back and do not give up when you are halfway through.” Ma wrote, “I did not hesitate to answer, ‘Of course!’ ”
Though Ma’s situation is dramatic, Criveller said Chinese bureaucrats have learned over the years that whenever possible, it’s smart to avoid creating new martyrs. Before they harass or arrest members of the clergy, he said, they first try to buy them off.
“They offer entertainment, travel, even access to a political career,” Criveller said in September 2012. “Those who go along are rewarded with substantial payoffs.”
Sometimes, he said, the carrot that is dangled for cooperation with the state, and thus defiance of Rome, is badly needed financial support for the construction of church buildings. In that situation, he said, “it’s easy to give in for the ‘good of church.’ ”
When those carrots don’t work, Chinese authorities have repeatedly shown that they’re willing to wield the stick. According to reports, at least twenty “underground” Catholic priests have been tortured to make them join the Patriotic Association over the past two decades. One of those priests, Fr. Peter Zhang Guangjun, was physically and verbally abused and denied sleep for five consecutive days.
The same pattern goes for Protestant leaders. In May 2011, Yang Caizhen, one of ten house church Christians sentenced to jail and a labor camp in Shanxi province, was set free on medical parole after she nearly died in detention. She had been transferred in February from a prison hospital to a local hospital with a high fever. A chest X-ray and blood test results revealed she was in poor health, with liver inflammation. The church leaders were arrested for organizing a prayer rally in September 2009, one day after four hundred police officers and others raided the unregistered church’s site, seriously wounding thirty Christians and
destroying church buildings. This was not an isolated incident. In March 2012, an unauthorized Protestant church was demolished by local authorities in Jiangsu province. Two church members were beaten in the process, and one of them had her back broken in the assault.
In early 2012, officials confirmed for the first time in twenty months that the Christian lawyer and human rights activist Gao Zhisheng was in prison; prior to that, officials had steadfastly denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. Arrested in February 2009, Gao had essentially vanished into thin air, part of a series of detentions he’d experienced since a 2006 conviction on the charge of subversion. In early January 2012, Gao’s brother received a brief letter indicating that he was being held in a prison in the remote western province of Xinjiang, with no further details.
In February 2011, more than a hundred riot police officers, in tandem with some local hoodlums, raided a house where at least twenty Christians were meeting in Hubei province. Officers destroyed video cameras, audio recorders, mobile phones, and other equipment capable of capturing the raid. Officers smashed the door open and broke into the house without presenting any legal documents. They then used tear gas on the group before beating them and taking them to the local police station. Authorities later justified the crackdown by claiming that the Christians had established “a site for religious activities without approval.”
In 2011, the Chinese writer, artist, and dissident Liao Yiwu published a gripping book called God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China, describing his journeys among China’s largely underground Christian communities. Now living in exile in Berlin, Yiwu is a nonbeliever, but one who came to admire the tenacity of Chinese Christians in keeping their faith alive in the teeth of often violent pressure. Making his way among Christian villages in Yunnan province, Yiwu noted that the soil seemed red, and wrote that perhaps it’s because “over many years it has been soaked with blood.”
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 8