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

by John L. Allen

  In January 2009, on the eve of Orthodox Christmas, an Orthodox cathedral in the city of Tuzla was attacked by arsonists. Two months later, St. Luke’s Catholic Cathedral in Novi Grad, part of the greater Sarajevo area, suffered its sixteenth attack since 2005. Windows of the church were shattered three different times. Police eventually arrested a suspect who admitted responsibility, but they never filed charges.

  In August 2009, shots were fired at an Orthodox church in the Reljevo neighborhood of Sarajevo. The priest who served in the church said it was the fifth such attack in the past year. Bosnian police arrested a man who confessed to firing the shots, claiming he was drunk at the time, but officials did not pursue the question of whether there was an underlying political or religious motive. A month later, Catholics attending a service at the Londza cemetery in the Bosnian Federation were assaulted with rocks by unidentified attackers. A woman suffered minor injuries, and police dismissed the incident as the work of rowdy youths.

  In October 2010, a former inmate in the Bosnian Federation charged that Islamic groups inside the prisons were targeting Christians, both Croats and Serbs, and also alleged that prison officials engage in religious discrimination. Among other things, he charged that a notorious Muslim inmate charged with murdering several Croats during their Christmas celebrations received “superb” treatment.

  In February 2013, the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Sarajevo, Pero Sudar, charged that the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords and their aftermath put the survival of Bosnia’s Catholic community at risk. By splitting the country into two republics, one dominated by Muslims and the other by Serbian Orthodox, Sudar said the message was that “there’s room in the country only for two peoples, not for three.”

  The impact, Sudar said, has been dramatic. In 1992, there were almost a million Catholics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the vast majority ethnic Croatians, representing almost 20 percent of the country’s population. Today Sudar says there are only 460,000 left, meaning the Catholic presence has been cut in half, and most of those who remain are considering exit strategies. Sudar predicted that Croatia’s entry into the European Union will further exacerbate the exodus.

  Sudar, now in his early sixties, was born during the Communist era in a small Bosnian village that was roughly half Catholic and half Muslim, and he says there were few religious tensions because Muslims and Catholics found themselves in the same boat vis-à-vis an oppressive regime. Up until the war, he said, that spirit still prevailed, with Muslim and Catholic seminaries exchanging faculty to teach courses in one another’s creeds. Today, however, he charged that religious and ethnic tensions are if anything “more intense than immediately after the war”—a result, he charged of the “unjust” situation imposed by Dayton, along with a dysfunctional economy and general stagnation.

  RUSSIA

  The climate for religious freedom in Russia has improved dramatically since the Soviet era, when Russia set the all-time mark for Christian martyrdom. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, the peak periods for martyrdom in more than two thousand years of Christian history occurred in Soviet prison camps from 1921 to 1950 and again from 1950 to 1980. Statistically speaking, the Russian Orthodox Church is by far the most martyred church among the various branches of Christianity, with its total number of victims under both the Nazis and the Soviets estimated at twenty-five million. When Mikhail Gorbachev repealed a 1960 ban on the ringing of church bells in Russia as part of his glasnost reforms in the late 1980s, it marked the end of a long winter and the beginning of a period of rebirth.

  Not only has the post-Soviet opening benefitted the Russian Orthodox Church, but it’s created something of a boom market for religion generally. Sociologist of religion Nikolai Mitrokhin, who directs the Institute of the Study of Religion in the CIS and Baltic Countries, believes there are now at least one million practicing Protestants in Russia, and he calls their growth “the most important religious trend” in the country. He estimates that the Pentecostals, Baptists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses expanded at a clip of 20–25 percent a year throughout the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century. In the streets of Moscow today, new storefront churches seem almost as common as Starbucks.

  Russian officials today trumpet their Christian credentials. In February 2012, President Vladimir Putin actually promised leaders of the Orthodox Church that Russia would be on the front lines of defending persecuted Christians in other parts of the world. “You needn’t have any doubt that that’s the way it will be,” Putin said during a meeting with Metropolitan Hilarion, foreign relations chief of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin also rallied to the defense of Russia’s Orthodox identity during the infamous “Pussy Riot” scandal of 2012, when members of a feminist punk band staged an unauthorized performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior—though critics argued that Putin was using the perceived offense to Orthodoxy as a pretext for another crackdown on political opposition.

  Yet the end of Communism hardly means that all is well vis-à-vis religious freedom in Russia. Legal regulations for religious organizations have become increasingly stringent under the regime dominated by Putin. In particular, non-Orthodox forms of Christianity in Russia frequently complain of discrimination, suggesting a double standard and alleging a pattern of favoritism and patronage for the Orthodox Church. Leaders of the Orthodox Church sometimes complain that rival Christian factions are engaged in proselytism directed at Orthodox believers.

  An October 2012 analysis by International Christian Concern expresses the situation this way: “Non-Orthodox Christian groups are seen as rooted in the United States in particular and the West in general, competing with the Orthodox Church for membership. Both the government—for which a key priority is to protect ‘Holy Russia’ from ‘foreign devils’—and the Orthodox Church, which is allegedly closely associated with the government, are anti-West. The Russian government also seeks to restrict the functioning of independent organizations that are not allied with it or show any sign of dissent.”

  Tensions over the return of church properties seized under the Soviets also continue to boil, especially after a controversial law adopted in 2010 that was criticized by Catholics and other minority groups as favoring the Russian Orthodox Church. Catholics, for instance, expressed outrage over the transfer of a former Catholic church in Kaliningrad to the Russian Orthodox. In Lipetsk, Baptists saw a onetime Orthodox church that had been assigned to them taken away and given back to the Orthodox, leaving the Baptists to seek financial compensation.

  Threats also continue to face Christians in some contested areas of the Russian Federation, including Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan, where fierce fighting between local Muslims and the Russian army has inflamed sentiments and fed the growth of radical Islamic currents. Formally speaking, Russian legislation is applicable in Chechnya, but the region enjoys limited autonomy, and President Ramzan Kadyrov has signaled his willingness to consider implementing Islamic shariah law. Informally, women who hold public positions are expected to wear head scarves, and men are expected to wear Islamic dress on Fridays, leading many observers to detect a trend toward Islamization. The tiny community of Christians in Chechnya is composed almost entirely of converts from Islam, who face steep social and political discrimination. According to reports, local authorities monitor the activities of these Christians and frequently pressure them to return to Islam. “Honor killings” are also common in families with a member who has converted to another faith.

  Most observers believe that for the foreseeable future, believers in Russia will face a twin set of challenges: reconciling genuine religious freedom with the quasi-authoritarian nature of the Putin administration, and dealing with trends toward Islamization and radicalism in some corners of the country.

  In February 2009, the governor of Russia’s Kaluga region declared that any land owned by the Word of Life Pentecostal Church must be seized “by any means possible,” apparently unaware that the meeting at which
he made the comment was being streamed live on the regional administration’s website. The footage was swiftly posted to YouTube. Most Russian observers said the rare thing was not that a bureaucrat would connive in an assault on a church, but rather that he would be caught doing it. The Word of Life Pentecostal Church has complained of harassment by government officials, who apparently want its land in order to develop a new shopping center.

  In October 2009, two Baptist preachers in Kaliningrad were fined after their community was charged with “singing psalms and speaking about Christ” in the streets of the city. Police sources said the Baptists conducted their activity without permission, violating local ordinances. The Baptists, however, insisted that what took place was a service, not a rally, and that requirements for advance authorization did not apply.

  In November 2009, Russia’s Justice Ministry proposed amendments to the 1997 Religion Law and the Administrative Violations Code to impose more stringent controls on religious activity. Though the measures were bogged down in bureaucratic wrangling, many observers saw them as a worrying indication of new pressures on religious groups.

  Also in November 2009, a well-known Russian Orthodox priest named Fr. Daniil Sysoyev was murdered when an unidentified gunman entered his Moscow church and shot him twice. Sysoyev’s story will be told at greater length in chapter 11, but the charismatic young cleric had a reputation for evangelizing Russia’s Muslim community, and claimed to have personally baptized a large number of Muslim converts to Christianity. Sysoyev frequently reported receiving death threats.

  In February 2010, police in Kaluga raided a Sunday-morning service of St. George’s Lutheran Church. The local Lutheran archbishop was in attendance in order to ordain a new member of the Lutheran clergy. Reportedly, eleven police officers armed with automatic weapons and assisted by police dogs stormed the church in a search for what they described as “extremist literature.” Officers blocked the doors for an hour while the search was conducted, though it ended without any seizures or arrests. Lutheran officials say the church has been harassed since it opened in 2009, apparently disgruntling some locals who see it as a threat to the Orthodox identity of the area.

  In May 2010, a seventy-six-year-old Baptist pastor named Yuri Golovin was beaten to death in St. Petersburg outside the home of an elderly member of his congregation he was planning to visit. Golovin died at a nearby hospital as a result of his injuries. Golovin’s attackers remain unknown, but local sources suspected they may have been drug addicts looking to rob the pastor. The St. Petersburg neighborhood where the crime took place is reputedly well known for a flourishing drug trade, and sources said that Golovin was aware of the risks but refused to stop his pastoral visits.

  In June 2010, authorities backed out of granting permission for members of the Pentecostal Hosanna Church in Dagestan to conduct pastoral visits in local prisons in Dagestan. The Pentecostal pastor asserted that the decision reflected government hostility toward his church.

  In July 2010, an evangelical pastor in Dagestan known for founding the region’s largest Protestant church was killed by an unidentified gunman, though most observers suspect the involvement of Islamic radicals given that the media in Dagestan had broadcast criticism of the pastor in the weeks leading up to his death. Artur Suleimanov, forty-nine, the pastor of Hosanna Christian Church in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, was shot on the evening of July 15 while leaving his church building. He founded the church in 1994, and it now claims more than a thousand followers, with over 80 percent of its membership believed to be composed of former Muslims.

  In June 2012, Sergey Konstantinov, pastor of the Mission Good News Church, and his assistant were attacked in the Leningrad region. According to media reports, the incident occurred early in the morning when morning prayers were being said in the church. Two cars drove up to the church building and more than ten drunken young men tried to enter, while shouting offensive remarks about its ministers and its activities. The hooligans then began to beat the leaders of the congregation, and when they fled and locked themselves in the building, the attackers smashed the windows of both the church and the pastor’s car. Konstantinov was left with a broken rib and a broken collarbone in the wake of the assault. A police investigation played down any religious motivation for the assault, but Protestant observers in the area charged that it reflects a growing social climate in which non-Orthodox churches are perceived as fair game.

  In September 2012, Russian officials supervised the demolition of Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church in Moscow, leaving more than two hundred members of the congregation to gather near the ruins for worship. Many reportedly do so carrying banners that read THE BUILDING IS DEMOLISHED, THE CHURCH IS ALIVE! Observers say that such demolitions and seizures of church property are becoming more common, with the government often creating a catch-22: it offers new land in a more remote area as compensation, but then makes it virtually impossible to obtain the zoning permits needed to actually construct a new church.

  Members of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group situated outside the Christian mainstream, are frequent targets of harassment, especially in light of a new “anti-extremism” law regarded by critics as a tool to exercise control over religious minorities. In February 2012, the Council of Europe voiced specific concern for the situation facing Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, expressing “deep concern about the misuse of anti-extremism legislation involving the illegal implementation of criminal laws against … religious minorities such as Jehovah’s Witnesses … and the improper banning of their materials on grounds of extremism.”

  Andrey and Lyutsiya Raitin illustrate the dynamics. They were arrested in February 2011 in Chita, a city in Russia’s Zabaykalskiy territory, and charged under the extremism statute. The Raitins were not considered leaders of the denomination, and they held no official positions. Reportedly, their offense was distributing Russian-language versions of a tract called “What Does the Bible Really Teach?,” commonly used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in their door-to-door ministry in various parts of the world. Local police searched the Raitins’ home, along with the homes of other Jehovah’s Witnesses in the city, and confiscated their religious literature. The Raitins were indicted on July 8, 2011, and the Chitinskiy district court began a trial in the criminal case against them on December 22, 2011. During the proceedings the defense called attention to numerous alleged violations committed by law enforcement officers prior to the case being opened and during the investigation, including the disappearance of documents, unauthorized corrections, signs of falsification, and so on. The court refused to consider these allegations, leading spokespeople for the Jehovah’s Witnesses to assert “that in trying this case, the court has not put forth the necessary effort to establish the truth.”

  As of this writing, the criminal proceedings against the Raitins were still ongoing, and no verdict had been reached. Observers say such delays are often part of the pattern of harassing and intimidating religious minorities in the former Soviet Union. The long stretch of time before conclusion is reached tends to sap their energy, and the fear of what might happen sometimes induces them to leave the country. Even if the accused are vindicated, the possibility of rearrest and facing new charges also tends to have a chilling effect.

  Other Jehovah’s Witnesses face similar harassment, including a church elder named Maksim Kalinin who lives in Yoshkar-Ola in the Mari El Republic, an enclave within the Russian Federation. He was indicted under the extremism law in December 2011, after a police raid in August 2010 on homes and a church service at which he was present. According to a report by Forum 18, the Russian security police had conducted surveillance of Kalinin using a hidden camera. Because Kalinin was too ill to go to the prosecutor’s office, officials delivered the indictment at his home. Also facing sanction was Yelena Grigoryeva, from Akhtubinsk in the southern Astrakhan region, who was indicted in December 2011. Grigoryeva was accused of “basing herself on the ideas of inciting religious hatred and enmity, as well as p
ropaganda of the exclusivity and superiority of people on the basis of their religion … committed from 2009 to February 2010, a crime of minor gravity against the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.” In support of those charges, the indictment noted numerous occasions when Grigoryeva handed a banned tract to someone. The formal indictment came after Grigoryeva’s home had been raided by police and her personal religious books confiscated. She was also forced out of her job providing social care in Akhtubinsk, with police compelling her to sign a statement saying she was stepping down “at her own request.” Her lawyer was also reportedly pressured to drop Grigoryeva’s appeal. Both the Kalinin and Grigoryeva cases went to trial in 2012.

  Profile: Fr. Tudor Marin

  Though religious animosity is far from the lone force fueling the global war on Christians, it is still part of the mix, as the tragic death of Fr. Tudor Marin illustrates. A beloved Orthodox clergyman in the Romanian city of Focsani, the sixty-nine-year-old Marin was stabbed to death on June 16, 2012, inside his Sfantul Ioan Botezatorul (Nativity of St. John the Baptist) Church on one of the city’s main squares. The attack was witnessed by an elderly parishioner who was selling candles inside the church.

  Police later arrested thirty-year-old Florentin Puşcoiu, who confessed to killing the Orthodox priest. During a search of Puşcoiu’s apartment, investigators found an extensively annotated Bible and rafts of paper with notes concerning various scriptural texts. During a subsequent interrogation of Puşcoiu, he said that he had set out that Saturday morning “to kill a priest.” According to his reconstruction of events, Puşcoiu had visited three churches but left the first two because they were too crowded or too well protected. When he arrived at Sfantul Ioan Botezatorul, he approached Marin and asked several questions regarding the interpretation of the Bible. Dissatisfied with his answers, Puşcoiu then produced a knife, stabbed Marin repeatedly, and left him to die.