It’s not hard to understand the perception that the global war on Christians is primarily about Islam. Christians endure harassment and various forms of second-class citizenship in many Muslim majority states, often related to pressures for the civil law to reflect shariah. Especially in the Middle East, a rising tide of Islamic radicalism is creating dramatic threats to all religious minorities, including Christians. As we saw in chapter 5, a once-flourishing Christian community in Iraq, which can trace its history back to the era of the Apostles, has imploded in the arc of two decades. In Egypt, attacks on and harassment of that country’s large Coptic Christian minority multiply on a daily basis, and the country’s new legal order threatens to consign Christians to a permanent underclass. In Syria, tens of thousands of Christians have been killed or dislodged by the fighting. Even where the Christian population is growing in the Middle East, such as the Arabian Peninsula, where Christians are being drawn as “guest workers,” there’s a chronic lack of religious freedom and deep fear about Christians being exposed to discrimination, exploitation, and physical violence. Outside the Middle East, the rise of the militantly Islamic Boko Haram movement in Nigeria and its vicious attacks on churches have cemented impressions that Muslim radicals are the primary villains in the global war on Christians.
The threats are real. Human rights groups and advocacy bodies devoted to tracking anti-Christian persecution confirm that the Muslim world is a primary danger zone. In the 2013 edition of the World Watch List issued by Open Doors, thirty-four of the top fifty nations have a Muslim majority, and several of the rest are mixed Muslim/Christian societies. In the 2012 report from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, ten of the sixteen nations designated as “countries of particular concern” have a Muslim majority. This book itself clearly reflects the peril that Christians face in many Islamic societies, as the chapter on the Middle East is considerably longer than the companion chapters on other parts of the world.
Yet the perception that the global war on Christians is all about Islam is nevertheless misleading, for four reasons.
First, there is a tendency in Western perceptions to identify Islam with the Middle East and the Arab world, but that way of seeing things doesn’t do justice to the reality of Muslim demographics. Only about one-quarter of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today are Arabs. Just as it’s a mistake to identify Christianity with the West, given that more than two-thirds of all Christians today live in the global South, it’s equally fallacious to associate Islam exclusively with Arab societies.
Indonesia, for instance, with a population of 238 million people, is the world’s largest Muslim nation. To be sure, there’s a more militant form of Islam in the country. Open Doors listed Indonesia as the forty-fifth most dangerous spot for Christians in 2013. Yet Indonesia also has a proud tradition of pluralism and a generally tolerant brand of Islam, and it has made a remarkable transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Most experts in Muslim/Christian dialogue say the conversation has an entirely different feel in Indonesia than in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
On the ground, relations are often strikingly strong. The Muhammadiyah movement is one of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organizations, running a network of schools that serves a large population of Christian students. In those settings, a Muslim school actually provides Christian religious education. One can find similar examples from other majority-Muslim nations, such as the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. The country’s Christian minority arrived in chains as prisoners during the era of Stalin; the Christians were taken in by native Kazakh Muslim families, breeding a strong sense of solidarity. Friendships and marriages between Christians and Muslims are common and generally accepted.
Second, in terms of the body count in the global war on Christians, the highest number of casualties has not come in the Muslim world. That distinction belongs to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation of seventy-one million people that’s overwhelmingly Christian. As chapter 1 outlined, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity is responsible for the estimate that an average of a hundred thousand Christians have been killed each year over the past decade in what the center calls a “situation of witness,” meaning that their death was related to their Christian faith. The bulk of those fatalities have come in the Congo, where a bloody civil war continues at a lower level of intensity, and where thousands of clergy, catechists, and ordinary believers have been slaughtered. Though experts debate precisely how many of these deaths can truly be attributed to anti-Christian hostility, no one doubts that the DRC is a primary killing field in the global war on Christians.
Third, Islamic societies also do not lead the pack in terms of de jure discrimination against Christians, meaning forms of oppression and persecution legally sanctioned by the state. The world’s leading manufacturers of state-sponsored oppression are Communist-inspired police states, principally in Asia. There is no Muslim society that operates a chain of prison camps, as in North Korea, where simply possessing a Bible can be grounds to be incarcerated along with three generations of one’s family, and where some fifty thousand to seventy thousand Christians presently are believed to languish in detention. Nor does any Muslim society insist that Christians must belong to state-sponsored “autonomous” religious bodies, such as the Patriotic Association in China.
Fourth, Islam also is not the world’s only crucible for de facto discrimination against Christians, meaning social harassment and persecution. Consider India, where the country’s small Christian minority, estimated at just 2.3 percent of the overall population, is subject to routine forms of verbal harassment, threats, beatings, and ostracism. In 2011, according to the Global Council of Indian Christians, there were 170 assaults on Christians in the country, an average of one every other day. Such incidents occur with regularity in several Islamic societies too, though no Muslim nation in the past decade has witnessed an anti-Christian pogrom on the scale of the mayhem that broke out in the Indian state of Orissa in 2008, which left at least five hundred people dead and fifty thousand homeless.
THE GALAXY OF THREATS
Instead of Islam being the lone protagonist, the global war on Christians is fueled by a complex galaxy of heterogeneous forces, each of which has its own reasons for seeing Christians as a threat. Understanding the nature of this war, and shaping strategies to cope with it, requires a clear-eyed view of the variety of actors in the drama. Beyond Islamic radicalism, those forces include at least the following ten.
Ultranationalists
In societies where national identity is tied up with a particular religion, such as Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Hinduism in India, or Islam in Turkey, nationalist currents tend to be hostile to religious minorities. Christianity is usually a particular source of anxiety, both because of its perceived identification with the West and because Christian ecclesiology emphasizes membership in a “communion of saints” that relativizes national loyalties.
Turkey is a good example, where the primary threats to Christians come not from the most committed Muslims but rather from an ultranationalist underground. (Islam too, with its idea of the ummah, the collective body of Islamic peoples, also has a natural tendency to subvert national loyalties.) It’s worth remembering that the most spectacular assassination attempt against a Christian leader in the twentieth century came from a Turkish gunman with links to a group of Turkish ultranationalists called the Grey Wolves—Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.
Some elements of the nationalist underground may be influenced by radical Islamic ideas, but there are also important forces in Turkey seeking a stronger public role for Islam, such as movements linked to Said Nursi and his disciple, Fethullah Gülen, which are open to religious freedom. As things play out, Christians in Turkey could well find that their greatest bulwark against the threats of ultranationalists come precisely in alliances with such moderate Islamic currents.
Totalitarian States
The most systematic repression of Christians comes in police states, generally ones with roots in Communism officially committed to atheism as part of national doctrine. North Korea is routinely rated as the most dangerous state in the world in which to be a Christian. Its quasi-religious official state ideology of juche, or self-reliance, not only translates into a cult of personality around the “Great Leader” but also makes any religious body with loyalties or ties outside the state suspect. In China, trends toward economic liberalization have not been matched by momentum toward political reform, and religious groups continue to be subject to occasionally severe state control.
Similar dynamics face Christians in other societies that are, to one degree or another, police states, such as Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos in Asia, as well as Zimbabwe in Africa. In Belarus, Russia, and other post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe, experiments with “managed democracy” often mean the heavy-handed management of religious dissidents. Churches, especially those not identified with the country’s dominant religious tradition, are seen with suspicion. In these societies, Christians are often subject to constant surveillance, clergy are either bought off or harassed, religious services are occasionally disrupted, and religious figures who criticize the regime are routinely threatened, deported, incarcerated, or killed.
Hindu Radicalism
Though radical Hindus represent a tiny fraction of India’s massive population, they have the capacity to create tremendous grief. A frequent pretext for violence is the claim that Christians engage in duplicitous missionary activity in an effort to “Christianize” India. Groups of radicals sometimes move into Christian villages, preaching a gospel of hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, and demand that Christians take part in “reconversion” ceremonies. These groups also routinely stage counter-festivals during Christmas celebrations. Fear of a Christian takeover is pervasive in these circles, often fueled by sensational media accounts of Christian conspiracies. In 2001, when Italian-born Sonia Gandhi ran in national elections, one national newspaper carried the headline “Sonia—Vulnerable to Vatican Blackmail!”
As we have seen, these tensions can turn violent. In April 1995, Hindu nationalists cracked the skulls of two nuns in a convent on the outskirts of New Delhi; another mob broke into a residence of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary Angels and beat the five sisters, along with their maid, using iron rods. In 2006, Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore and two priests were attacked by a mob in Jalahally, ten miles south Bangalore. As described in chapter 3, such assaults have become virtually daily fare in certain parts of India, often with the connivance of local police and politicians.
As the twenty-first century develops, such violence may no longer be confined to India. India is emerging into superpower status, and a wealthy Indian diaspora is spreading around the world, making Hinduism a steadily more global religion. It’s possible that at some point observers may came to think of Hindu radicalism the same way they regard Islamic radicalism today, as a primary threat to global stability.
Buddhist Radicalism
Despite stereotypes of Buddhists as tolerant and peace-loving, the reality is that under the right conditions, Buddhist societies are just as susceptible to nationalist and radical currents as anyplace else. Countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Laos illustrate the point, having emerged in recent years as primary arenas for the global war on Christians. Time magazine captured the trend in July 2013 with a cover story featuring a picture of a militant monk in Myanmar named Wirathu under the headline, “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Wirathu is best known for drawing an aggressive line in the sand with regard to Myanmar’s Muslim minority. The government promptly banned the magazine on the grounds that it posed a threat to “religious feelings.”
Sri Lanka has adopted a stringent anti-conversion law supported by Buddhist nationalists that tightens freedom of expression for Christians, as well as the country’s Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim minorities. Rumors of proselytism by Christians in recent years have also led to a spike in attacks on churches by angry Buddhist mobs. During a 2006 conference of Catholic theologians staged in Padova, Italy, Redemptorist Fr. Vimal Tirimanna, a Sri Lankan, described what he called a worrying rise in “religious extremism” in his society.
In Laos, Christians in general, and the Hmong Christian community in particular, are seen by sections of the Lao society and the authorities as an American or imperialist import, leading to a rising wave of hostility. In 2011, troops from the Lao People’s Army stopped a group of Christians belonging to the Hmong community, killing four of the women after repeatedly raping two of them. The husbands and children were beaten, tied up, and forced to witness the gruesome killings. Though the violence was carried out by the military under orders from a Communist-inspired police state, it’s often encouraged by religious radicals.
In November 2012, radical Buddhists in Myanmar prevented humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders from delivering aid to Muslim refugees in the western part of the country, and the same sort of hostility often befalls the country’s Christian minority. One aid worker said at the time, “I’ve never experienced this degree of intolerance.”
Economic Interests
Whenever Christians denounce corporate policies that appear to place profit ahead of the well-being of people, or advocate for economic policies in defense of the poor, they may place themselves at risk. The story of Sr. Dorothy Stang, recounted in chapter 4, illustrates the point. She was shot to death in 2005 by gunmen working on behalf of a local rancher who would not tolerate Stang’s defense of the human rights and property rights of local farmers.
Sr. Valsa John in India, murdered on November 15, 2011, offers another example. A member of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, she worked among the Dalits of Patna and the Adivasis of Santal Parganas, struggling for dignity and justice. In India, the tribals have often been the victims of development. According to national statistics, 40 percent of all people displaced by development projects have been tribals, and the promised rehabilitation has seldom been implemented. Sr. Valsa led a resistance movement to a mining project in her region that would have displaced thousands of poor people, and as a result she was brutally hacked to death by a mob of forty armed men.
Across the developing world, the struggle against corruption has become a signature Christian cause, exposing activists to reprisals from forces with a vested financial interest in the status quo. For instance, Rev. David Ugolor of the New Apostolic Church leads the Africa Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, campaigning for transparency in the oil-rich Nigerian delta. In July 2012, he was arrested and charged with complicity in the murder of a government official and local labor leader, whom Ugolor insisted was a friend. The charges were later dropped, but most observers saw the incident as an attempt by local elites to muzzle Ugolor’s criticism.
Organized Crime
In places dominated by criminal syndicates, religious leaders are often the only voices not under their control, and they’re often perceived as a serious threat. The 1993 murder of Fr. Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi in Sicily and the 2011 death of Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro in Mexico, outlined in chapter 4, are both compelling examples. So too was the November 2012 assassination of Maria Santos Gorrostieta, another Mexican woman determined to speak out against the gangs. A devout Catholic, she was a thirty-six-year-old medical school graduate who went into politics, serving as mayor of the town of Tiquicheo. She was outspoken in her criticism of the cartels, which produced death threats and a 2009 assault that killed her first husband and left her badly scarred and in constant pain. On November 12, 2012, as she drove the youngest of her three children to school, she was dragged from her car in an ambush. According to local reports she begged her abductors to spare her child, and when they agreed, she left with them. Her family clung to hopes that she was being held for ransom, but a few days later her badly bruised body was found dumped by a roadside.
After the earlier 2009 attack, Gorrostieta had writte
n: “I have had to bear losses that I would not wish on anyone, and have had to accept them with resignation and with the knowledge that it is our Lord’s will, and I have gone on, even with a wounded soul.… My long road is not yet finished. I will continue fighting. I will get up however many times God allows me to, to keep on searching, negotiating plans, projects and actions for the benefit of all of society, but in particular for the vulnerable ones. This is who I am.”
Even where Christians are not explicitly resisting organized crime, they may nevertheless fall victim to it simply by remaining in place. In lawless zones in which simply moving about is tantamount to taking risks, Christians who choose to continue going about their business may expose themselves to harassment and physical violence. In Mexico, for instance, estimates in January 2013 pegged the number of people killed in drug violence over the past six years to be in excess of sixty thousand, with less than 4 percent of those crimes ever being solved. Guatemalan pastor Neftali Leiva, gunned down by a cartel member as he arrived for a pastoral meeting near the border with Mexico, illustrates the point. A father of five daughters, Leiva was a pastor in Guatemala with the Church of God Ministries, an American Protestant denomination. On the morning of January 30, 2012, Leiva was on his way to a regional meeting of ministers at a retreat center called Prayer Mountain, located in a violent border area near Mexico. As Leiva was arriving at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses, an assailant walked up, pointed a gun at the pastor’s head, and fired at point-blank range several times. The shooting was attributed to a member of the Zetas drug cartel. Raul Benitez Manaut, a national security specialist, said that “any person, institution or organization which harms the interests of drug cartels automatically becomes their enemy.… These groups are very clear that if any member of the clergy takes positions that challenge them, they become targets.”
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 23