If our aim, however, is not to establish criminal culpability but rather to establish the true scope of the global war on Christians, the focus must be different. The first step toward an accurate assessment must be establishing what counts as “Christian” activity, and there it’s the motives of the person undertaking the activity that are most relevant. For instance, if a Christian from the United States or Europe goes to a zone of Colombia dominated by narcoterrorists and FARC guerrillas in order to exploit the area’s mineral wealth and ends up killed, that would not count as a “situation of witness,” because the person’s motives for being present in that place were not related to any Christian convictions, even if he or she was quite devout in terms of personal spirituality.
If, however, a Christian moves to Colombia in order to serve in a mission hospital, and understood that service as a form of religious commitment, then his or her death in an ambush might well be seen as a casualty in the global war on Christians. The motives of the perpetrator would be identical, but the self-understanding of the victim is different, and that’s what is relevant for purposes of this analysis.
On the moral plane, placing the emphasis on the motives of the perpetrator also does a serious injustice to the victims of the global war on Christians. Eric de Putter, Sr. Lukrecija Mamić, Francesco Bazzani, and the forty-four victims of the massacre at the Buta seminary in Burundi all gave their lives for the faith, just as surely as the great saints persecuted under Nero for refusing to participate in the imperial cult. They deliberately chose to give up their own comfort and security, placing themselves in dangerous situations because they believed their faith compelled them to do so.
To suggest that their sacrifice is somehow less religiously meaningful, that it doesn’t fully count as a Christian act, because their persecutors were not driven by specifically religious motives would be both morally unfair and spiritually hollow.
11
THE MYTH THAT ANTI-CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION IS A POLITICAL ISSUE
Of all the myths about the global war on Christians, the idea that the suffering of Christians around the world is either a left-wing or right-wing concern is arguably the most pernicious. If members of the various political tribes can agree on anything, surely it ought to be that violent persecution of people on the basis of their beliefs—whatever those beliefs may be—is indefensible, and not as a matter of any ideological position but on the basis of universal human rights.
Over the years, the global war on Christians has undeniably been exploited by various forces in Western politics. During the 1970s and 1980s, the martyrs of the liberation theology movement in Latin America were touted by left-wing voices in order to criticize the Reagan Doctrine in the United States, which was premised on supporting anti-Communist regimes and movements regardless of their human rights record. In Latin America, that policy sometimes put the United States in the position of propping up police states that suffocated dissent and brutalized their own people, with El Salvador being an emblematic example. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero became exhibit A for opponents of the Reagan Doctrine, and for a time it seemed that in political terms, the new Christian martyrs skewed to the left.
After the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, anti-Christian persecution receded in public consciousness, only to make a strong comeback in the 1990s. This time, the issue was propelled by the right rather than by the left. It was put on the American political map by a constellation of conservative activists and intellectuals, such as Michael Horowitz, Nina Shea, and Paul Marshall—in part as an element in a broader critique of secular hostility to religion, and in part as a pre-9/11 version of the “clash of civilizations” with Islam. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in 1997, Jeffrey Goldberg called the newfound concern with persecuted Christians “an issue manufactured in the mile-square section of Washington that produces the most priceless of political commodities: the wedge issue.”
Goldberg went on to describe how the crusade to defend persecuted Christians pitted several important domestic constituencies against one another:
• Mainline church groups versus evangelicals and conservative Catholics. (The general secretary of the National Council of Churches, Joan Brown Campbell, groused in 1997 that the movement smacked of an “overly muscular Christianity.”)
• Social conservatives versus pro-business groups and the foreign policy establishment. (China tended to be the focal point: Do we impose sanctions because of China’s record on religious freedom, or not?)
• Traditional human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union versus faith-based movements.
To some extent, those divisions still exist. One could add that in the post-9/11 era, anti-Christian violence by Muslims is a terrific rallying cry for hawks on the American right, which may help explain why some liberals remain skittish. All this, however, says much more about American politics than about the nature of anti-Christian persecution. Alas, the United States has developed a political culture that could turn Mom and apple pie into wedge issues.
The truth is that, ideologically speaking, persecution against Christians is an equal-opportunity enterprise. Looking around, it’s clear that the traditional villains for both the political left and the political right, the bête noire for both ideological camps, are equally among the protagonists in the global war on Christians.
Take the 2012 murder of a Protestant Christian named Asif Masih in Mirpur Khas, a village located in south Pakistan. Masih, an evangelical who was twenty-six at the time of his death, was a member of the Dalit underclass and the only breadwinner for his family, which comprised his parents, his younger brothers, and a sister. Masih was reportedly shot to death by gunmen acting at the behest of an influential area landowner named Faisal Kachelo, just one month before his planned wedding date. According to a medical report, Masih was hit by five bullets, including one to the head. He was a manual laborer with ties to a local nongovernmental organization that advocated for the rights of Dalits and tribals, and he was apparently killed over a petty dispute involving some bags of sand used by locals as construction material. Observers charged that the Pakistani authorities did not investigate the murder with vigor, part of what they charged is a pattern of not taking crimes against non-Muslims seriously, especially where they are perceived to belong to low-caste groups that don’t enjoy any social standing or protection.
Standing back from the details, one sees that Masih died not from religious and ethnic discrimination but as a result of a social and economic system premised on defending the privileges of wealthy landowners over the rights of exploited laborers. In effect, one could say that Masih was a martyr to a particularly savage form of capitalism, and thus he is a classic icon of the political left—precisely the sort of figure that one could imagine on Che Guevara-style T-shirts and banners, inspiring progressive uprisings for social change.
Now consider Bishop John Han Dingxiang, an underground Catholic prelate in the Chinese region of Yongnian, a division of Hebei province. A staunch Roman loyalist, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1986 and became a bishop in 1989. Even before his ordination, Dingxiang had refused to take part in the state-controlled Patriotic Association, erected by the Chinese authorities as an “autonomous” form of Catholicism independent of the Vatican but which in reality is subservient to the government. As a result, Dingxiang spent his entire life as a member of China’s Catholic underground, often referred to as the “church of the catacombs,” worshipping mostly in secret in house church services for fear of harassment and arrest.
Those fears were hardly idle. Dingxiang was imprisoned at a labor camp for almost twenty years, from 1960 to 1979, and during his tenure as a bishop he was imprisoned eleven separate times, which meant that he spent thirty-five years of his life in some form of official custody. Repeatedly during those incarcerations, he was beaten, subjected to various forms of “reeducation,” and otherwise mistreated. He had been placed under arrest again in 19
99 and remained in custody until his death in 2007, having been kept in several locations, including a housing complex for Chinese police and their families. As a final indignity, when the bishop died in 2007, Chinese officials refused to allow anyone to be by his bedside. They said that he died of lung cancer, but his body was hastily cremated just six hours after his death, preventing any autopsy from being conducted. His remains were then placed in a large public cemetery without any headstone marking the spot.
Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic humanitarian group that monitors anti-Christian persecution around the world, has preserved a bit of grainy footage of Dingxiang shot by a fellow Chinese Catholic just prior to his death from one of the locations where the bishop was held under arrest. It shows an obviously weakened Dingxiang on a balcony surrounded by iron bars, clinging to the bars for support, but defiantly waving a cross in the air. The Aid to the Church in Need report also featured comments from some of the mourners who gathered in secret to mark the bishop’s passing, one of whom was quoted as saying: “We are so tired of these difficulties.” Then, with a smile, he quickly added: “But the sufferings of this time are as nothing compared to the glory of God.”
China, of course, is an officially atheistic and socialist society. In that light, one could say that Bishop John Han Dingxiang was a martyr to Communism. Dingxiang could be styled as a classic icon of the political right, someone who went to his death upholding the right to personal freedom against the Leviathan of the state. Taking both Masih and Dingxiang into view, the bottom line should be obvious: there are victims in the global war on Christians whose stories reflect the instincts and worldview of both the political left and the right, and no one has any monopoly on suffering.
As mentioned in the introduction, politics distorts perceptions of the global war on Christians in another sense. Ideological bias tempts observers in the West to see only part of the picture. Those on the political left may celebrate martyrs to corporate greed or to right-wing police states, but fear to speak out about the suffering of Christians behind the lines of the Islamic world. Conservatives may be reluctant to condemn the situation facing Christians in the state of Israel or in regimes that are presently in fashion on the right as allies in the “war on terror.” Either way, the result is a reductive reading of the true score of anti-Christian persecution, and a double standard when it comes to engaging its protagonists. If we want to see the global war on Christians clearly, we have to stop looking at it through the funhouse mirror of secular politics.
The following vignettes are designed to bolster the point that there are martyrs aplenty in our time who appeal both to the political left and to the right, making the point that no ideological camp can make any exclusive claim confirming this war.
BISHOP JUAN JOSÉ GERARDI CONEDERA OF GUATEMALA
Born in 1922, Juan José Gerardi Conedera was the grandson of Italian immigrants to Guatemala. Seventy-five at the time of his death in late April 1998, he devoted the latter stages of his life to promoting justice and reconciliation in the wake of Guatemala’s long-running civil war, which in one form or another had lasted from 1960 to 1996. Gerardi knew the story from the front lines: while he was serving as bishop of the rural El Quiché diocese in the late 1970s, he repeatedly received death threats because of his advocacy on behalf of the indigenous Mayan people, and several of his clergy were actually killed by paramilitary groups in league with the Guatemalan military. At one stage, the violence directed at the church became so intense that Gerardi took the unprecedented step of closing the diocese rather than watch as the army picked off more of his priests. Gerardi was forced to take refuge in neighboring Costa Rica for two years until the overthrow of a military junta allowed him to return.
Carrying the scars of those experiences, Gerardi was later named to a national reconciliation commission. He said that he had had two goals for his work: keeping the memory of the suffering endured by his people alive, and promoting a national climate of forgiveness that would allow society to recover. Within the offices of the Archdiocese of Guatemala City, Gerardi spearheaded a project called Recovery of Historical Memory, designed to catalogue in detailed fashion the human rights violations and other atrocities that had occurred during the civil war. The project presented its final report on April 24, 1988, laying the lion’s share of blame for what had happened at the feet of the Guatemalan government and the army.
Two days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his home in Guatemala City. His attackers beat Gerardi with a crude concrete slab, disfiguring him to the extent that his face was completely unrecognizable and identification of the body was possible only by means of his episcopal ring.
Fr. Ricardo Falla, a Jesuit anthropologist who first got to know Gerardi in the 1970s, said the manner in which Gerardi was killed is significant. He contrasted it to the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador.
“Romero was killed with a bullet to the heart, as if to kill off the love and the passion that drove people to struggle,” Falla told reporter Paul Jeffrey in 1998. “Gerardi was killed by someone who smashed his brain, as if they were trying to wipe out his memory.”
If that was in fact the aim, it backfired. In the wake of Gerardi’s death, archdiocesan officials increased the press run on the four volumes of the church’s report from three thousand copies to twenty thousand copies, and to this day it remains the most widely circulated report chronicling human rights violations in Guatemala, despite the fact it’s definitely not easy reading. Besides a statistical breakdown about who did what during the war, there are dozens of selections from victim testimonies. Here’s an example: “Many of the women were pregnant, and they cut open the stomach of one of them who was eight months pregnant. They took out the creature and played with it as if it were a football,” said one survivor of a 1981 army incursion.
In a section titled “Mechanisms of Horror,” the report describes the practices of death squads and other clandestine organizations spawned by the military. Besides the organization of hit squads and descriptions of domestic spying, the report also includes anecdotes of how novice assassins would practice their skills on street people, in preparation for political jobs. Testimonies of former soldiers relate how troops were trained in a step-by-step process for conducting massacres, such as how military agents would conduct “disappearances”—characterized in the report as a particularly vicious form of social control. The report also relates how civil defense patrols were designed to extend the army’s reach in the countryside and induce civilians to kill one another.
Presenting the report on April 24, Gerardi said: “As a church, we collectively and responsibly assumed the task of breaking the silence that thousands of victims have kept for years. We made it possible for them to talk, to have their say, to tell their stories of suffering and pain so they might feel liberated from the burden that has been weighing down on them for so long.”
Authorities in Guatemala initially tried to deflect blame for Gerardi’s murder, at one point making the ludicrous suggestion that the killer was the parish dog, named Baloo, which they hinted had attacked Gerardi at the direction of a priest who lived in the same residence. The “arrest” of Baloo was briefly a mini soap opera. In response, the Catholic Church in Guatemala took the controversial decision to form an investigative team of young men who called themselves “Los Intocables,” or “the Untouchables,” to find the killers.
Eventually in 2001, three army officers, including a colonel and two junior officers, were convicted of Gerardi’s assassination and sentenced to thirty-year terms in prison. A priest identified as an accomplice received a twenty-year sentence. The verdicts were historic, in that they marked the first time members of the Guatemalan military were tried before civilian courts. Upon appeal, two of the officers had their sentences reduced to twenty years, while one was killed in prison before the appeals process reached completion. One of the convicted officers was paroled in July 2012, while the pries
t, Fr. Mario Orantes, was released in January 2013 for good behavior after serving twelve years.
The court had also requested that thirteen other people be investigated, including a handful of senior government officials, but to date no additional charges in the case have been filed. Many observers in Guatemala believe that the real masterminds of the affair remain at large and are unlikely ever to be identified or tried.
Fr. Cirilo Santamaría, a Carmelite priest and veteran of the Recovery of Historical Memory project, said at a public forum in 2003 that Gerardi’s legacy continues to challenge the church to reach past its institutional boundaries.
“Gerardi was a bishop who went beyond the frontiers of the church,” Santamaría said. “He was a bishop who incarnated himself, who knew how to walk with the poor, listen to the indigenous, who knew the way down into the gullies where the urban poor live, who attended to the victims without asking them their religion. The victims were simple people, and Gerardi embraced them where they were.”
Santamaría encouraged Gerardi’s followers to pick up where the bishop left off.
“Gerardi wanted this country to break out from the years of fear and death that have reduced the majority of Guatemalans to silence,” he said. “That’s why we’re today starting to continue the task he began, to recover our memory so that history won’t repeat itself. All of us are learning to shout together, ‘Never Again!’ Never again violence, never again massacres, never again assassinations.”
In 2010, a dramatic film was made of the bishop’s life and death, titled Gerardi. He is celebrated as a “martyr for truth,” someone who gave his life so that the suffering of the Guatemalan people, especially the Mayans with whom he lived and worked for most of his life, would not be lost or forgotten. By encouraging the remembering of the past, his aim was to shape a better future.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 26