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

by John L. Allen

  The response left the crowd quiet for a minute, until one of the industrialists finally had the nerve to ask: “Dr. Barrett, could you tell us what the second most effective form of evangelization is?”

  The question reflects a core human instinct: no matter how much we may admire the martyrs, most of us aren’t in a hurry to join them. The proper Christian understanding of martyrdom is that of St. Thomas More, who did everything in his power to avoid death except renouncing his faith. Yet all the evidence suggests that when martyrdom does occur, it’s an enormously powerful resource for introducing people to the faith, or renewing it in those for whom the faith has grown cold. Even for people hostile to religion or to Christianity in particular, the martyrs represent Christianity at its most attractive.

  Like pretty much everything in Christian life, the subject of mission has become controversial today. At the liberal end of some denominations, there’s a current wary of the whole idea of trying to convert others. In part, that’s because of the historical association between evangelization and colonization, and the embarrassing memory of the faith being imposed down the barrel of a gun. In part too, that’s because when people look around, they often find the most aggressive Christian missionaries to be a bit repulsive—too pushy, too self-righteous, too insensitive to the wisdom of other peoples and cultures. Critics also may feel there’s something offensive about insisting that followers of other religions need to convert in order to be right with God.

  While appreciating those cautions, most Christians feel that the church can’t just throw in the towel on missionary work, because doing so is impossible to square with the risen Christ’s final command: “Go forth and make disciples of the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is by nature a missionary religion, and most Christians rejoice when they see someone join the family of faith. The mainstream Christian consensus probably boils down to something like this: The faith must always be proposed, never imposed. Do it with great respect, do it gently, and don’t measure success in terms of head counts and market share—but at the same time, do it.

  Surveying the landscape of the early twenty-first century, we may be entering a time of renewed Christian missionary ferment. In the Protestant world, there’s a powerful movement among evangelicals and Pentecostals who call themselves “Great Commission Christians,” referring to the commission given by Christ after his resurrection. The most determined current in Great Commission Christianity today focuses upon what its architects call the “10/40 window,” meaning a swath of the globe between 10 degrees latitude north of the equator and 40 degrees south of the equator. It includes North Africa, the Middle East, India, and China, representing the part of the world with the lowest percentage of Christians. Of the fifty-six countries in the 10/40 window, forty-four are majority-Muslim states, and these Great Commission Christians are determined to bring the Gospel to those regions of the world.

  This isn’t just an ambition among Western Christians. The most audacious Christians in China today dream of carrying the Gospel beyond the borders of their own country, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as “Back to Jerusalem.” As journalist David Aikman explained in his 2006 book Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the movement of the Gospel for the last two thousand years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the Gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem.

  In the Catholic world, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI made what they call the “New Evangelization” the church’s highest internal priority. In broad strokes, the idea is to exit a period in which the Catholic Church’s energies were largely consumed by internal debates and to turn once more to the external challenge of spreading the faith. As it’s been conceived by church leaders, the New Evangelization is directed in the first instance at people who have already been baptized as Christians but who for one reason or another are no longer practicing the faith. In the United States, for instance, the “Catholics Come Home” campaign founded by Arizona layman Tom Peterson is one example of the New Evangelization in action. Featuring slick TV, radio, and Internet presentations (such as a commercial during the 2013 college football national championship game with former Notre Dame coach and TV commentator Lou Holtz), the campaign claims an average increase of 10 percent in Mass attendance rates in the dioceses in which it’s been rolled out.

  As this evangelical momentum gathers steam, in tandem with rising consciousness about the global war on Christians, it’s reasonable to suspect that the stories of the martyrs will become an increasingly important resource in Christian missionary efforts. That’s not only because the martyrs will simply be on people’s minds but also because, from a missionary perspective, the martyrs work.

  From the point of view of bringing people to the faith, or bringing them back if they’ve walked away, it’s one thing to sit down and give them a theological lesson about Christian notions of sacrifice, human dignity, and love for one’s neighbor. It’s another thing to tell them the story of Fr. Fadi Jamil Haddad, an Orthodox priest who was kidnapped and killed near Damascus, Syria, in late October 2012.

  Haddad was born to a Christian family in the Syrian city of Qatana on February 2, 1969. In 1994 he graduated from the University of Balamand, and in 1996 he began serving in Qatana, a city with a mixed Muslim-Christian population, which had a population of fifteen thousand before the war. He was ordained a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church on July 14, 1995. He quickly became a beloved local activist on behalf of victimized people, regardless of their religious affiliation. He reached out to Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Alawites equally, as well as Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Protestants, and those with no religious ties. Because he was considered a man of tact and discretion, he was often asked to negotiate for the release of kidnapped Syrians on behalf of their families. Despite the risks to his own life and safety, he always agreed, and frequently was able to engineer their safe release. Haddad purposely did not take sides in the political conflict in Syria, and gained the reputation of a “man of God, trusted by all.”

  Days before his own death, Haddad acted as a mediator for the family of a Muslim doctor who had been abducted. He communicated with the kidnappers, who demanded a ransom of more than 50 million Syrian pounds (roughly $700,000). He managed to reduce the ransom to 25 million pounds ($350,000) and traveled with the doctor’s father-in-law to hand over the money. The transaction turned out to be a ruse, and both Haddad and the father-in-law were themselves taken prisoner. The kidnappers then demanded 750 million pounds ($10.5 million) to free all three men.

  When the money wasn’t forthcoming, the kidnappers decided to kill Haddad to prove they were serious—perhaps on the assumption that the church was the least likely party to pay for his release anyway. The forty-three-year-old priest was found shot in the head on a highway near the town of Drousha. Sources say an examination of the body revealed that Haddad had been tortured, including gouging out his eyes, before death finally came.

  Haddad swiftly was declared a martyr by Orthodox believers in Syria. They see him as a believer willing to risk his own life to try to liberate people who had been taken captive, in the spirit of Jesus as portrayed in Luke 4:18: “The Lord has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” Syrian state television stated of Haddad, “He was one of the most prominent workers for national reconciliation and the healing of wounds.”

  As a question of missionary strategy, the Haddad story has a capacity to capture imaginations and stir hearts that a catechetical lesson or a sermon simply cannot reproduce. One spiritual fruit of the global war on Christians is providing the contemporary church with more such stories, both those told about the dead by others and those that survivors can tell
for themselves. They represent a powerful missionary resource at a time when the churches are struggling to renew their evangelical commitment.

  For believers, that coincidence might well smack of divine providence.

  14

  WHAT’S TO BE DONE

  Authors are an idiosyncratic bunch, with different strategies about the best way to write a book. Some play their cards close to the vest, refusing to reveal anything about what they’re up to until the book is actually published, so that it falls upon an unsuspecting world like a thunderclap. The idea is to maximize impact and, naturally, sales. I generally take a different tack, developing my books like open-source software. I trot out the material along the way, in columns I write for the National Catholic Reporter and other media outlets, and in speeches I give on the lecture circuit. That’s partly a product of sloth, in that I don’t have the energy or the time to come up with anything else to write about or think about, but in my experience this kind of public exposure to my ideas prior to publication also results in a better finished product. I’m able to figure out which verbal formula capture ideas most effectively, which questions people are likely to ask, and where my initial assessments are half-baked or need development.

  By the time I publish a book, I’ve usually written articles and given speeches about it hundreds of times, and also given scores of interviews to other reporters on the subject, giving me a pretty good sense of what the typical responses are likely to be. In many cases, especially when the topic stretches over a lot of ground, there’s no single dominant reaction. When it comes to the global war on Christians, however, the clear winner in terms of a response from the grass roots is: “What can we do?”

  That reaction speaks to a couple of basic truths. First, the scope and scale of the global war on Christians is almost invariably news to audiences in the West. They may have heard a few of the individual stories—many Catholics could probably identify Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, for instance, and lots of folks at least have heard of Asia Bibi in Pakistan. However, most people are staggered to hear that a leading estimate says that eleven Christians are killed somewhere in the world every hour, or that 80 percent of all acts of religious persecution in the world today are directed at Christians. They’ve never asked themselves what ought to be done about the global war on Christians, because quite honestly they didn’t know it’s being waged.

  Second, the “What can we do?” question reflects basic Western instincts toward both decency and activism. It’s about decency, in the sense that most people are well-intentioned and compassionate souls inclined to generosity. Having learned that Christians around the world are in trouble, they’d like to help. It’s also about activism, in that Westerners generally are not inclined to passivity or contemplation in the face of suffering and evil. Our instinct instead is to roll up our sleeves and get to work. All this reflects a sort of good news, bad news situation. The bad news is that consciousness about the global war on Christians is slow in reaching the grass roots. The good news is that once people pass from ignorance to awareness, there’s precious little debate over the merits of the cause. Instead, the vast majority are ready to act.

  This final chapter presents a set of suggestions for responding to the global war on Christians, in an effort to answer the question “What’s to be done?” It is not intended to be comprehensive, as there are many additional possibilities beyond those mentioned here. In that sense, this is more like a primer, or a stimulus, than an encyclopedia. The idea is not to imply that these are the only things that can be done, because additional steps and strategies always emerge when momentum around a cause begins to build. Rather, these are among the immediate things that can be done, right here and right now, which stand a plausible chance of making a difference.

  As a broad observation, the ideal is always that any response to the global war on Christians ought to be worked out in conversation with the victims themselves, to avoid ending up in Hell down the road of good intentions. Arab Christians in Palestine, for instance, often complain that they are not consulted by evangelical groups that come into the region and make pronouncements. Many Indian Christians were outraged in 2012 when prominent American politicians declared their support for providing a travel visa for a visit to the United States by Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujurat state, because of his reputation as a fierce opponent of Islamic radicalism. These Indian Christians pointed out that Modi is also responsible for a notorious 2003 anti-conversion law in Gujurat that frequently serves as a pretext for violence and harassment against Christians. In colloquial language, their point was that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. The rule of thumb should be to look before leaping, paying special heed to the people who’ll have to live with the consequences of whatever we do.

  PRAYER

  For believers, the first and most natural response to a situation of suffering is prayer. Mainstream Christian theology holds that pain is always regrettable, but when it’s unavoidable, it can have spiritual value. Mediated through prayer, pain allows a believer to enter into the spirit of Christ on the Cross and to open oneself more deeply to the suffering of the world. In prayer, people experiencing pain turn to God to ask for consolation and strength, to struggle with their doubts and despair, and to summon the will to endure.

  Aside from such spiritual fruits, one also should not underestimate the importance of prayer in shaping a culture in the church. Catholicism has the saying lex orandi, lex credendi, meaning “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” The idea is that what Christians pray for shapes what they believe and how they see the world. In that light, the more that Christians learn to pray on behalf of the persecuted, both individually and in public liturgical settings, the more conscious they will be of the nature of the global war on Christians, and the more inclined they will become to want to do something about it.

  As an example of the point, consider the Catholic Church’s custom prior to the Second Vatican Council of including a prayer for the “conversion of Russia” at the conclusion of each Mass. It was part of a cluster of prayers to be said at the end of each low Mass, known as the “Leonine Prayers” because they date from 1884 during the papacy of Leo XII. The prayer for Russia was added in 1930 at the direction of Pope Pius XI, following the Bolshevik Revolution. It was not actually for the conversion of Russia, but rather that “tranquility and freedom to profess the faith be restored to the afflicted people of Russia.” It was popularly known as a prayer for conversion, however, because of its association with a reputed appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal, where the visionaries reported that Mary had directed Catholics to pray for the conversion of Russia.

  Naturally, this was before the ecumenical momentum unleashed by Vatican II, and today the idea of praying for the “conversion” of Russia would be seen as ecumenically insensitive. Russia is a profoundly Christian nation, and remained so despite seven decades of Soviet oppression. Recent popes have worked hard to restore good relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, and today most Catholics would see the aim of those relationships not to be the conquest of Russia for the papacy, but a form of mutually acceptable unity in diversity.

  However politically incorrect, the prayer served the purpose of reminding Catholics that there were people suffering for the faith in Russia, and that the church cared. It created a popular consciousness about the “Church of Silence,” the catacombs church behind the Iron Curtain, which was important in keeping Christian attention riveted on the fate of believers in the Soviet sphere. Such concern alone did not cause the collapse of Communism, but Christians in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations, sustained by networks of support in the West, were instrumental in setting the dominoes in motion, and it’s reasonable to ask if that Western support would have been as strong without the culture of concern shaped by the practice of prayer on behalf of the persecuted.

  In today’s context, similar prayers on behalf of the victims in the global war on Christians c
ould help raise consciousness and steel resolve. In order to maximize effectiveness and to cement ecumenical solidarity, it would be desirable for such a prayer to be worked out among the various Christian churches and then authorized for common use, both in terms of personal devotion and for public liturgical functions. Such a gesture would not only say something important about how committed the churches are but also promote and enhance the spiritual fruits of martyrdom described in the previous chapter.

  RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS

  On September 16, 2012, I found myself in the middle of a vast crowd gathered in Beirut, made up of people who had come from all across the Middle East to attend Pope Benedict XVI’s open-air Mass. It was the culmination of the pope’s three-day trip to Lebanon, which had begun just two days after U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in Benghazi, Libya, triggering a spasm of anti-American and anti-Western violence. Benedict’s presence seemed to lift up a different face of the Middle East, one characterized by mutual respect and welcome. Even Hezbollah, seen in the West as a terrorist organization but which acts as a social and political movement in Lebanon, festooned Beirut with banners welcoming the Holy Father. Lebanon’s Daily Star hailed the three-day trip as a “symbol of tolerance.”

  During the Mass, I made my way toward a group of people in the crowd waving a Syrian flag. It turned out they were a group of Christians from Syria who had fled the bloody civil war, packing their bags and boarding a beaten-up minivan, not sure if they would ever be able to return, and hoping that someone in Lebanon would take them in. A member of the group told me they had found temporary refugee with a Christian family living in a village near the Syrian border, but they weren’t sure what their long-term solution would be. They described losing family and friends, hearing anti-Christian slogans shouted by the Free Syrian Army, watching Christian churches and shops being bombed, and being afraid to take their children to services on Sunday.