"If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you," Christ
warned his disciples, who came to learn the truth of his words.
Eleven of the 12 sent out to preach the Gospel after Pentecost died a
martyr's death witnessing to the truth that he was the Son of God and
had a claim to man's obedience and allegiance even greater than
Caesar's.
Christ's words come to mind on reading about a report, extracted from
a balking State Department, about the persecution of Christians in our
own era. According to The New York Times, "A senior administration
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed discomfort at
the mandated focus on Christians alone. ... "
Remarkable. In August 1941, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, Winston
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt joined hands to fight Nazi tyranny.
To gain strength for the journey, they and the crews of the American
and British warships sang "Onward Christian Soldiers." Yet our State
Department is miffed at having to document the brutalization of
millions of Christians.
That persecution is "massive and vastly unreported," contends Nina
Shea of the human-rights group Freedom House, but "few Christian
Americans even know about it."
"There's a bias among some of our political elites," says Shea, "that
if you are willing to die for the Bible, you're a fanatic, but if you
die in front of a tank, you're a hero. The great lesson absorbed by
the tyrants of the world from the collapse of the Soviet empire is
that it was the churches that contributed to the ... collapse of the
empire. So you see a pattern of persecution in places like China and
Saudi Arabia."
Right on target.
The State Department report was to have been delivered in January,
but it was delayed until Congress had voted to extend
most-favored-nation trade privileges to the greatest persecutor of
Christians on Earth. In official language, it dryly documents what the
New Republic's Jacob Heilbrunn vividly describes:
"Last year seems to have been a particularly busy one for China's
Christian hunters. ... Police destroyed 15,000 religious sites in the
Zhegiang province alone in 1996. In January, Father Guo Bo Le of
Shanghai was sentenced to two years of re-education ... for 'saying
Mass.' ... (D)uring Holy Week ... security officials raided the home
of the bishop of Shanghai and confiscated numerous religious texts,
and in April, the authorities closed more than 300 home churches or
meeting places. In the Jia
Beijing's anti-Christian pogrom is ecumenical: "Protestant leaders in
China say that 40 percent of the inmates in Henan labor camps are
members of the Christian underground. The methods that the authorities
use to re-educate these Christians include starving and beating
detainees, binding them in excruciating positions, hanging them from
their limbs and torturing them with electric cattle prods and drills.
Sometimes, relatives are forced to watch the torture sessions."
And what is the Clinton policy toward the devils who authorize such
atrocities against men, women and children who only wish to witness
to their faith in Jesus Christ? "Constructive engagement." The
rationale: By giving China's communist rulers free access to U.S.
markets and treating them with respect, we will introduce them to our
Western values, and they will gradually come to see the error of
their ways.
But the rebellion against communism in the Soviet empire did not come
from the top down; it came from the bottom up. It was the Polish pope
who inspired the Catholic working man Lech Walesa and Solidarity to
rise up, not Archer-Daniels-Midland or Chase Manhattan. And if
"constructive engagement" is the surest way to ease the persecution of
Christians, why has it failed so dismally in Saudi Arabia, where we
have been "constructively engaged" for half a century?
Americans developed the Saudi oil fields, sold Riyadh much of what the
monarchy has used to modernize and sent half a million men -- most of
them Christians -- to defend that country. And how are Christians
treated? Writes Tom Bethell in the American Spectator: "There are
three or four dozen Catholic priests in the country, all disguised as
civilians. If Christian services are discovered, violent reprisals may
be expected from the Mutawa, or Saudi religious police."
According to Chuck Colson, Saudi citizens are "paid a bounty of
$3,000 for exposing a home Bible class." Former Foreign Service
Officer Timothy Hunter says that even Americans caught practicing
their faith have been beaten and tortured.
Would speaking out forthrightly about the persecution of Christians
somehow jeopardize our access to cheap oil? What are our Saudi
friends going to do with it if they don't sell it to us? Or is
religious freedom an inconsequential concern in a capitalist America
where the commands of trade trump all other values?
Where have all those Christian soldiers gone?
