News- United States

The Forgotten Victims

Although the vast majority of Americans profess to be Christians, the State Department has never placed a high priority on efforts to stop persecution of Christians around the world.

When Pope John Paul II looks at the globe, he sees a collage of the world's great religious traditions. As he wrote in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, "this map of the world's religions has superimposed on it, in previously unknown layers unique to our time, the phenomenon of atheism in its various forms, beginning with the atheism that is programmed, organized, and structured as a political system."

Those words were written in 1979. Since that time, and since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and its satellites--and despite the signs that the old atheist system may be poised for a comeback--many people have come to the conclusion that the shadows have been lifted, and religious liberty will shine forth.

But when Nina Shea looks at a globe, she sees the Far East still overshadowed by dogmatic Communism; in China alone the system still holds 1.2 billion people in its thrall. And in North Africa and Central Asia she sees the map pockmarked by militant Islam.

Shea was recently named to the US state department's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom. She is the author of In the Lion's Den: A Shocking Account of Persecution and Martyrdom of Christians Today and How We Should Respond. In that book she writes:

Millions of American Christians pray in their churches each week, oblivious to the fact that Christians in many parts of the world suffer brutal torture, arrest, imprisonment, and even death--their homes and communities laid waste--for no other reason than that they are Christians. The shocking, untold story of out time is that more Christians have died this century simply for being Christians than in the first nineteen centuries after the birth of Christ.

To back up that dramatic statement, Shea cites on-site research done by evangelical missions and her own Puebla Program at the Washington-based Freedom House. But she also cites reportage by organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations, and by a precious few American newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun.

The Sun sent two reporters into the Sudan in 1996, to cover the civil war that was (and is) raging between the Muslim north and the Christian South. "We survey the children," they wrote:

The reporters bought two boys, half-brothers, for $1,000, and gave them back to their father.

Yet a reporter from another major newspaper told Michael Horowitz, formerly an official in the Reagan administration and now a fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, that his "description of anti-Christian persecutions had to be wildly overdrawn--couldn't be true. I asked how he knew this to be so," Horowitz recalled, "and he answered: 'Well, I haven't read about it in my paper.'"

The Pope identifies an "atheism that is programmed, organized, and structured as a political system." According to Horowitz, a more subtle form of unbelief can be found in "many reporters, or in those who dominate our human-rights establishment.... They don't know anybody who would risk his life for the sake of faith.... Such sentiments are, to say the least, powerfully shared within our State Department."

Horowitz made these comments last February after accepting an award from Prison Fellowship Ministries, an evangelical organization lead by Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate conspirator who experienced a profound religious conversion while he was in prison.

Horowitz said that "today's elites find it hard to believe that Christians can possibly be the persecuted rather than the persecutors." Among those who dominate American political and intellectual life, he charged, "believing Christians have been patronized as polyester bigots against whom a modern, thinking, caring culture must protect itself."

Thus believers emerged from the caldron organized atheism in the East only to fall into the pool of apathy in the West. Horowitz recounted the horror story of Genaneh Metafria, an Evangelical from Ethiopia, who was repeatedly arrested and tortured by the Communists. In his affidavit to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Metafria said:

Having escaped Ethiopia, Metafria returned after the Communists fell--only to be arrested this time by the militant Muslim authorities now in power. He escaped again and made his way to the United States.

"I went to an immigration lawyer," Horowitz recalled, "and said, 'here is an asylum applicant almost certain to be murdered if returned to his former country.' The lawyer told me that, as a Christian asylum seeker, Getaneh would have a hard time winning his case. 'Can he fit through the eye of a needle?' the lawyer asked." The INS is now seeking to deport Getaneh, on the grounds that he does not qualify for religious asylum.

In her book Nina Shea recounts evidence of the same attitude. During the 1996 meeting of the Human Rights Commission held by the UN in Geneva, neither the United States nor any other Western delegates spoke out about Christian persecution. The European Union delivered a 19-page statement on what it considered the gravest human-rights violations: Tibetan Buddhists and Iranians of the Baha'i faith were specifically mentioned; Christians were not.

"If the countries of a Christian background have so little interest in specifically referring to the persecution of Christians," commented British human-rights activist Wilfred Wong, "then who will?"

"If I am not for myself," said the famous 1st-century Rabbi Hillel, "then who am I for?" After World War II and the Holocaust, American Jews came to the same painful conclusion.

"There were so many people who did nothing when the opportunity was there," said Paul Kenney, a Pittsburgh-based expert on Jewish-Catholic relations. "And unfortunately, some of the people who did nothing were Jews." In the 1930s the do-nothing attitude sometimes shaded off into a something beyond passivity. For example, when President Roosevelt nominated Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, to the US Supreme Court, a delegation of leading American Jews pleaded with Roosevelt to withdraw the nomination. Hitler was coming to power, they reasoned, and a highly visible Jew in the US political system would only intensify anti-Semitism in Germany.

After the war, many Jews came to the consensus that, "had they spoken out and been more militant, maybe things would have been different," Kenney said. So when anti-Semitism seemed to be on the rise in the Soviet Union through the 1950s and 1960s, the worldwide Jewish community acted.

The demographic data are unreliable, but even today between 1 and 2 million Jews live in the former Soviet Union, giving that region the third-largest concentration of Jews in the world--trailing only Israel and the US. The Jewish community "picked a battle that they thought they could win," Kenney said. "And they picked a battle using the United States as leverage because of the Cold War."

A brief relaxation of emigration laws by the Soviets in 1967 came to an abrupt end after the Six-Day War. Things reached their nadir in 1970, when a group of Jews attempted to hijack a plane to Israel. But the harsh sentences the hijackers received only galvanized the worldwide campaign to free Soviet Jewry.

It started at the grassroots level, with things like signs displayed in front of synagogues and bumper stickers. From there it went on to lobbying in places like New York where Jews exercise a great deal of political influence. When a candidate seeking public office came to speak before a Jewish organization, he would be asked: "What's your position on Soviet Jewry?" Those who didn't have a position on the issue quickly developed one. "The Jews had the moral authority of the Holocaust going for them," Kenney said. "All you have to do is rattle the bones of Auschwitz before the politicians."

The campaign for Soviet Jewry found a handy political vehicle in a piece of trade legislation. The US trade policy divided other nations into three categories: goods coming from some countries faced high tariffs; from others no tariffs at all; from still others, lower tariffs. Although they did not qualify for tariff-free trade, countries in the last category were said to have "most favored nation" tariff status. During the early 1970s, the Nixon and Ford administrations pressed for "most favored nation" status for the Soviet Union, as part of the overall policy of detente. That campaign gave American Jewish groups their opportunity.

In 1974, Sen. Henry Jackson, head of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, and Congressman Charles Vanik, chairman of the Way's and Means Committee in the House of Representatives, introduced legislation linking trade concessions to Communist countries with the countries' record on allowing emigration. Their proposal was made in the form of an amendment to a trade bill, and passed through Congress almost unanimously. The Jackson-Vanik legislation required the president to make an annual report on the number of emigrants released by Communist countries, and it prohibited offerring most-favored status to countries which lagged in that department.

The measure worked. Despite the periodic freezes and thaws in the course of the Cold War, the flow of Jews out of the Soviet Union steadily increased from less than 15,000 in 1971 to 51,000 in 1979, and contined to rise. In 1990--the year before the Soviet Union dissolved--more than 250,000 Jews emigrated.

Micheal Horowitz, for one, believes that the effect of the Jackson-Vanik amendment went far beyond the question of Jewish emigration. The dissolution of the Soviet Union began, he argues, when "the then-mighty Soviet Union blinked in the face of America's implacable hostility to perpetrators of religious persecution."

This spring, Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania plan to introduce bills in defense of religious freedom, especially for Christians. The legislation would mandate:

• a presidential advisor on religious freedom, subject to Senate confirmation, who would sit on the National Security Council;

• major modifications to the immigration and naturalization laws which would allow easier access to asylum and residence in the US for Christian refugees; and

• trade and aid sanctions which would be triggered by violations of religious rights.

The last provision is the most difficult to codify, and those involved in drafting the bill--including Michael Horowitz--are now debating how to attain their object. Precisely because religious rights are not simple to define, this may be the point where a comparison between the Wolf-Specter proposal and the Jackson-Vanik amendment breaks down. The Jackson-Vanik amendment offered a clearly defined measure of oppression: the number of emigres released. And that bill also had a definite group in mind: Soviet Jews. Although the bill did not actually mention any particular group, one Congressional staffer observes, "everyone knew who it was aimed at and what group of people was being helped."

Last year, political leaders in Washington had their consciousness raised about another group of people needing help, when Congress scheduled hearings on the persecution of Christians around the world. Inevitably--as in any discussion of religious persecution--the case of China loomed large. Both the House and the Senate unanimously called upon the Clinton administration to pursue a vigorous policy championing the rights of persecuted Christians therre. The House resolution categorically stated that "Christians in China are now experiencing the worst persecution since the 1970s" and "there are more documented cases of Christians in prison or in some form of detention in China than in any other country."

Christians in underground or "house" churches also loom large in the mind of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which has publically called them "a principal threat to political stability." Estimates vary, but there are tens of millions of such Christians in China today. Yet the government's treatment of these churches apparently does not figure prominently in US policy. When human-rights activists questioned him about the problem last year, the US ambassador to China, James Sasser, reportedly responded with a question of his own: "What's a house church?"

When the State Department official who chairs the advisory committee on religious freedom told the New York Times that the committee was not going to be "action-oriented," Congressmen Wolf, Christopher Smith of New Jersey rounded up several colleagues to join him in firing off a letter to their main ally on the committee, Nina Shea. The committee's effectiveness, they wrote,

Would the legislation to be introduced by Wolf in Congress, while not explicitly mentioning China, be aimed at countering religious-rights abuses there? A member of the Congressman's staff affirmed that indeed it would. But she was less clear on how China's annual progress or regress regarding religious liberties would be measured on an annual basis. "The standard we will probably use is," she said, "is there widespread and systematic persecution of Christians of specific denominations?"

There is another respect in which the new Congressional move to address persecution of Christian differs from effort to protect Soviet Jews in the 1970s: in that earlier campaign, American Jews organized into a powerful lobbying force. Capitol Hill is still waiting for American Christians--and especially Catholics--to mount the same sort of offensive.

In the first signs of such an effective political movement, Evangelical Protestants are leading the way. Last year the National Association of Evangelicals issued a condemnation of the persecution of Christians, and the World Evangelical Fellowship designated last September 29 as an international day of prayer for persecuted Christians. But the rest of the Christian community--including the nation's single largest Christian denomination, the Catholic Church--seems largely unaware of the issue.

Furthermore, those religious leaders who do know about the rumblings in Congress seem reticent about making persecution a major issue. Paradoxically, the "American Christian community was unstinting in its commitment in the campaign against Soviet anti-semitism," Horowitz said. For example, the US Catholic Conference endorsed the Jackson-Vanik bill. For Jews like Horowitz, helping Christians carry on a similar campaign is one way "to return your mighty favor."

And yet, Horowitz laments, "When I talk to many Christians, they get nervous about such a campaign. 'We can't only protect our own,' they say. In fact, I think you can and must."

Horowitz believes that it is always right to come to the aid of any community which is suffering under tyranny. And the proof of his point, he observes,

So in the campaign for persecuted Christians, Jewish activists are also leading the way. In March the Center for Jewish and Christian Values scheduled a conference last month in the Senate chambers, in which representatives from B'nai B'rith, the Religious Action Center of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the Anti-Defamation League recalled the lessons from the successful Soviet campaign to save Soviet Jewry. Representatives from the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Knights of Columbus were asked to respond. On this political issue, Christians are just beginning to learn.

[AUTHOR ID] James McCoy writes for the Pittsburgh Catholic.

[SIDEBAR]

In Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council taught that the dignity of the human person is the foundation for the right to religious freedom:

Vatican II admitted that the Church "through the vicissitudes" of human history has not always lived up to this standard. Nevertheless "it has always remained the teaching of the Church that no one is to be coerced into believing."

For at least a millennium, the Catholic religion was the official state religion wherever it had taken hold. From this "christening" of kingdoms, Christendom was born.

"If because of the circumstances of a particular people, special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional organization of a state," Vatican II said, "the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom must be recognized and respected as well."

Today, official state recognition of the Catholic religion is generally not a political issue. But many Catholics are caught up in a bitter struggle to realize their own rights to worship freely in a country where Christianity is a minority religion.

Such is the case, for example, in Saudi Arabia, an officially Islamic country. Not a single Catholic church can be built there, even though one-fifth of the population is made of foreign workers, many of whom are Filipino Catholics.

It is arguable that the Saudi political situation--with the regime constantly on guard against Muslim militants--is so volatile that limits must be set on the free exercise of religion. After all, Vatican II allowed, "All men should be immune from coercion ... within due limits." What are those "due limits?" The Council also said that "the exercise of this right cannot be interfered with as long as the just requirements of public order are observed." But again, what is "public order?"

That same term shows up in a 1995 State Department report on human rights in China: "The Government attaches higher priority to maintaining public order and suppressing political opposition than to enforcing legal norms. As a result, security forces are responsible for numerous human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, forced confessions, and torture." (emphasis added) Is that the "public order" the Council had in mind?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads: "The 'due limits' which are inherent in [the right to religious liberty] must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order."

The Catechism concludes that the right to religious liberty "is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities."