Year: 2014

We’ve been following the case of Egyptian human rights dissident and alum of the Center for Civil and Human Rights Yara Sallam.  She had her sentence reduced to two years — but still, alas, faces two years in prison.  She remains in our thoughts and prayers.

An encouraging story comes from Kaduna, Nigeria, where Muslim youths stood guard to protect Christians celebrating Christmas.  Such stories are not merely heartwarming but are critical to understanding the global profile of Islam and its capabilities for peacebuilding.  The story evokes memories of similar recent episodes around the world, including ones in Egypt, where Muslims encircled Coptic Churches, also at Christmas — and where Christians encircled Muslims in prayer during popular protests in Cairo.

Kaduna is in northern Nigeria, where strife between Christians and Muslims has been intense over the past decade-and-a-half, particularly since sharia law was established in Kaduna State in 2001.  As a result of riots and other violence, Muslims and Christians have migrated to different parts of the city, where they live separately.

Christmas is a good time to remember persecuted Christians and indeed all who suffer the denial of their religious freedom.  Jesus was born into persecution under a king who sought his life for his being who He is.  Christian Caryl of Foreign Policy writes of a black Christmas for Christians of the Middle East.  Meanwhile, India’s aggressive Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, is threatening to move ahead with forced the conversions of Christians and Muslims on Christmas.  In China, the demolition of churches continues.

Here at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, we have spent the fall launching our three-year project on how Christians respond to persecution, Under Caesar’s Sword.  We look forward to a major conference in Rome on the subject in December 2015.  This Christmas provides no shortage of reminders of the relevance of the issue.

One of my favorite writers on religious freedom is Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol.  Check out his courageous and innovative book, Islam Without Extremes.  Today, his analysis appears in the New York Times in a column taking to task Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for the increasingly harsh, closed, and authoritarian Islam that he is imposing on Turkey, especially in education.  The policy of unfreedom is inimical to the economic and political dynamism through which Turkey has prospered as of late.  Secularism, though, is not Akyol’s answer.  For most of the Republic of Turkey’s modern history, it was under the equally closed, authoritarian — and stifling — secular dogmas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.  Erdogan’s recent direction is sad, for from 2002 to 2010, he led Turkey in the direction of political and economic openness — a prying open of Ataturk’s rigid secularism towards a religiously vibrant liberal democracy.

One of the most colorful dimensions of the new U.S.-Cuba deal to emerge is the role of Pope Francis in brokering it.  His intervention recalls previous ones like Pope John Paul II’s intervention in the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in December 1978.

More commentary has emerged on Pope Francis’s role over the weekend.  John Allen of Crux sees it as manifesting a longstanding papal policy of detente.   Here is a skeptical perspective from Nicholas Hahn.

 

When I mention religious tolerance in contemporary India to people, I still get startled reactions: Isn’t this the land of Gandhi, peace and pluralism?  Yet the latest news is another reminder of a very different picture.  Hindu nationalist forces, whose political party now governs India, have been planning mass “reconversion” ceremonies, including one for Christmas Day intended to “reconvert” thousands of Christians “back” to Hinduism.  Fraud, bribery, and deceit typically accompany the conversions.  Now the government has decided to ban the Christmas conversions for the sake of public order.  See a BBC story here.

Across India’s northern border, religious repression and accompanying violence continues.  See the latest piece of Knox Thames, who is always good on Pakistan.

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture brings back with renewed force the debates of the previous decade about the use of torture in fighting terrorism.  The three main conclusions I draw from the report are that first, the CIA’s use of torture in fighting terrorism was far more widespread than previously known; second, that torture was never effective in eliciting information for capturing active terrorists; and third, that the CIA deceived many, including the public and even the president, about both of these facts.  Defenders of the techniques even now say that they kept us secure.

Insofar as the debate deals with the morality of torture, it proceeds on consequentialist grounds: was torture really effective in stopping terrorism?  Obscured is the position that torture is intrinsece malum — always, everywhere, inherently wrong.  This is the position of the Catholic Church, articulated in the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et Spes, the Catechism (1994), and Pope Saint John Paul II’s great encyclical on morality of 1993, Veritatis Splendor.

The Church acknowledges its own complex past on the matter, having sanctioned torture in the Middle Ages.  The contemporary Catechism says this:

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture.  Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy.  She forbade clerics to shed blood.  In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person.  On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading.  It is necessary to work for their abolition.  We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

Let us pray indeed.

For an excellent explication of the Church’s views, including a historical perspective, see this article in 2010 by Steve Colecchi in America.  For an excellent natural law argument against torture, see this piece by Chris Tollefsen.

 

 

Previous posts here have covered the religious dimension of the protests in Hong Kong.  Now the police have arrested Cardinal Zen, one of the great Catholic dissidents in China.  See here.

Behind religious terrorism are . . . restrictions on religious freedom.  Thus argue Nilay Saiya and Anthony Scime of the State University of New York – Brockport.  Here writes Saiya:

What is the relationship between religious liberty and faith-based terrorism? Some argue that restrictions on religion, though morally problematic, are at times justified in order to prevent or curtail religious violence. This logic gained increased traction in certain circles following the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001 and then again in the tumult associated with the so-called “Arab Spring.” In the Middle East, many secular dictators have long defended their repressive policies on the grounds that they were at least able to keep to forces of religious extremism at bay.

In a forthcoming article in Conflict Management and Peace Science, my coauthor, Anthony Scime and I argue that this line of thinking is incorrect. On the contrary, restrictions on religion actually work to generate religious terrorism by radicalizing religious actors, weakening moderates, and increasing the support of extremists. Often embattled religious communities, perceiving their faith to be under attack, subscribe to a ubiquitous narrative of communal disillusionment, sometimes leading to violence against those perceived to be responsible for their marginalized and suppressed status. When religious groups find themselves ostracized through laws or violent suppression, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence as well. In short, regimes that hinder the knowledge or pursuit of the supernatural play with fie when they interfere with peoples’ innate aspiration for transcendent and eternal truth.

Using classification analysis, we find that government regulation of religion is by far the most significant variable predicting the onset of religious terrorism—more than twice as important as any other variable included in our model. Generally, religious terrorism increases dramatically as the level of restrictions also increase. Religious repression becomes especially problematic in countries with large populations and unstable political regimes. We also find that when governmental restrictions on religion are low, religious attacks seldom occur and that the values of other variables have no effect in explaining the absence of religious terrorism.

Our findings suggest certain policy recommendations. The inclusion of religious groups and individuals in political processes and the protection of their religious rights serve to negate the claims of extremists that violence is necessary to challenge the status quo. The findings also buttress the accumulating evidence that the relaxation of religious restrictions and protection of religious liberty nurtures peaceful competition of religious groups in society, thus contributing to a wide array of positive externalities that come from widespread freedom. It is time for policymakers around the world to take religious freedom seriously, if not for moral reasons, then at least for the sake of peace and stability.

Elizabeth Sperber, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and one of the most creative young scholars today in the study of religion and politics, posts on the political dynamics created by Born Again Christians in Nigeria:

When western journalists cover religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, they tend to focus on politicized Islam. News about Boko Haram’s violence in northern Nigeria, for instance, has dominated recent reporting on religion and politics in the region. Yet, in Nigeria as in other sub-Saharan countries, Christians and adherents of African traditional religions are also engaged in dynamic and increasingly politically relevant movements. In fact, the region’s fastest growing religious groups are born again Christian (see an influential Pew Forum study). These movements are increasingly visible in the public sphere.

Moreover, in many parts of Nigeria, religious conflict has arisen not as a result of conservative Muslim movements, but rather due to the aggressive evangelization of Muslim areas by ‘militant’ Nigerian born again Christians. Siyan Oyeweso (Osun State University) presented an important paper on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association last weekend. He was joined by Insa Nolte (University of Birmingham) and Olukoya Joseph Ogen (Osun State University), who presented preliminary findings from a joint, five-year study of religious encounter in southwest Nigeria. Nolte and Ogen’s findings explore the infuence of local Pentecostal movements on “traditional” religionists in the region. Taken together, these papers underscore the complexity, dynamism, and political significance of religion in Nigeria, even in areas far from the headline news of Boko Haram.