On old ArcU theme has been the plight of Christians in India. The Boston Globe‘s John Allen has just written a column on this at Crux very worth reading.
Islam’s Religious Freedom Problem Deserves a Closer Look
I just published a piece at “The Monkey Cage” at The Washington Post titled, “Are Muslim Countries Really Unreceptive to Religious Freedom?” It draws from the research for a book that I am writing on Islam and religious freedom.
The title question of the WaPo piece wades into a culture war:
The West’s cultural war over Islam has entered an intense new phase since the rise of the Islamic State. The debates are familiar: Is Islam inherently violent and intolerant, or is it peaceful, diverse and often the victim of Western domination? A good criterion for answering the question is religious freedom – the civic right of persons and religious communities to practice, express, change, renounce and spread their religion. Whether the adherents of one religion can respect the beliefs and practices of another, or whether they respond to this otherness by violence or discrimination, is at the heart of these debates.
A global view looks grim:
An aggregate, satellite view does indeed show a dearth of religious freedom in Islam. A comparison between the world’s 47 or so Muslim-majority countries and the rest of the world – derived from measurements developed by sociologists Brian Grim and Roger Finke and undergirding the Pew Forum’s rankings on religious freedom – shows that Islam clearly has considerably lower levels of religious freedom than the rest of the world and Christian-majority countries. In their 2011 book published on the same data – “The Price of Religious Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” – Grim and Finke show that 78 percent of Muslim-majority countries have high levels of government restrictions on religious freedom, compared with 43 percent of all other countries and 10 percent of Christian countries.
But a closer look reveals more complexity – and hope:
Do these aggregate scores prove that Islam is indeed generally inhospitable to religious freedom, then? No. Zooming in from a satellite view to a more fine-grained view reveals far greater diversity. First, it shows that 12 out of 47 Muslim-majority states fall into the category of “low restrictions on religious freedom,” meaning that they are essentially religiously free. Even among the other 35 Muslim-majority states, which have moderate, high or very high levels of restriction, there are significantly different patterns of repression, which yield different conclusions about Islam. There are two patterns in particular, namely “Islamist,” which represent 21 of these countries, and “secular repressive,” which represent 14 of these countries.
The piece comes out of a workshop on Islam and International Order hosted by the Project on Middle East Political Science. For the other short pieces to come out of the workshop, see here.
John Allen to John Kerry: Don’t Forget Egypt’s Christians
Ace reporter of global Catholicism John Allen wrote an insightful column last week on the U.S. State Department’s recently released annual report on human rights. He takes the department to task for ignoring the plight of Egypt’s persecuted Christians.
The document cites only one instance of a Christian suffering discrimination, involving a man charged under anti-blasphemy laws for “liking” a Facebook page critical of Islam. Yet Christians are the largest and most embattled minority in Egypt, forming 10 percent of a population of 83 million, and any account of the human rights situation that fails to feature their hardships is seriously incomplete.
In general, religion is undervalued throughout the State Department report. It lists seven categories of human rights problems, treating religious freedom as a mere sub-heading under “respect for civil liberties.”
Granted, the State Department is correct to be concerned about all threats to personal freedoms and civil rights. Granted, too, a special American focus on Christians might simply make things worse, feeding suspicions that the Western powers are leading a 21st century crusade against other faiths.
In fairness, the report does give prominence to anti-Christian persecution in a few other nations, including threats from ISIS in Iraq.
Still, if the suffering of Egyptian [Christians] . . . isn’t worthy of serious American concern — especially since it comes in a country that’s the second-largest recipient of US military and economic aid in the world — then it’s hard to know what such an outrage might look like.
Things have gotten worse, not better, since the fall of the Morsi government, and they don’t look likely to improve any time soon:
Far from better days after the fall of a Muslim Brotherhood government in July 2013, Botros says that today things are “ten times worse” in Egypt than they were, for instance, under former ruler Hosni Mubarak just a few years ago.
“We thought the police would start a new era with the people,” he said, “but it hasn’t happened.”
Ibrahim, the human rights expert, echoes that impression. He identifies five broad categories of threats faced by Christians in Egypt:
- Physical assaults on churches and other Christian properties
- Difficulties in obtaining permits to build or repair churches
- Kidnappings for ransom
- Selective enforcement of anti-blasphemy laws
- Forced displacements, especially from rural villages
Only the first, Ibrahim said, has improved under Sisi. Statistically speaking, he said, incidents in other categories are actually on the rise.
Further spikes in violence could be on the near-term horizon. Last month, an Egyptian court sentenced Morsi to death for his alleged involvement in a prison break, and just two weeks ago the sentence was confirmed.
Mina Thabet, another human rights observer with the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, believes that if those sentences are actually carried out, it could spark another wave of anti-Christian rage.
Dignitatis Humanae at 50
This coming December 7th, the Catholic Church will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty.
Of all of the Council’s teachings, Dignitatis Humanae evoked the hottest debate and broke most sharply with the past. A great enthusiast for the document, I recall sharing my interest with my Protestant grandmother: “Well, it was about time,” she shot back tartly.
Why indeed did the Catholic Church take so long to embrace a principle that Protestants had discovered three centuries earlier and that Enlightenment philosophers had proclaimed two centuries earlier?
The Enlightenment was part of the problem. While Rousseau and the Jacobins who launched the French Revolution pushed for religious freedom for the individual, they brooked no sympathy for the institutions of the Catholic Church — the purveyor of inquisitions and purges and a siphon of loyalties that should now be directed towards the state, as they saw it. So, they forced Catholics to swear loyalty to a Church without the Pope, exiled and beheaded priests and nuns, and carried out what was perhaps the first modern genocide against Catholics in the Vendee region. Throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, liberal republican legatees of the Revolution continued to advocate for a state management of religion that curtailed the powers of the Church.
The Church’s slowness to come around to religious freedom was not mere reaction, though. Its ideal of Church-state relations continued to be that derived from the Middle Ages: a close partnership in which Church and state worked together to fashion a thoroughly Christian society. The Church would direct its members’ loyalty towards the state. The state would not only guard the privileges of the Church but would actively promote Catholic culture, customs, morals, and beliefs. And, centuries after the heretic’s pyre and medieval torture chambers had disappeared, the Church still taught that it could, in principle, where possible, legally restrict non-Catholic expression of religious faith. Even as late as the 1950’s, the Pope and top cardinals espoused this doctrine.
How did the Church go from this stance to its declaration that all people enjoy the human right of religious freedom?
First, Catholic intellectuals, including John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and John Courtney Murray, did the hard intellectual work of laying the groundwork for a genuinely Catholic doctrine of religious liberty, one that explained why people and communities of every religion had the right to express and practice their faith, but that also was rooted in philosophical and theological commitments friendly to Catholic beliefs. Their ideas at once broke with medieval politics and avoided the pitfalls of Enlightenment individualism. The key was human dignity — the dignity of the human person as one who searches for and potentially embraces religious truth.
Second, in the West, regimes that were hostile to religious freedom eventually became liberal democracies friendly to religious freedom, thus convincing the Church that it could flourish and operate in a democratic context. This did not happen until the close of World War II. Indeed, upon closer inspection it turns out to be an anachronism to say that the rest of the world had arrived at religious freedom while the Church remained behind. The fascist and communist regimes that arose in the 1920s and 1930s were among the harshest deniers of religious freedom in the history of the world, while regimes like that of Mexico in the 1920s also suppressed religious freedom sharply. Even Protestant rulers like Bismarck were imprisoning Jesuit priests in the late 19th century. After World War II however, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy all sprouted liberal democratic constitutions with fairly robust religious freedom. Catholic statesmen like Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer served as great political leaders during this period.
Third, by the time of the Second Vatican Council, new and serious threats to religious freedom had emerged, especially where the Church lived under Communism, as it did in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, and China. Such regimes exceeded Jacobinist restriction and replaced it with totalitarian eradication. One of the most eloquent advocates of religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council was Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. In places like Poland, religious freedom meant the Church’s survival.
Fourth was the United States. There, the Church lived under liberal democracy but had a very different experience than it did in liberal republican Europe. It flourished in an environment of freedom created by the First Amendment’s religious liberty clause. Doubtless, anti-Catholicism was directed at Catholics, sometimes in the form of violence and discrimination. By and large, though, the Church grew and could flourish in practicing its faith. While the lesson came slowly perhaps, the United States taught the Catholic Church that freedom and faith could co-exist in practice.
This coming December, a major conference in Rome will commemorate Dignitatis Humanae by looking at how Christian communities around the world respond to persecution. The very idea of the conference reflects a new reality for the Catholic Church fifty years after the Council. In countries spanning from China to India to Pakistan, Catholics are now the persecuted rather than the persecuting. Even in advanced liberal democracies, they are experiencing new restrictions. What does Dignitatis Humanae mean now, then?
Beyond the Veil?
Here at ArcU, I have been tracking the fate of Muslims in France amidst the resurgence of laïcité over the past few months in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings. A recent article in the New York Times by Suzanne Daley and Alissa J. Rubin reports insightfully on the atmosphere created by France’s famous law banning veils passed over ten years ago.
More than 10 years after France passed its first anti-veil law restricting young girls from wearing veils in public schools, the head coverings of observant Muslim women, from colorful silk scarves to black chadors, have become one of the most potent flash points in the nation’s tense relations with its vibrant and growing Muslim population.
Mainstream politicians continue to push for new measures to deny veiled women access to jobs, educational institutions and community life. They often say they are doing so for the benefit of public order or in the name of laïcité, the French term for the separation of church and state . . ..
So far, France has passed two laws, one in 2004 banning veils in public elementary and secondary schools, and another, enacted in 2011, banning full face veils, which are worn by only a tiny portion of the population.
Lift the ban, not the veil.
Remembering Martyrs – of Yesterday
I have just returned from Rome, where I, along with my colleague Zahra Vieneuve, spent the week laying the groundwork for a conference on December 10-12, 2015, Under Caesar’s Sword: Christians in Response to Persecution.
Co-sponsoring the conference is the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay community known for its work in peacemaking and a litany of other causes of justice, all centered upon its “methodology” of personal friendship, especially for the poor.
One of the community’s most striking ventures is its maintenance of the Church of San Bartolomeo as a shrine to contemporary Christian martyrs. This 10th century basilica stands on the Tiber Island astride the district of Trastevere, where the Community is headquartered. In the shadowy, candelit side chapels can be found the relics of Christians who lost their lives due to their faith or their faith-based stand for justice. Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero’s missal; a tiny piece of the beard of Maxmilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who exchanged his life for that of a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz; and objects from the lives of Rwandans, Russians under the Soviet Union, and many other Christians from around the the world over the past century can be found here.
Like the martyrs themselves, the shrine is little known and deserves to be better known — a stop on every Rome tour bus’s itinerary.
Obama Cold to Middle East Christians
Several pieces have been posted recently on the unabated persecution of Christians and other religious minorities like Yazidis and Mandeans in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East — and of the relative indifference of the State Department and the Obama administration to it. Last month, journalist Kirsten Powers wrote in USA Today that President Obama “just can’t seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians.” Reporting on a joint press conference that Obama held with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, she writes:
As Renzi was questioned about the incident, Obama was mute on the killings. He failed to interject any sense of outrage or even tepid concern for the targeting of Christians for their faith. If a Christian mob on a ship bound for Italy threw 12 Muslims to their death for praying to Allah, does anyone think the president would have been so disinterested? When three North Carolina Muslims were gunned down by a virulent atheist, Obama rightly spoke out against the horrifying killings. But he just can’t seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians or the eradication of Christianity from its birthplace.
Religious persecution of Christians is rampant worldwide, as Pew has noted, but nowhere is it more prevalent than in the Middle East and Northern Africa, where followers of Jesus are the targets of religious cleansing. Pope Francis has repeatedly decried the persecution and begged the world for help, but it has had little impact. Western leaders — including Obama — will be remembered for their near silence as this human rights tragedy unfolded. The president’s mumblings about the atrocities visited upon Christians (usually extracted after public outcry over his silence) are few and far between. And it will be hard to forget his lecturing of Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast about the centuries-old Crusades while Middle Eastern Christianswere at that moment being harassed, driven from their homes, tortured and murdered for their faith.
Writing in a similar vein is Faith J.H. McDonnell of the Philos Project.
Evidence suggests that within the administration not only is there no passion for persecuted Christians under threat of genocide from the Islamic State, there is no room for them, period. In fact, despite ISIS’ targeting of Iraqi Christians specifically because they are Christians, and, as such, stand in the way of a pure, Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East (and beyond), the U.S. State Department has made it clear that “there is no way that Christians will be supported because of their religious affiliation.”
As ISIS is now seizing the Iraqi city of Ramadi, let us hope that the Obama administration will acknowledge the particularly of ISIS’s victims.
Too much state
The state’s tendency to over manage religion and suppress religious minorities cuts across all religions. A story in today’s New York Times documents the suppression of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar’s Buddhist-controlled state. A passage:
The refugees fleeing Myanmar, from the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority, have been persecuted for decades. They have been evicted from their homes and kicked off their land, and attacked by the military and by Buddhist extremists in Rakhine, the western coastal state where they live. Their voting rights were effectively revoked in February. Their government insists that they are in the country illegally, and most neighboring countries refuse to accept them.
In effect, they are stateless.
President Thein Sein denies that the Rohingya, with a population estimated at 800,000 or more, exist as an ethnic group, and he refers to them as Bengalis, suggesting that they are from Bangladesh and therefore subject to deportation.
Then comes an impassioned plea from Zambia for the state not to declare Zambia a Christian country. Lessons learned in the West (though not adequately enough) come into play:
It is important for national leaders to guard against the imposition of any particular religion on the entire society. The Republican constitution particularly should be a neutral document that should not discriminate against atheists, agnostics or pagans, or those who believe in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Jainism, or the Baha’i faith.
In the long run, the Declaration is likely to make non-Christian citizens to feel that they are second-class citizens. And, as Prof. Venkatesh Seshamani has argued, a feeling of religious superiority is likely to develop among Christians by virtue of their religion having been accorded constitutional status, which may lead to bigotry that would prompt them to view non-Christians as lost souls.
Christianity’s Failure in India? Think Again
Historian Philip Jenkins has a post at Aleteia in which he takes on a piece in an Indian magazine by Tony Joseph claiming that Christianity has failed in India, evidenced by its small and declining numbers. Jenkins voices strong cautions about Joseph’s arguments, including ones about the Indian census:
Nobody can claim that Christianity has claimed major shares of the Indian population, or that it is likely to do so in the near future. But some counter-arguments do need to be stressed, especially about the overall numbers. No sane person believes the religious content of the Indian national census, which is one of the world’s great works of creative fiction. At all levels, there is enormous pressure of all kinds – cultural, political and bureaucratic – to minimize the presence of all non-Hindu religions, including Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. That pressure becomes overwhelming when dealing with people of low and no caste, those who are most tempted to defect to one of the alternative faiths. Bureaucrats are especially hard to convince in matters of religious conversion from Hinduism.
He claims even more strongly that Christianity is not populous in India because others want it that way:
Also, Joseph is wrong to suggest any deep-laid cultural reasons why Christianity is incompatible with Indian culture. As recently as the 1940s, Chinese Christian numbers were just as tiny as those in India, and they have ballooned. The reason the same thing has not happened in India is because of systematic and widespread persecution by Hindu extremist sects, often operating in alliance with local governments and police authorities — violence that receives virtually no publicity in the West. If and when conversion became easier and less dangerous, we would presumably see a Christian boom in India comparable to that in China or Korea.
Jenkins reminds us that in a country that is intensely religious and one of whose greatest challenges is managing religious pluralism, religious freedom is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Be Afraid! No John Paul II for France
The enthusiasm for Pope John Paul II that I have expressed in the last two blog posts is apparently not shared by a French court, which has ordered the town of Ploëmel, France to take down its statue of John Paul II under France’s 1905 law establishing laïcité. The statue quotes the former pope’s motto, “Be not afraid.” The court, it seems, would have the good citizens of Ploëmel be afraid — of its jurisdiction.