Ministerial: Major Moment for Religious Freedom

A “ministerial” — not easy to describe, but something like a combination of a foreign minister’s meeting and a giant conference — on religious freedom took place last week (July 24-26) in Washington, D.C. Convened by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo with the full support of President Trump, the ministerial involved representatives of some 80 countries and some 400 representatives of faith communities and civil society organizations. Lots of panels and side meetings took place; conversations happened; connections were made.

Most significantly, this event lends support for the cause of religious freedom from the highest levels of government(s). Those of us who have been promoting religious freedom as a foreign policy aim since the U.S. Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 have often lamented that this cause, beyond carrying out what the law mandates, has been relegated to a side issue, buried in the State Department by most administrations. The ministerial is a major moment for elevating religious freedom towards being a more central foreign policy priority, pursued not only for its own sake but also as an integral part of counter-terrorism, democracy, and security policy. The Potomac Declaration and this plan of action are two important results.

I write this as a principled skeptic of President Trump and his derogations of the dignity of Muslims, women, immigrants, and many others; his praise of and support for dictators; and his many efforts to dismantle the post-World War II liberal international order. But I will still applaud when he takes actions that uphold human dignity and essential freedoms like appoint Supreme Court justices committed to the rights of the unborn, nullify the HHS mandate’s infringement upon conscience, and promote international religious freedom. Reasons of coalition politics may well motivate him (see here), but the policies promote justice. My daily prayers include a petition for the Trump Administration, that the good may increase and the bad may decrease. The ministerial increases the good.

 

Just Published: Findings from the Under Caesar’s Sword Project on the Persecution of Christians

I’m pleased to announce the publication of Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution, just published by Cambridge University Press, edited by Timothy Samuel Shah and myself.. It presents the findings from the Under Caesar’s Sword research project on how Christians respond to persecution around the world.

The bad news is that the book costs $140. The good news is that early next year it will come out in paperback at an affordable price.

This description from the book’s webpage tells it best:

The global persecution of Christians is an urgent human rights issue that remains underreported. This volume presents the results of the first systematic global investigation into how Christians respond to persecution. World-class scholars of global Christianity present first-hand research from most of the sites of the harshest persecution as well as the West and Latin America. Their findings make clear the nature of persecution, the reasons for it, Christian responses to it – both non-violent and confrontational – and the effects of these responses. Motivating the volume is the hope that this knowledge will empower all who would exercise solidarity with the world’s persecuted Christians and will offer the victims strategies for a more effective response. This book is written for anyone concerned about the persecution of Christians or more generally about the human right of religious freedom, including scholars, activists, political and religious leaders, and those who work for international organizations.

  • Brings attention to the underreported plight of persecuted Christians
  • Includes details of persecution in twenty-four countries
  • Will help activists and officials respond more effectively to persecution

And here’s a crackerjack endorsement from Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput:

‘As editors Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah show in this immensely valuable volume, nearly three-quarters of the world’s people live in nations burdened with religious discrimination or worse, and eighty percent of the violence and persecution is directed against Christians. Followers of Jesus Christ are the most commonly repressed, attacked and violated religious group not just in history, but right now in countries across the globe. The editors have done a superb job of gathering together comprehensive proof of anti-Christian persecution from a wide range of regions and political circumstances, and the overall effect is stunning – but also unimpeachable. Anyone sincerely interested in human rights and dignity needs to read and share this book.’ Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia

Erdogan’s Electoral Victory a Defeat for Freedom

The re-election of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, yesterday was a defeat for freedom in general and raises ongoing questions about religious freedom in particular in Turkey.

The Republic of Turkey’s unfreedom dates back to its founding in 1923 under Kemal Atatürk, whose authoritarian rule was designed to eliminate Islam’s influence on society and to replace it with a secularism of “laïcité” modeled on the French Revolution. He succeeded only in part. Turkey’s heartland remains religious to this day. The country’s subsequent history has oscillated between democratic openings that have returned Islam-friendly governments to power followed by coups and crackdowns led by the country’s Kemalist military and judiciary.

When Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (whose Turkish initials are AKP) was elected in 2002, many saw in it a hope for an Islamic version of a European Christian Democratic Party that would advance liberal democracy, allow increased religious freedom for Muslims, and maybe, just maybe, allow Turkey to gain entry into the European Union.

This dream is dead. For awhile it looked hopeful – and many in the AKP’s rank and file remain committed to a religion-friendly democracy – but since 2011, Erdoğan has turned into an authoritarian thug. He has cracked down on popular protests, curtailed judicial independence, restricted the press and social media, committed electoral fraud, overseen a rise in corruption, and accrued the power to oust and even imprison legislators. In suppressing a coup attempt in July 2016, Erdoğan arrested one-third of his generals and admirals, detained some 10,000 officers and soldiers, imprisoned about 50,000 people affiliated with the movement of Gülen, his chief rival, and had some 70,000 professionals – professors, journalists, businesspeople – and 150,000 public employees fired or suspended from their jobs. Erdoğan has not resisted the trappings of a sultan, building himself a presidential palace of 1,150 rooms, costing $615 million and built with stone pillars and sheet glass. A referendum last year fortified presidential power, and allowed him a second, and possibly third, term as president, creating the possibility that he will be in power until 2032.

Erdoğan is authoritarian, but is he an Islamist authoritarian? Is he rolling back Kemalist secularism for the first time, turning Turkey into a repressive Islamist state? It is not clear. Some observers believe that he intends a traditional sharia state, others that he is more a thug than a puritan. Since 2011, he has issued calls for Turkish children to become a “pious generation,” vastly increased funding for “Imam Hatip” reliigous schools, introduced Islamist textbooks in these schools, made religious education compulsory in all primary schools (with exceptions only for Christians and Jews), required new schools to include prayer rooms, successively lifted rules banning women from wearing headscarves in state institutions (including schools, universities, the police and the military), sponsored the building of mosques, and cracked down on Alevis.

To be sure, these policies move Turkey in a religious direction but they do not make it Islamist. Funding religious schools is little different from what many western democracies do, and Imam Hatip schools contain only 10% of Turkish students. The lifting of restrictions on headscarves is in fact a liberalizing move. Religious freedom means that women can don a headscarf in Turkey or France and doff one in Iran. Still other measures – like the issuance of religious textbooks – admittedly look more Islamist. All in all, though, Erdoğan is not creating another Iran or Saudi Arabia.

More troubling is the Turkish government’s treatment of religious minorities (meaning both non-Muslims as well as groups like Alevis, which Sunni Muslims consider heretical). These policies have been around since Atatürk and are unlikely to change under Erdoğan. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty defined citizenship according to Islam and gave official recognition to some minorities will denying it to others. In the case of recognized minorities – which today include Armenian Orthodox Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Jews – the state, acting in the spirit of Kemalist religious management, created a General Directorate for Foundations that governs their charitable foundations; regulates their religious practice; has at times expropriated their property and grossly overtaxed them; and has kept the seminary of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul closed for over four decades now, thus preventing the training of clergy and contributing to the decimation of this community in Turkey. Alevis, a syncretic offshoot of Islam who amount to about 15% of the total population, have suffered sharp restrictions, including obligatory education into Sunni Islam, curtailments on the construction of meeting places, and lack of representation at the state level. Discrimination against them dates back at least to the 16th century Ottoman Empire. Sufis, practitioners of an Islamic mysticism, saw their orders dissolved and their practices banned in 1925 and continue to exist underground. Christians experienced repressive violence continually during the first twelve years of the republic, pograms directed against the Greek Orthodox Church in 1955, incidents of violence in 1963 and 1974, and several assassinations in the past decade-and-a-half. American Protestant pastor Andrew Brunson was imprisoned in the aftermath of Erdoğan’s 2016 coup, is still imprisoned, and faces up to 35 years in prison for the “crime” of being a member of the Gülen opposition “terrorist” movement, charges that outside humanitarian groups widely regard as bogus.

Erdoğan is likely to remain in power for quite some time. May religious freedom and democracy advocates make loud and clear the repression that takes place under his regime for an equally long period of time.

These reflections are drawn from the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today, due to be published by Oxford University Press this coming February.

Bending the Arc in Nigeria

The following post is contributed by Nnadozie Onyekuru, who is a graduate student of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He previously studied at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria and Thomas Aquinas College in California.

The recent posthumous conferment of Nigeria’s highest honors on Moshood Abiola and Gani Fawehinmi is a cheerful break for followers of events in Africa’s most populous country. Last week, President Buhari stunned Nigerians by announcing his decision to honor the late Abiola with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) title typically reserved for the country’s heads of state. Abiola was the presumed winner of what is widely regarded as Nigeria’s best conducted elections about a score and five years ago. There is a noteworthy reference to his travails in Kofi Annan’s memoir, ‘Interventions: A Life in War and Peace.’ June 12, the anniversary of the eventually annulled elections, will now replace May 29 as Nigeria’s Democracy Day, according to the press statement announcing the president’s decision.

There is already a debate over the motive and constitutionality of the president’s act but few Nigerians dispute its merits. Even more uncontested is the president’s simultaneous award of the nation’s second highest honor, Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON), to the late human rights defender, Gani Fawehinmi. Gani was a tireless and fearless advocate for truth and justice in the Nigerian polity. The mention of his name elicited one of the loudest ovations during President Clinton’s address to Nigerian legislators in 2000. Such unequivocal appreciation by the nation’s political class speaks a thousand words as does the jubilation surrounding the events of the past week. President Buhari’s decision to honor these late countrymen is a nod to the part of the Nigerian anthem that speaks of our heroes not laboring in vain and a fitting validation of the saying that inspires the name of this blog. The arc which bends towards justice also runs through Nigeria.

China at a Religious Freedom Low

A headline the other day struck me, “China’s Persecution of Christians at Highest Level Since Mao.” I was struck back at Easter when I read news stories describing how government officials actually removed people from church worship services in enforcement of new regulations against people under 18 attending church. This is as clear and direct as religious freedom violations get – physically restraining people from worshipping with their communities. Now, this recent piece recounts that:

Watchdog groups say the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in China is at its most intense since the Cultural Revolution, as churches are shuttered, Bibles confiscated and believers arrested at rates not seen in decades.

That’s saying a lot. The Cultural Revolution, lasting from roughly 1966 to 1979, was an especially intense period of religious persecution in the history of Communist China, which began in 1949.

The story quotes pastor Bob Fu, one of the leading advocates of religious freedom in China, as saying that the levels of persecution have increased markedly even since last year:

Pastor Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid, said the number of people arrested in China for exercising their religious freedom “has reached the highest level since the end of the Cultural Revolution.” He cited internal figures showing a nearly fivefold increase in the number of Christians who were persecuted by the government last year.

“For Christians alone, last year we documented persecution against 1,265 churches, with the number of people persecuted over 223,000. And that is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Fu said. “In 2016, there were 762 cases of persecution, according to our documentation, with the number of people persecuted 48,000. It really is almost five times [as much].”

He said ChinaAid knows of 3,700 Christians who were arrested in 2017, up from 3,500 the previous year. Some religious dissenters and human rights activists have been detained for years, Mr. Fu said, with their families left to wonder if they are still alive.

May this not be forgotten as trade and North Korea dominate the headlines regarding China.

Signs of Momentum in Religious Freedom Policy

Last week, the U.S. State Department issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report, covering religious freedom around the world during 2017, as mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Two factors accompanying the issuance of the report serve as encouraging signs for a strong religious freedom policy under the current president.

First, the report was announced through a press conference involving the Secretary of State himself, Mike Pompeo, along with the Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. Second, Pompeo announced the first ministerial meeting on religious freedom, in which the U.S. will host ministers from other countries who promote religious freedom in order to develop cooperation and solidarity. This is a proactive, forward step that indicates real interest in a religious freedom policy, which, without support from the top, is liable to become marginalized in the corners of the State Department bureaucracy.

An article in Crux summarizes some of the report’s key findings:

– The plight of the Rohingya and the Kachin people in Myanmar. Brownback noted that he visited several of the refugee camps in Bangladesh about a month ago. “The situation is dire. We must do more to help them, as they continue to be targeted for their faith.”

– In North Korea, up to 120,000 political prisoners in “horrific conditions” in camps across the country, some have been imprisoned for religious reasons. The report said there were 1,304 cases of alleged religious freedom violations in the country last year.

– In Eritrea, the government “reportedly killed, arrested, and tortured religious adherents and coerced individuals into renouncing their faith.”

– Tajikistan continues to prohibit minors from even participating in any religious activities.

– Saudi Arabia does not recognize the right of non-Muslims to practice their religion in public and imprisons, lashes, and fines individuals for apostasy, blasphemy, and insulting the state’s interpretation of Islam.

– In Turkmenistan, individuals who gather for worship without registering with the government face arrest, detention, and harassment.

-In China Falun Gong adherents, Uighur Muslims and members of other religious minorities continue to be imprisoned; with many of them dying in custody.

Many of these trends only became worse during 2017.

Everyone Matters

This past Sunday, Notre Dame awarded its 2018 Laetare Medal to Sr. Norma Pimentel, M.J., a religious sister who lives on the U.S.-Mexican border and serves immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Sojourners magazine covers the issue well here and includes a video of her short acceptance address. Notre Dame awards the Laetare Medal every year to an American Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity” and has been awarding it every year since 1883.

The award — and Sister Pimentel’s emotional address — came shortly after President Donald Trump once again referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals,” a dehumanizing description that he has deployed many times since he announced his presidential candidacy. Some are criminals, no doubt, but they are still human and retain their inviolable dignity. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical on the dignity of life, Evangelium Vitae, in the context of calling into question the death penalty, “[n]ot even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.”

Friday, I published this piece taking issue with the decision by the major of my city to veto the zoning request of a pregnancy resources center that wished to locate next to the property of a prospective abortion clinic — also, I maintain, an instance of indifference to the humanity of the poor.

How much do we need, and how far we are, from a politics that upholds the dignity of everyone, no exceptions.

The Christian Response to Persecution of Archbishop Bashar Warda

In the aftermath of the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, what is the future of the Christian church there? Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the population of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from 1.6 million to just under 400,000 in 2016 (estimates vary). Will they continue to exit? Return? Rebuild as a smaller church?

One of the leaders in answering these questions and shepherding the church in Iraq is Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Church, based in Irbil, Iraq. Warda has been an international voice for the church, has provided pastoral care and facilitated relief services for 20,000 people, supported refugees, promoted inter-religious dialogue, and inaugurated a Catholic university in 2015.

Earlier this semester, the Under Caesar’s Sword project here at Notre Dame hosted Archbishop Warda with the support and sponsorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture. Warda spoke in several venues in the United States, including Georgetown University, where he was hosted by the Religious Freedom Research Project, partner in Under Caesar’s Sword. Warda exemplifies what Under Caesar’s Sword is all about: the response of Christians to persecution. He exemplifies one of the most salient findings of the project, namely that Christians respond to persecution even under the most difficult of circumstances through constructive efforts to build ties with other communities and contribute to the common good, thereby strengthening their freedom and position in society. Outsiders who understand this response can better assist Christians living under persecution.

Warda’s talk at Notre Dame was well attended and well received. Several students afterwards asked how they could be involved in helping persecuted Christians. One student, Zach Pearson, wrote up the talk in Notre Dame’s renowned student publication, The Irish Rover. As Pearson describes, Warda’s first point was a challenge to Muslims:

He stated that “if there is to be any future for Christians and other religious minorities … in the Middle East, there must be a change and correction within Islam.”

He was predominantly concerned with the ideology of political Islam, including the enshrining of sharia as state law, which causes non-Muslims to effectively become second class citizens.  He called it a “ruling system that preaches inequality and justified persecution,” which therefore needs to be stopped in order for Christians to survive.  This realization has been made by leading Muslim minds in Asia, but has not yet found its way to the Middle East, the archbishop noted.

In reference to ISIS, the archbishop said that “while the fighting force of Daesh [ISIS] may have been defeated … the idea of the reestablishment of the caliphate has been firmly implanted in many minds throughout the Muslim world.”  He made the point that it is a change in ideology along with a prevention of violence that is key to saving the Christian presence in the Middle East.

His second point was about how the West could help Christians survive in Iraq:

He highlighted a few main points:  the importance of prayer; efforts from Western leaders to support equality for minorities in countries where persecution is taking place; and material and intellectual support focused on helping create sustainable Christian communities, specifically in the realms of education and healthcare. Additionally, the archbishop cited the importance of not allowing a sense of “historical relativism” to cloud the reality of persecution.

When asked what college students can do to actively contribute to helping persecuted Christians, he said that “praying for us is important.”  He spoke to the importance of social media to raise awareness for persecuted Christians, who, he reminded the audience, are “the most persecuted religion today.”  He referred to students who have come to help teach in schools and volunteer in these communities for anywhere from a one month to a whole year.  Finally, he called students to speak out publicly on campus, asking rhetorically, “when the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campus here hold demonstrations and carry signs that [say] ‘We are all Christians’?”

To me, one of the most remarkable of Warda’s points was a response to persecution that he recounted Christians in Iraq exercising: forgiveness. Christians have forgiven and continue to forgive their persecutors. This does not preclude at all their efforts to secure help, bolster their position, or defeat ISIS decisively. It is one response of Christians, though, that amounts to a distinctly Christian response.

 

Walk the Way of the Cross with Today’s Christian Martyrs

This week is Holy Week for Christians and a good occasion to remember today’s Christian martyrs. The Community of Sant’Egidio , which journalist John Allen recently dubbed “The Pope’s Favorite Movement,” does just that through its annual prayer for martyrs — in which the names of recent ones are read out — in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome that takes place Tuesday of every Holy Week. Local Sant’Egidio communities, including ours here in South Bend, Indiana (where I am a member), follow suit with their own annual prayer of remembrance.

This year the prayer is more urgent that ever. Aid to the Church in Need’s 2017 report, Persecuted and Forgotten? reports that the persecution of Christians, already widespread, has only become worse in the last couple of years. The Under Caesar’s Sword project studies and reports Christian responses.

An article in yesterday’s Washington Times, details one site of this persecution that is surprising to many — India. The country’s Hindu nationalist government, and many state governments, use trumped-up charges of induced and forced conversion as a pretext to pass anti-conversion laws that serve to repress the country’s minority Christian community (2.3% of the population). Christians are also harassed and attacked by Hindu nationalist groups.

India is one of many sites — add China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and many others — where Christians are denied their religious freedom harshly. Solidarity means remembering their Way of the Cross as we walk ours, and working for their religious freedom as we undertake our own participation in the resurrection.

 

 

 

How the Democrats Left Catholics

In previous posts I have lamented the decline of the pro-life Democrats. Skeptics have told me that you can fit them in a telephone booth. Now, I fear, they’re being actively driven out of the party. Abortion rights activists sought to oust Representative Dan Lipinski, a Chicago-area congressman, who is one of the few pro-life Democrats left. He barely survived a challenge in the Illinois Democratic primary last week.

Fittingly, also last week, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York dissected and lamented the Democrats’ failure to support life as well as Catholic education, which benefits the poor and minorities.

Wrotes Dolan on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on March 23:

[T]he dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights . . . were, and still are, widely embraced by Catholics. This often led Catholics to become loyal Democrats. I remember my own grandmother whispering to me, “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.”

I can hear my grandmother, a life-long Democrat, saying the same.

Such is no longer the case, a cause of sadness to many Catholics, me included. [These] two causes . . .  the needs of poor and middle-class children in Catholic schools, and the right to life of the baby in the womb . . . largely have been rejected by the party of our youth . . .. Last year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted that pro-life candidates have no place in the modern Democratic Party.

He concludes:

The “big tent” of the Democratic Party now seems a pup tent. Annafi Wahed, a former staffer to Hillary Clinton, recently wrote in this newspaper about her experience attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. She complimented the conservative attendees pointing out that most made her feel welcome at their meeting. They listened attentively to her views—a courtesy, she had to admit, that would not be given to them at a meeting of political liberals.

I’m a pastor, not a politician, and I’ve certainly had spats and disappointments with politicians from both of America’s leading parties. But it saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.

If the Democratic Party cannot be persuaded to shift their views in principle, it seems that the Hindenburg of November 2016 might have taught them that their radical exclusion of life and support for Catholic education are bad politics. The states where Hillary Clinton critical lost — Midwest Rust Belt states and Florida – are ones where Catholic voters exist in large numbers, are willing to vote for either party, and would be persuaded by an economic progressive who is pro-life — or at least not radically pro-abortion rights, as Hillary was — and favors support for religious schools that are on the side of the little guy. But the Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the little guy.