Year: 2014

In keeping with Arc of the Universe’s theme of religious freedom, Reg Reimer blogs on Christians in Vietnam.  Reimer is part of the team of scholars who make up the Center for Civil and Human Rights’ project, “Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christian Communities Respond to Repression.”  He first went to Vietnam as a missionary in 1966 and served there throughout the Vietnam War. He has travelled to the country numerous times since, connecting with Christians churches, researching the repression of Christians and advocating for them. He is an acknowledged authority on Christianity in Vietnam, particularly of the Evangelical tradition, whose followers have increased more than tenfold since the communist takeover in 1975. His book on the Evangelical movement, Vietnam’s Christians: A Century of Growth in Adversity, was published in 2011.  Here is what he writes:

Christian believers in the remaining communist countries, even those that have made some progress toward religious freedom, continue to experience local or widespread reversions to discrimination and harsh treatment.  An ugly campaign to remove crosses from hundreds of church buildings in eastern China is underway. From Laos and Cuba come periodic but regular reports of brutal persecution in local areas. In Vietnam, certain remote areas have never experienced the relaxation of persecution promised by changing regulations and experienced in urban areas.

A clear case in point is Dien Bien province in northern Vietnam. A rare and lengthy testimony of a Christian leader in the province was obtained by advocates. It details 25 years of repression against Christians of the Hmong ethnic minority. The leader himself spent 8 harsh years in various prisons, often in a “small dark cell”. He and fellow Christian villagers were often raided by officials, and forced to feed them – after which the villagers were thanked by beatings and attempts to pressure them to recant. This was done by forcing them to drink the blood of chickens freshly sacrificed to spirit or ancestors. Officials helped themselves to the Christians’ property, fields and crops and encouraged their animist neighbors to do likewise.

Many other abuses are listed, and the latest are very current. Earlier in 2014 groups of officials and animist Hmong they recruited raided Christians’ homes, abused the occupants, then tore their houses down, also destroying their gardens and taking their crops.

Authorities, whose goal is containment of the growing Christian movement, go to great lengths to prevent Christians from receiving teaching from qualified leaders. They confiscate Bibles and Bibles and Christian literature, and forbid meetings larger than the nuclear family. These enforced restrictions, all against Vietnam’s own religion regulations, have led directly to some Hmong Christians being led into cultic beliefs for which they suffered a brutal military crackdown in May 2011.

The Christian leader begs for the “the world” and the United Nations to come to see if Vietnam is living up to its promises on religious freedom. He also gives names and addresses of offending officials and Christian victims.

That such still happens in some places in Vietnam puts all religious believers under a cloud.  There are no extenuating circumstances for abusing people for their religious beliefs and peaceful practices. As long as some people remain subject to regular abuse because of their religious beliefs, the whole fragile religious freedom project in any country is jeopardized.

 

All too little attention in the West is paid to the world’s second most populous state and most populous democracy, India.  Just over three months ago, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister.  Former Chief Minister of Gujarat State, Modi was demonstrated to have turned a blind eye towards and condoned massacres of Muslims in riots of 2002.  More generally, he is associated with an aggressive Hindu nationalism that runs roughshod over religious minorities like Muslims and Christians.  Now the Ghadar Alliance, a U.S.-based watchdog group, has published “Fast Track to Troubling Times: 100 Days of Narendra Modi – A Counter Report.”  The conclusion is that little has changed about Modi now that he is in India’s highest office.

Tomorrow look for the announcement of a letter signed by 100 Muslim scholars and leaders denouncing the injustices of ISIS.  Significantly, the letter is to be issued in Arabic as well as publicized in English.  Though it will be important to see who the signers are and where they are from, the letter will likely create a strong Muslim voice for shared norms of justice.  If religious beliefs matter in forming ISIS, then public theological arguments are needed to counter ISIS — and discourage would-be joiners across the Middle East and the West.

Christianity is finished in northern Iraq, argues Daniel Williams in an op-ed in the Washington Post today.  Williams is not writing for a church or a Christian advocacy outfit; rather he is a correspondent for the Post and a former research at Human Rights Watch.  The decimation of the Christian community that began when Saddam Hussein fell in 2003 has now accelerated.  The iciest part of his analysis: They are not going back.

He writes:

Indeed, the exodus of Christians is ongoing. Has anyone noticed that the Christian population of Iraq has shrunk from more than 1 million in 2003 to maybe 300,000 today? Now, there are virtually no Christians left in either Mosul or on the plain.

So when I ask refugees their plans, it is unanimously to leave Iraq altogether. Enough is enough. This runs counter to the desire, expressed mostly outside Iraq, that a Christian presence be preserved in a land that has known Christianity for 2,000 years. It’s sad but true: Christianity in Iraq is finished. As one refugee told me, “We wanted Iraq. Iraq doesn’t want us.”

And:

Western countries ought to come together and offer refuge to the tens of thousands who want to leave Iraq.  Yes, this would mean the end of Christianity in this part of the world, where its presence has often served as a bulwark against fanaticism. But it’s over anyway, whatever happens to the Islamic State. It’s time to face that fact and save the Christians themselves.

Resonant with the themes of Arc of the Universe is a conversation worth reading over at Open Global Rights on religion and human rights.  Today’s human rights advocates — activists, academics — commonly believe that religion is an impediment to human rights.  They  believe that human rights were a modern, Enlightenment-era invention that replaced religion, which was hierarchical, feudal, and irrational.

The series, edited by James Ron, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, challenges this view — and does not.  It begins with a post by Larry Cox, who makes the case that religion, though some times in tension with human rights, also bolsters human rights.  Others come back and defend the conventional contemporary view — that religion is in tension with human rights, leading to exclusion and even persecution.

My own post argues that it is difficult to make a strong defense of human rights without God.  Human rights activists may be perfectly committed to their cause even without believing in God.  If you want to know why there are human rights, though, you can’t get far without God.

It is true, though, that secular and religious people often offer different accounts for why there are human rights, which human rights are valid or deserve priority, and who is entitled to human rights.  Rather than religion vs. human rights, I think it would be better to speak of “clashing visions of human rights” or “competing orthodoxies.”  A more accurate and honest debate would ensue.

Two pieces are worth reading on the religious freedom theme.  One is Ross Douthat’s piece in the Sunday New York Times, “The Middle East’s Friendless Christians.” Reflecting on Senator Ted Cruz walking off the stage amidst boos in speaking to a recent summit of Middle East Christian leaders, Douthat explains why Christians in the Middle East are a battered, forgotten minority, both in their region and in the American political system.

The other is Thomas Farr’s recent testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, republished on the website of First Things.  A former foreign service officer whose last stint in the State Department was directing the Office of International Religious Freedom, Farr now directs the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University.  In his testimony, he takes up U.S. policy towards the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and argues, as I have, that more than guns are needed to defeat them.  Whereas I stressed the crucial need for political reconciliation among fractured groups, Farr stresses religious freedom.  Why?  Because, like John Owen, he stresses that the religious ideas of the Islamic State matter; the group’s rise cannot be chalked up to poverty, a reaction to western imperialism, or some other external factor.  Ideas matter.  Theology matters.  And the antidote for extreme religious ideas is a regime of religious freedom, where such ideas cannot dictate and dominate through repression.