Month: October 2018

The Under Caesar’s Sword project has sought to discover how Christians around the world have responded to persecution (results summarized in this recently published book).

One of the most surprising — and Christian — of these responses is forgiveness.

A fascinating recent case has emerged in Kandhamal, India, where terrible violence took place against Chrisitians (after the slaying of a Hindu monk) in August, 2008. The story is in a recent piece in the National Catholic Register.

The original violence is described here:

Christian targets in the idyllic jungle district of eastern Odisha state went up in flames following the August 2008 slaying of Hindu nationalist monk Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in his hermitage in Kandhamal.

The body of the mysteriously slain Hindu leader was promptly displayed across Kandhamal in a funeral procession. Alleging the murder as a “Christian conspiracy,” Hindu nationalists promoting the two-day display called for revenge on Christians, leading to a bloodbath.

In the aftermath, nearly 100 Christians were killed, and 300 churches and 6,000 houses were plundered in unabated violence, rendering 56,000 people homeless when thousands of Christians refused to recant their faith, as ordered by the Hindu mob.

Advocacy groups and researchers expressed anger and frustration — over a lack of justice and even compensation for victims of the orchestrated violence — in protests held in New Delhi, in Odisha’s capital of Bhubaneswar, and in Phulbani, the administrative headquarters of Kandhamal district.

And here was the response:

A decade later, the Catholic Church’s observance of the tragedy was cool and sober. A dozen bishops from other parts of the country joined six bishops of Odisha in a solemn Mass of thanksgiving Aug. 25, with a message of reconciliation.

“We are here to give thanks for the valiant witness of Kandhamal Christians: those who embraced martyrdom, those who had to live in the jungles for months for their faith,” said Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, in his homily during the Aug. 26 celebration in Bhubaneswar.

“Due to the witness of the Kandhamal Christians, the faith of the Indian Church has increased,” added Bishop Mascarenhas. Further, he said, “There are regrets in the minds of those who carried out the violence. We ask the Lord today to change the minds of those who carried out violence so that they come to the path of peace.”

Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, which includes Kandhamal, reiterated this theme of thanksgiving at the beginning of the Mass, which was attended by 3,000 people.

“What happened is behind us. We are happy with the positive changes taking place in Kandhamal,” Archbishop Barwa told the Register, in an apparent reference to the hundreds of assailants who have since apologized for the assaults on the Christians, with dozens of them even embracing the Christian faith.

There was much more to it, and worth reading the whole piece.

 

I have just written a blog post for the site, God’s Servant First, run by the U.S. Catholic Bishops, on the new book by Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, just published by Cambridge University Press, which I recently noted in an ArcU post here.

From the latest post:

Religious freedom advocates face this predicament: We fervently believe that our cause fosters justice and human dignity yet find that these qualities alone do little to persuade officials in the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, or the White House to make promoting religious freedom a high priority. In Washington, only the national interest talks.

Well, a formidable case that religious freedom affects our interests now emerges in a book by political scientist Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, published this year by Cambridge University Press. (Full disclosure: I was the adviser of Saiya’s doctoral dissertation, on which the book is based). Saiya’s thesis is simple: when governments violate the religious freedom of their citizens, they foment religious terrorism.

 

Gabriel Reynolds of the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame has reviewed the new volume, Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution, which presents the findings of the scholars involved in the Under Caesar’s Sword project, in the Catholic magazine, Commonweal.

Here are his provocative closing paragraphs:

Under Caesar’s Sword also raises the problem of how Christians ought to respond to persecution. Is it permissible to forswear one’s faith under the threat of persecution? We learn that some Christians in Iran and Saudi Arabia have chosen to profess Islam publicly, while privately maintaining their faith in Jesus Christ. Certain Christians in northeastern Kenya learn Islamic prayers and wear Muslim clothing so that, should they be attacked by al-Shabaab, they can pose as Muslims and save their lives. Then there is the related question of whether Christians should give up on evangelism in contexts where preaching the gospel to Muslims can provoke threats against those who convert and reprisals against Christians communities. Islamic law, at least in principle, makes apostasy from Islam punishable by death.

Today concern for religious freedom can no longer be taken for granted. As Paul Marshall notes in his chapter on denials of religious freedom, certain scholars in recent years—notably the late Saba Mahmood of the University of California Berkeley—have questioned whether the “rhetoric” of religious freedom is a tool of the West and its imperialism. For the contributors to Under Caesar’s Sword, however, advocacy for religious freedom is above all a response to human suffering. If we are called to be merciful to the “least of these brothers and sisters,” then we cannot forget those who suffer because of their faith.

Read the full review here.

A major new book is out on global religious freedom, Nilay Saiya’s Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism from Cambridge University Press. Saiya makes the case, using global data, that repression of religion causes violence and that religious freedom is a force for peace and democracy. It’s supremely relevant for foreign policy and for the cause of religious freedom more broadly.

Here is the description:

Religious terrorism poses a significant challenge for many countries around the world. Extremists who justify violence in God’s name can be found in every religious tradition, and attacks perpetrated by faith-based militants have increased dramatically over the past three decades. Given the reality of religious terrorism today, it would seem counterintuitive that the best weapon against violent religious extremism would be for countries and societies to allow for the free practice of religion; yet this is precisely what this book argues. Weapon of Peace investigates the link between terrorism and the repression of religion, both from a historical perspective and against contemporary developments in the Middle East and elsewhere. Drawing upon a range of different case studies and quantitative data, Saiya makes the case that the suppression and not the expression of religion leads to violence and extremism and that safeguarding religious freedom is both a moral and strategic imperative.

And here is some advance praise:

‘Weapon of Peace is ​an extraordinarily refreshing and rare achievement​. Just as the early-modern ‘Wars of Religion’ taught generations of Europeans that schemes of religious conformity would only fuel rather than dampen sectarian violence, Saiya’s ground-breaking book promises to make the causal nexus between religious persecution and religious terrorism a more central and serious subject of discussion in our own era of sanguinary religious conflict. There are many valuable studies of religion and terrorism. But Weapon of Peace is an absolute must-read for scholars and policy makers alike.’ Timothy Samuel Shah, Senior Advisor, Religious Freedom Institute

‘With prodigious documentation and lucid prose, Saiya shows how state repression of religion propels the violence and fanaticism afflicting our world today – a finding of enormous strategic importance. Elegant, timely, and fateful, this book is a masterful achievement.’ Allen D. Hertzke, David Ross Boyd Professor, University of Oklahoma

Saiya just took up a position at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.