Author: Daniel Philpott

Among the responses of Christians to persecution around the world uncovered by the Under Caesar’s Sword project, some stand out for their saintliness and holiness.

One is Fr. Frans van der Lugt, a Jesuit priest who refused to leave his people in Homs, Syria, and was murdered for it, as described in a recent piece in Aleteia.

The author, Weronika Pomierna, describes his spirit:

“The most important thing is to keep up hope and not to despair. Only then can I help others! If I leave my home, nothing will stay of it. Besides, there are still Christians here. About 28 people. I do not want to leave them,” said the 75-year-old Jesuit priest, Fr. Frans van der Lugt.

He speaks of this in one of the videos he made, where he can be seen walking among the rubble down the streets of Homs, wearing his worn-out gray sweater.

In other videos, in the background you can clearly hear the sound of bombs exploding and gun shots. “I will stay here even if there are no more Christians, because I came here for Syria, for all Syrians. I am here to serve them and this country, which I have loved so dearly,” he says.

Many found these words incomprehensible: Here we have a European who could easily leave during the siege of Homs, yet rejects this possibility in order to stay with those he was called to serve. He wants to be there with them till the end, even when there are only 28 Christians left.

She concludes:

From the very beginning he believed that people can live together, despite their differing views. He would also constantly remind us that we are all brothers and should love one another, Lilian recalls. He was a holy man, indeed! Many thought so. He had pure goodness in him. People sensed that he was like Jesus. Everyone could come to him to talk. He did not create any distance. When I talked with him, I felt that I was unique in his eyes, but absolutely everyone who spoke to him had the same feeling. Some Muslims, too, called him “holy.”

On the first anniversary of Fr. Frans’ death, his confrere and friend said during Holy Mass that he was sure that Fr. Frans immediately forgave his killer. He added that if only this man had stopped to look in his eyes, full of goodness and peace, he would not have shot the priest.

Pray for us, Father.

Friend and colleague John Carlson at Arizona State has published an op-ed piece arguing that President Trump is spurning the United States’s civil religion in promoting his own cult of personality — a quest to be God? He concludes:

Trump’s inaugural and presidency have deepened fissures over what it means to be, as our national motto affirms, one nation made up of many diverse peoples.

Do we embrace “American Exceptionalism” or “America First”? Should we lead the international order, or compete with Russia to be a craven superpower? Will we open our doors to the world’s “tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to be free,” or send them back to the “s***hole countries” they come from? Put starkly, are we a nation “under God” or under Trump? We must choose.

Civil religion, grounded in “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” provides strength for resisting Trump’s noxious cult of personality. As high priests of civil religion, presidents usually use the authority of their bully pulpit to summon the nation to noble purposes. But without the sermon, a president no longer commands a pulpit. And all that is left is the bully.

We now must look to other leaders and citizens to restore the civil religion that Trump has renounced.

Read the whole thing and see his other interesting work on religion and politics and, most recently, global citizenship, here.

One of the world’s largest religious freedom violations was brought to light this past Friday in a United Nations report on the detention of some one million (in some estimates two million!) Uighur and other Muslim minorities in internment camps in Xinjiang Province in Western China at the hands of the Chinese government.

These minorities have long lived in tension with the Chinese government, who fears their separatist tendencies and uses the rhetoric of the War on Terror to legitimate its suppression of them. (See this excellent piece by Mehdi Hasan). The Chinese government exaggerates, as Hasan explain:

That isn’t to say that Uighur militant groups are a myth, but the few that do exist are small, weak, and pose very little threat to the Chinese state. Most are inspired by local factors rather than international alliances. To quote Michael Clarke, an Australian academic who has studied Xinjiang, “It’s not that China shouldn’t be concerned about [global terrorist ties], but the core issue is that the linkages have been exaggerated by the Chinese government.”

Xinjiang Province also happens to be the home of China’s largest oil and gas reserves.

Religion is integral to the internments and to the Chinese government’s suppression of Uighurs in recent years. A common criticism of religious freedom advocates is that they depict conflicts as religious that are really about something else: economics, self-determination. Here, yes, these factors are also involved. But so is religion — in a big way. Hasan describes China’s policies:

The Chinese government seems bent on humiliating and abusing the Muslims of Xinjiang. In recent years, Beijing has banned Uighur parents from naming their sons “Muhammad”; children from entering mosques; and government employees from fasting during Ramadan. Muslim men are prohibited from growing “abnormally” long beards, while Muslim women cannot wear the face veil in public.

Then there are the “political camps for indoctrination,” cited by the U.N. panel last week, in which hundreds of thousands of detainees are forced to shout Communist Party slogans; declare their loyalty only to the Chinese dictator, President Xi Jinping; and are “lectured about the dangers of Islam.”

The word “Orwellian,” therefore, does not do justice to the harrowing accounts of abuses coming out of Xinjiang, rightly dubbed a “police state” and “apartheid with Chinese characteristics” by The Economist. The U.N. panel said it was a “massive internment camp” — “a sort of ‘no-rights zone.’”

The camps merit outrage, not the indifference shown by heads of Western and even Muslim majority states. Hasan again:

So where is the global outcry? Where are the protests from Western governments, which so often claim to value human rights above all else? President Donald Trump says he has “a lot of respect for China” and likes to brag that Xi Jinping is “a friend of mine.” On a visit to China earlier this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May won plaudits from Chinese state-run media for being “pragmatic” and ignoring Western journalists and activists who “keep pestering [her] to criticize Beijing” over human rights abuses. Her fellow European leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, has visited China 11 times in 12 years — but has never publicly raised the issue of the Uighurs on any of those trips.

Where is the outrage from the governments of majority-Muslim countries, which so often claim to speak on behalf of their oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters across the globe? They are loud in their condemnation of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians and Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. But a million Muslims behind bars? Beards and veils banned? Imams humiliated? The news out of Xinjiang has been met only with radio silence from the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Take the Turkish government, which in the past has spoken out in defense of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, but these days is keen on cozying up to Beijing. Or consider the Iranian government, which not long ago announced a “new chapter” in Tehran-Beijing relations, praising China for having stood “by the side of the Iranian nation during hard days.”

The camps remind everyone that Muslims are often the recipients, not just the perpetrators, of massive human rights and religious freedom violations. The world’s states, the human rights community, and, not least, religious freedom advocates are called to respond.

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.

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.

‘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

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 16^th 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.

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.