Category: General

One of my favorite writers on religion and politics is Ismail Royer of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team at the Religious Freedom Institute, where I am also affiliated. He’s got an incredible story – an American convert to Islam who was indicted in 2003 for assisting the Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba and spent over 13 years in federal prison. Now, he advocates against Islamic extremism and for interreligious peace, reconciliation — and, yes, religious freedom. His story is here.

Exemplary of his writing is a piece he published in Public Discourse last week explaining why the Bladensurg Cross, which stands astride a Maryland highway and whose removal as a violation of the Establishment Clause is soon to be considered by the Supreme Court, ought in fact to be allowed to stand.

A devout Muslim, Royer is honest about the differences between Islam and Christianity. That’s good. Religious peacebuilders, as I know from having been involved in this work for many years, are often religious pluralists, hail from the liberal side of their traditions, and tend to elide the real differences between faiths, eroding their credibility among the people who most need to be convinced. Not Royer:

Islam differs from the Christianity of America’s founders in many ways. It firmly rejects the trinity and the Christian doctrine of salvation.

But he also finds much in common in the two traditions:

But as in the Christian faith, our spiritual and moral order derives from our relationship with our Creator. Muslims worship the God who revealed Himself to Abraham and the Children of Israel, and we understand ourselves to be participants in the history of this revelation and the continuing drama of its fulfillment.

Likewise, for Muslims, God’s revelation is the foundation of our rights and duties toward our fellow man. The Quran obliges upon Muslims the substance of the Ten Commandments. It states that God has “honored the Children of Adam,” conferring on them a status that compels each of us to treat others with the dignity they are due irrespective of their religion. The Prophet warned against striking another person in the face because God created Adam in His image, and he said, “He who wishes to avoid hellfire and enter heaven should die believing in God and the Last Day, and do unto others what he wishes to be done unto him.” Thus, notwithstanding historical and current rivalries, the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage of Christian and Islamic civilizations substantially overlap in their values, foundations of order, and Semitic and Greek roots.

Most of all, the two faiths have in common an interest in opposing a repressive sort of secularism:

For these reasons, Christianity and Islam share an inherent antipathy toward the ongoing ideological revolt against God that manifests itself in the militant secularism found in parts of continental Europe and Asia, and increasingly in the United States. The Quran says of such people, “They know only the outward appearance of the life of the world, and are heedless of the Hereafter.” This amounts to idolatry with the creation as the object of worship: and while Islamic theology deems Christians to be astray, it does not equate idolatry and Christianity.

He believes that Muslims have a strong interest in the religious character of the United States:

The civilizational substance preserved in the American order is common to Islam, even if few or no Christians realize it. It is thus appropriate, even urgent, that American Muslims seek to preserve this order against encroachments by totalitarian secularism because doing so means preserving what remains of a civilizational order that proceeds from belief in God. For these secularists do not want simply to live peaceably within this order, which the constitutional settlement entitles them to do; rather, they want to scrap this settlement and replace it with their own totalizing vision of society in which good lies not in “regressive” religious traditions, but in the whim of the autonomous self.

He then takes to task both Christian and Muslims who acquiesce in various ways to this secularism. Read the rest of this incisive and compelling piece.

 

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.

Part Two of my post on Christians in Nigeria is up at God’s Servant First, the religious liberty blog of the U.S. Catholic Bishops on religious liberty. The first part was posted on August 28th. This one focuses on Christian responses to persecution there.

An excerpt:

Some Christians have simply had to flee the violence, [Robert] Dowd [,one of the Under Caesar’s Sword researchers] found, becoming internally displaced people or refugees. He was impressed, though, by how many adopted “strategies of association” through which they strengthened their position by building ties with those around them. Sometimes Christian pastors and other leaders would build relationships with sympathetic Muslim leaders, thus isolating Boko Haram. This strategy was used, for instance, by Archbishop Kaigama in Plateau State to attempt to stop the violence between Fulani herders and Christian farmers.  In some cases, Muslim leaders would hide Christians from other attackers. Christians even proclaimed forgiveness publicly in order to counter jihadi discourse. Christians have also appealed to the government to defeat militant violence and provide protection. They have also adopted more confrontational approaches of protest and bringing light to government failures through advocacy campaigns. In a small number of instances, Christians have taken up arms against militants.

I also propose some strategies for responding to the persecution that U.S. Christians can undertake.

For the last two days, U.S. Catholics have been clicking for updates on Archbishop Vigano’s testimony against high-level prelates, including Pope Francis. As they should be.

Meanwhile, 6,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria this year at the hands of Fulani herdsmen.

How many of us know about their plight?

I published the first of a two-part series of blogs on this on Friday at the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ blog on religious freedom, God’s Servant First.

Here is a preview:

Sure, I had heard of Boko Haram, the infamous Muslim terrorist group in Northern Nigeria whose name means, “Western education is a sin,” but I had not known that since 2009, Boko Haram has destroyed over 200 churches, displaced nearly two million people, killed at least 20,000 people, created over 200,000 refugees, and kidnapped hundreds, including many women whom it has made sex slaves. While Boko Haram has attacked and killed both Muslims and Christians, Christians are disproportionately represented among these many victims, and, of course, explicitly targeted. In 2013, it is estimated, more Christians were killed as a result of persecution in Northern Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined. . . . Why is this so little known among Christians in the West?

And:

Much more recently and apart from Boko Haram operations, reports have revealed large death tolls of Christians at the hands of Muslim Fulani herdsmen in the states of Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Adamawa, Kwara, Borno, and Zamfara. Since this past January, over 6,000 Christians, most them women, children, and elderly, have died in raids and other attacks. In 2015, there were 4,028 killings and 198 church attacks, nearly double those of the previous year. The attacks increased again in 2016 and continued into 2017.

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.