Category: General

The following is an address that I delivered at the opening convocation of Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida on September 1, 2017.

President Towey, Chairman Timmis, faculty, and students, it is a great honor to speak at your opening convocation and to help you launch your academic year.

Travel with me to Rome, through which runs the Tiber River. On what is known as the Tiber Island there sits a 10^th century church which is full of interesting relics. In Rome, old churches and relics are not unusual. But look closer. These relics are not of Christians beheaded or thrown to lions in the first centuries. Rather, they are the Bible of Pakistan’s Shabhaz Bhatti, whom terrorists shot dead only in 2011. And of the missal of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed while celebrating Mass in San Salvador in March 1980. And a letter by Christian de Cherge, a Trappist monk in Algeria, whom Islamist terrorists killed in 1996.

The Church was commissioned by Pope St. John Paul II to remember the stories of martyrs of our time in preparation for the Jubilee Year, 2000. In front of the altar stands an icon some 8 ft. tall whose manifold scenes depict martyrs of the past century: Mexico’s Miguel Pro, Poland’s Maxmilian Kolbe, Janani Luwum of Uganda, killed under Idi Amin in the 1970s. Behind the altar stands the stark reality that more Christians have been martyred in the past century than in all previous centuries combined, as reported to us by Todd Johnson and the late David Barrett, two demographers.

Religious persecution continues around the world today. The Pew Forum estimates that some 75% of the world’s population lives in a country where there are high restrictions on religious freedom. Of this number, Christians make up a high proportion. Credible sources claim that some 80% of all acts of religious discrimination and denials of religious freedom are directed at Christians.

To see where most of these denials take place, exercise your geographical imagination once again. Begin on the coast of North Africa, say, in Libya, then move southeast to Nigeria, back up to Kenya and up through the Gaza Strip, Syria, and Iraq, up to Central Asia, down to Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka and then east to Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. North Korea is worst of all. It is on this latitudinal bandwidth that the vast majority of persecution takes place.

The types of regimes that do the persecuting are strikingly diverse. Much of the headlines these days go to Islam, and Islamist regimes are one type of persecutor. But there are others, including regnant Communist regimes like China, Vietnam, and North Korea, religious nationalist regimes like India and Sri Lanka, and secularist regimes like the “stans” of Central Asia. Then, too, there are persecutors who are not states at all, but renegade armies such as the Islamic State, or ISIS.

To speak of the persecution of Christians is not to forget that Christians have been on the other side of persecution, as they were in many episodes from the 4^th through roughly the 17^th centuries, or that Christians have denied the freedom of other Christians, as they did in the religious wars of early modern Europe and as they do even today in countries like Mexico and Russia, or that members of other religions also suffer persecution on  large scale. Today, though, as the Church of San Bartolomeo attests, Christians are by and large persecuted and not persecuting and are the bulk of the persecuted – the lion’s share of the lion’s den.

By now, numerous analysts have documented and described the persecution of Christians. I especially commend to you the writings of the journalist, John Allen, whose articles regularly appear in Crux. This persecution still does not receive disproportionate attention among human rights organizations, the mainstream media, and western governments, including our own, though there have been signs of progress. Nor does the persecution, in my view, even receive adequate attention among Catholics and other Christians, who are still largely unaware of what our brothers and sisters suffer. But the knowledge of the persecution of Christians is available.

What is important to me, though, is not just becoming aware that Christians are being persecuted but also learning how they respond to persecution. What do they do when their religious freedom is egregiously denied? This is important to know if we are to be in solidarity with members of the “household of faith,” to use the Apostle Paul’s phrase. As I shall argue today, it can also teach us important truths for our situation here in the West, which Pope Francis has described as “polite persecution.” And it can teach us important truths for our lives more generally.

My interest in how Christians respond to persecution has led me to undertake the project, Under Caesar’s Sword, which began in 2014 on a generous grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. Conducted as a full partnership between Notre Dame, with the sponsorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture, and the Religious Freedom Institute, a Washington, D.C. based organization, Under Caesar’s Sword aims to investigate and communicate how Christians around the world respond to persecution so that the relatively religiously free world may be in solidarity with them and so that they would be strengthened in their responses. We commissioned a team of 17 world class scholars of global Christianity to go to countries where Christians are most persecuted in order to learn how Christians respond. We have then sought to disseminate the results through a major international conference in Rome in December 2015, a documentary, a report that was launched in Washington, D.C. this past April, a volume of essays forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and curricula for schools and parishes. All of this can be found at our project’s website, ucs.nd.edu. These investigations, I am convinced, have much to teach us and I will focus on one insight in particular, as I shall explain.

I want to begin, though, by focusing for a moment not on the persecuted but on the persecutors. Straightforwardly, persecution is the egregious denial of the human right of religious freedom, the right to express and practice one’s faith without coercion. Today’s Caesars practice arbitrary detention, unjust forms of interrogation, imprisonment, forced labor, torture, murder, the seizure and destruction of church properties, and related acts, as well as severe forms of discrimination.

Persecution also has a more theological dimension. Here I rely on the insights of one of the co-leaders of Under Caesar’s Sword, Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah of the Religious Freedom Institute, who spoke about the theological character of persecution in his lecture for our learning materials. Persecuting Caesars defy God’s justice and love in how they treat the persecuted and do so in the name of their ruling ideology – Islamism, Communism, secularism, religious nationalism. In exercising their authority in this way, these Caesars engage in a project of social and political construction, constructing a city that rivals the City of God. In defying God, they have made themselves into a little God themselves. If their project is to succeed, they must coerce into conformity the conscience of anyone who would swear loyalty to a rival God.

We can thus see why Christians were threatened by a literal Caesar, that of the early Roman Empire, which found these Christians to be threatening in a way that it did not find followers of pagan gods to be threatening. Christians worshipped a God over and above Caesar, to whom they regarded Caesar as accountable. The pagan gods, by contrast, were serviceable to Caesar, for they helped tame disorder while posing no challenge to the god-like status that Caesar claimed. Frequently, it was Christians’ refusal to swear an oath to the emperor that led to their persecution.

Rome’s Caesars would not be the last temporal rulers who would demand oaths from Christians on behalf of authority in defiance of God. King Henry VIII demanded assent to an oath of supremacy over the church that arose from his desire to enter a marriage declared illicit by the pope. Thomas More was the only high government official and John Fisher the only English bishop to refuse to sign. Thomas Hobbes theorized Henry’s authority by arguing for the supreme authority of the temporal ruler, the Leviathan, over the church. Rousseau called for a civil religion that would recognize the state’s sovereignty and would be enforceable by the death penalty, presaging the oaths demanded by the French revolutionaries only a few decades later. So, too, today’s Caesars demand that Christian subjects forswear the exercise of any portion of their faith that stands in the way of their idolatrous construction project.

It is in the shadow of these construction projects that I wish to call attention to one of the most important findings of the Under Caesar’s Sword Project, an insight that also emerges from Christian martyrs down through the ages – namely the sense in which persecuted Christians also engage in acts of construction. The “central feature” of such a Christian, argues Shah, is that “he or she possesses and embodies an active faith in God – a vibrant, abundant faith that God the Great Lover exists, that He is there for us, and that He mercifully and generously receives our adoration, our sacrifices, and our good deeds.” Out of this faith, by grace, this Christian constructs goods for the Kingdom of God – an alternative realm of rule — even as he or she is undergoing great duress.

Please understand that I do not mean to romanticize or idealize persecuted Christians or martyrs. One of the findings of the Under Caesar’s Sword project is that Christians respond to persecution in a great variety of ways, including fleeing from danger in great numbers, as they have in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and elsewhere. We must not judge hastily what Christians do when they and their families are in danger of imminent death. We must acknowledge also those cases where they respond by more or less joining the persecuting regime. The project’s China scholar, Fenggang Yang of Purdue, noted cases of Christians who enthusiastically joined themselves to the Communist project of the 1950s, seeing it as realization of the Social Gospel.

Still, I want to focus on those responses to persecution that manifest an authentic Christian faith through their construction of good – not because of how numerous they are but because they have much to teach us. These responses manifest the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice that he underwent in response to persecution. It is a sacrifice, though, that is not merely a death at the hands of political authorities. It also achieves a victory over sin, evil and death. It does so because it ends in the victory of the resurrection. The resurrection, in turn inaugurates a transforming renewal of the world, one that will be achieved finally at the end of time.

This victory and transformation are the constructive dimensions of the Eucharist.

In Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis, he employs a remarkable metaphor to describe the Eucharist – nuclear fission. He writes: “The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of “nuclear fission,” to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all.” Pope Benedict goes on the declare that Eucharistic transfiguration even involves the world’s social and political structures. Through God’s vertical salvation of the world through incarnation, cross, and resurrection, the horizontal transformation of the world, including social, political, economic, and cultural reality, is inaugurated and can be furthered. Think of Pope Benedict’s metaphor when you next behold the blood and wine being consecrated at mass – an unleashing of transfiguring power.

When Christians act to construct justice, whose meaning in the biblical sense is right relationship, in the face of persecution, they act eucharistically. We could even say that they participate in the Eucharist. Through grace, they are drawn into the work of construction in sacrifice. In some cases this is true for martyrs. But it can also be true for Christians who live under persecution and experience hardship short of death. Interestingly, our research for Under Caesar’s Sword turned up fewer martyrs than we thought it would, at least the sort of dramatic martyrs whose death attracts international attention. But we found many Christians who, experiencing the suffering of the denial of their freedom, engaged in construction.

We found that responses to persecution could be placed into three categories.

First, there were strategies of survival, where Christians and their communities sought mainly to preserve their worship and their most basic characteristic activities. Second, there were strategies of association, where they sought to build ties, either with other Christians, other religions, or secular actors in order to counter the power of the persecuting state or militia. Third, there were strategies of confrontation, where they openly took on the persecuting authority, through protest, through legal strategies, and sometimes through armed resistance.

What surprised us were the prevalence of strategies of association, the creative and courageous ways that Christians both strengthened their hand and increased the sphere of friendship and right relationship. Catholic and Protestant Christian communities in northern Nigeria, for instance, formed ecumenical partnerships as well as close ties with mainstream Muslim leaders in the face of the rampant violence carried out by the Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram.

Another constructive response is simply working for and witnessing to the religious freedom that is being denied. Pakistan’s Shabaz Bhatti, a Catholic in a country in which Christians make up 2 percent of the population, dedicated his life to the cause of religious minorities and became Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs, a cabinet post that he accepted for the sake of “the oppressed, downtrodden, and marginalized” of Pakistan, as he explained.

Lobbying against Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy law, promoting interfaith cooperation, and advocating for minorities of all faiths, including the browbeaten Ahmadiyya movement of Islam, Bhatti knew that his life was in danger. He had renounced marriage because he did not want to leave a family fatherless. In a video that he made to be released in the event of his death, he stated, “I believe in Jesus Christ who has given his own life for us, and I am ready to die for a cause. I’m living for my community . . . and will dies to defend their rights.” He was speaking eucharistically.

On March 2, 2011, he was assassinated right near his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, in a shooting for which Tehrik-i-Taliban, a militant Islamist group, claimed responsibility. The constructive witness of Bhatti’s life continued after his death. Thousands of Muslims attended his funeral, paying tribute to him and demonstrating their support for religious freedom.

Another Christian response to persecution is the building of ties between churches, increasing Christian unity. Pope Francis said in 2016, “when terrorists or world powers persecute Christian minorities or Christians, they don’t ask, But are you Lutheran Are you Orthodox? Are you Catholic? Are you a Reformed Christian? Are you a Pentecostal? No! You are a Christian! They only recognize one of them: the Christian. The enemy never makes a mistake and knows very well how to recognize where Jesus is. This is the ecumenism of blood.” Our research showed that in Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere, persecution has brought Christian churches into closer cooperation. The icon of the new martyrs in the Church of San Bartolomeo includes Christians of many churches and places. At its center appears the verse from the Gospel of John, Chapter 17: “That they may be one.”

Sometimes persecuted Christians construct closer ties between religions separated by enmity. Christian de Chergé, abbot of the Trappist monastery in Atlas, Algeria, had lived with his fellow monks among Muslims for two decades, befriending them and providing them with medical care. When civil war broke out in the 1990s between Algeria’s repressive secular government and Muslim opposition forces, the monks were in danger of being murdered by Muslim terrorists. As portrayed by the recent film, Of Gods and Men, the monks decided to stay and remain true to their mission. Abbot de Chergé then penned a note to his future killers. He did not desire martyrdom, he made clear, lest it reinforce caricatures of Muslims as fanatics. But should he be killed, he desired to “immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ.” Here is neither syncretism nor triumphalism but rather Christ-like love for Muslims. Then, “to the friend of my final moment,” he writes “that we may find each other, happy `good thieves,’ in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both.” As with Shabhaz Bhatti, the funeral for de Chergé and his fellow monks, held in June 1996 in Algiers, drew a crowd of 100,000, displaying Algerian Muslims’ love for the monks.

In his last testament, Abbot de Chergé willed to “forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.” Forgiveness is another way that Christians can respond to persecution through construction. In the Christian tradition, forgiveness is a gift that one who has been offended or wounded gives to the offender. It is not only a waiving of charges or a cancellation of debt but also an invitation to conversion and reconciliation. The Eucharist is an act of forgiveness because it performs the sacrifice by which God died for humanity “while we were still sinners” and in doing so lifts up humanity. Paul Bhatti, Shahbaz Bhatti’s brother, forgave his brother’s killers in April 5, 2011, when he traveled to Rome for a conference in his brother’s memory. When Shabhaz was killed, Paul was living in Italy and was filled with rage and shunned appeals to move back to Pakistan and carry on his brother’s fight for minorities. When he traveled back to Pakistan to attend his brother’s funeral, though, his heart was moved by the love for his brother that he saw among the people, including Muslims. He said at a conference in Rome in 2011 that his family had forgiven the assassins “because . . . our brother Shahbaz was a Christian and the Christian faith tells us to forgive.” He even took on his late brother’s cabinet position in order to fight for minorities.

There are other ways, too, in which Christians respond to persecution faithfully.

Jesus is clear: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Great is your reward in heaven. This, too, is a constructive response, one that asks for God’s help for the one who is doing the persecuting. There is a sense, after all, in which the persecutor is the one who is diminished the most. The persecuted may have suffered death, injury, or loss of property; the persecutor is in danger of losing his soul.

Today, in America, to speak of persecution might seem a great exaggeration. No American has suffered the fate of Helen Berhane, the Eritrean gospel singer whose evangelizing earned her two years in a shipping container in the middle of a hot desert.

You might insist on the complexity of persecution, but you would be accused of having a persecution complex. Still, in the last decades American Christians, like Christians across the West, have faced a rising trend of what Pope Francis has termed “polite persecution.” As the pope explains, “if you don’t like this, you will be punished: you’ll lose your job and many things or you’ll be set aside.” At the hands of bureaucrats, bosses, judges, and deans, Christian merchants, universities, schools, hospitals, charities, campus fellowships, students, public officials, employees, and citizens have been fired, fined, shut down, threatened with a loss of accreditation, and evicted for living out traditional convictions, primarily regarding marriage and sexuality.

In the face of polite persecution, witness is unlikely to merit martyrdom but it may well incur costs. In these situations, American Christians, too, must decide how to respond faithfully. Here, I want to thank and salute Ave Maria University for its decision to sue the Obama administration over the HHS mandate in 2012. Part of the calculus will be avoiding formal cooperation and illicit material cooperation with regulations and decisions that ask us to be involved in wrongdoing. But as Christians around the world has shown us, there is also the call to respond constructively, thus participating in the Eucharist and its embodiment of cross and resurrection.

Showing us how is Baronelle Stutzman, the florist at Arlene’s Flowers in the state of Washington who, like other Christian merchants, was sued for not being willing to supply a gay wedding. The would-be purchaser was a man named Rob who had been her customer for nine years and whom she counted as a friend. But while Stutzman, a devout Southern Baptist, could sell him flowers in general, she could not decorate his ceremony, for the purpose of flowers is to magnify, memorialize, and celebrate the union being established. As she put it, “Rob was asking me to choose between my affection for him and my commitment to Christ. As deeply fond as I am of Rob, my relationship with Jesus is everything to me.”

At the urging of the state attorney general of Washington and with the help of the ACLU, Robert then filed a discrimination suit while the attorney general filed, too, in the most aggressive fashion he could, confronting Stutzman with the prospect of financial ruin. In part, Stutzman’s witness was to hold firm in her insistence on her religious freedom. She refused an offer to pay a fine of $2000 with an agreement to provide services for same-sex couples in the future. In addition to justice, though, mercy was also a theme of Stutzman’s witness. She commented to the Christian Science Monitor that her telling Rob that she could not support his wedding was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.” She added, “I would love to see Rob again. I would love to just hug him and say I’m sorry if there is anything he’s going through that is hurting him.”

We may learn from Stutzman’s model of constructive witness in the face of polite persecution. Polite persecution is a prospect that many of us my well face in coming years. In some ways, the Trump administration has provided a temporary reprieve. But as a recent article in The Hill argued, the administration has not ended decisively or firmly the regulations that compromise religious freedom. A future president could easily decide to enforce them again. Polite persecution also comes from many sources other than the executive branch, including the courts and manifold employers.

Stutzman’s case is still in the courts; this past February the Supreme Court of Washington ruled 9-0 against her. She may well lose her case and face financial ruin. In the same way, many persecuted Christians around the world will not live to see the vindication of their cause. Here, the Christian may take comfort and courage from what the great Second Vatican Council Document, Gaudium et Spes, teaches, that the goods that we construct in this life are burnished, transformed, and placed on eternal display in the next.

 

This talk drew from the following publications;

Daniel Philpott, “Polite Persecution,” First Things, No. 272, April 2017, 17-19.

Daniel Philpott, “Modern Martyrs,” America, Vol. 207, No. 14, November 12, 2012, pp. 13-18.

In Response to Persecution: Findings of the Under Caesar’s Sword Project on Global Christian Communities report published April 20, 2017

 

I am a professor who believes that freedom is critical to the best and most defensible purpose of a university: the pursuit of knowledge, whose criterion is truth. And so I have been watching nervously in recent years as crowds on campuses have shouted down, chased off, and forced the disinvitation of speakers. The veritable takeover of Evergreen State by Jacobin mobs last month was positively frightening.

So, I read with great interest an insightful piece on the issue by Georgetown’s Jacques Berlinerblau — increasingly one of my favorite writers — published in the Washington Post last week. Berlinerblau was extolled here at ArcU by contributor Tim Shah, who praised and elaborated on his critique of “pomofoco” critics of religious freedom. Now he weighs in on speech on campus.

Berlinerblau notes that episodes of speech being shut down typically evoke cries of liberal bias:

Recent controversies at American colleges and universities follow a predictable script whose final act culminates in cries of “liberal bias!” The saga begins when a coalition on campus concludes that a person’s ideas are wrong, demeaning to a certain group or lacking in scholarly rigor. The holder of aforesaid ideas might have a lecture invitation rescinded (as occurred when the comedian Bill Maher was briefly disinvited from delivering a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley in 2014). Or this person will be shouted down and verbally abused (as transpired recently with Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein, who declined to participate in a diversity initiative). Or maybe the offender will be shouted down, verbally abused and physically assaulted (as happened to lecturer Charles Murray and Professor Allison Stanger at Middlebury College).

Once the incident goes viral, our drama lurches to its spectacular conclusion: a backlash emerges, and commentators decry liberalism run amok. The scandal at Middlebury impelled right-wing critics to speak of “liberal intolerance” and “liberal groupthink.” After the Evergreen episode, conservative media fingered “liberal terrorists” as responsible for Professor Weinstein’s ordeal. Even a progressive liberal like Bill Maher attributed his rebuff to the wishy-washiness of liberals.

He argues, though, that liberals are not to blame for this, but rather the radical left, which is disproportionately represented on campuses. “This third camp,” he argues, “is composed of a vast, and diverse array of quite serious scholars whose animus towards liberal ideas often exceeds its disdain for conservative ones.” Here is how he describes this camp:

If you want to conceptualize the differences between liberal and leftist professors in political terms—which, I repeat, is always hazardous—think of it this way. Liberal professors are the types that probably voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential elections. Radical left professors likely wrote her off as a dreaded “neo-liberal.” Their primary votes might have been cast for Bernie Sanders—as irritatingly “mainstream” as the social-democratic candidate might have been to them. In the general election they might have opted for Jill Stein, or sat it out altogether in protest of American capitalism, imperialism, hegemony, etc

Yet whereas Stein received 1 percent of the popular vote, one recent national study of professors in all disciplines demonstrated that roughly 15.6 percent at non-sectarian schools self-identify as “far left.” That finding calls attention to a pronounced difference between the politics of American voters and American professors. But even this number strikes me as way too low. Although the data has never been parsed in this way, if we were to look solely at professors in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, my guess is that the 15 percent figure would be two or three times higher—and more so at elite institutions. In other words, at a nationally ranked school a department of English, Women’s Studies, Art History, French, African-American Studies, Spanish, Philosophy, Anthropology, Film Studies or Sociology is likely to have more far-left faculty than liberals and conservatives combined.

Berlinerblau concludes:

There’s a lot to be gained by contemplating the tripartite distinction identified above. College administrations and scholarly societies need to ask themselves why these ideological imbalances are so pronounced. They might also wonder why it’s so hard to identify a fourth camp, comprised of professors whose politics are inscrutable or unpredictable. (I would hope that my teaching and research places me in that camp.) The radical left might ponder why the academy is the sole American institution where its ideas hold any sway. Conservatives have every right to complain about ideological imbalance. But they need to stop blaming liberals for their misfortune, politically expedient as such a charge might be.

As for liberals, whose core values on issues like freedom of speech are everywhere under assault, they need to define what they actually stand for. And if it causes tension with their “allies” on the radical left, so be it.

A couple of glosses on this incisive piece.

First, I like to think that I am in Berlinerblau’s fourth camp. My views of justices are rooted in Catholic social thought, which, as I often tell my students, does not fall easily into left or right camps. As such, I am all the more committed to free speech on campus. It is the interstitial views that often get rubbed out when the Grim Censor comes around.

Second, I have wondered why more university administrators have not spoken out for freedom on campus. A number of moderate to liberal commentators who have observed the unruliness in forums of learning and reacted with apposite outrage. Journalist Kirsten Powers is one, and has been joined in standing for freedom of inquiry by journalist Fareed Zakaria, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and even President Obama when he was still president. Kristof is especially interesting. Usually a voice for causes of social justice on the left, he was outraged by the silencings and raised his own voice. When readers wrote to the editor asking why conservative views ought to be tolerated at all, he wrote another column pleading for freedom, and then another. But if Powers, Zakaria, Kristof, and Obama have spoken up, why have so few tenured professors and college presidents, with only a few exceptions, raised their voices in solidarity with beleaguered fellow members of what are supposed to be communities of learning? If the free pursuit of truth is the very end of the university, then why have so few spoken out when it has been assaulted? Father Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president of 35 years, who is pictured at the top of this blog, spoke often and eloquently for freedom on campus. But not presidents, provosts and deans today. Even after Evergreen State, where a professor was prevented even from teaching his class. Is not a threat to free inquiry in one university a threat to inquiry in every university? Where is the solidarity?

 

 

One of the most impressive voices for justice in the global Catholic Church is Cardinal Charles Bo of Burma, who has recently spoken out against Burma’s Buddhist nationalist government for its atrocious treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority. Unlike few other Burmese, he has been willing to name openly his government’s actions as ones of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the government of Burma has displaced over 100,000 Rohingya and subjected them to arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, summary executions, and similar forms of repression.

Religious freedom is a critical dimension of the issue. Rohingyas are targeted for being Muslims and have experienced their mosques and madrassas destroyed at the hands of the state as well as riotous citizens. When a Catholic Cardinal dares to speak of the oppression of Muslims, it lends unique credibility to the Catholic Church’s witness for religious freedom. The Church’s key document declaring religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (1965) roots religious freedom in the religious nature of every human being. When Christians stand up for the religious freedom of others, they not only do what is just but enhance claims for their own religious freedom. Religious freedom is also an overlooked dimension of peace. When diverse religious communities respect one another’s members’ full citizenship rights, they have taken the critical step towards living together peacefully. As they must do in Burma.

Cardinal Bo gave a riveting address at the Under Caesar’s Sword conference in Rome in December 2015, by the way.

 

 

 

Daniel Mark, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University — and ArcU contributor! — has just been chosen to be Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was first appointed to the Commission in 2014. USCIRF is an independent commission established by Congress that monitors religious freedom around the world, makes recommendations for U.S. foreign policy, and produces a valuable annual report along with numerous excellent reports on dimensions of international religious freedom. Warmest congratulations and best wishes to Daniel.

In today’s New York Times appears an insightful op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, one of my favorite writers on Islam, offering an explanation for why certain Muslims are killing Christians in the Middle East, written in the wake of yesterday’s shootings of Coptic Christians in Egypt. He points out that the attackers are a militant strain of Islam and that many other Muslims have condemned the killings and sought to defend and assist Christians.

[W]hile such atrocities come from extreme groups like the Islamic State, most other Muslims — from ordinary people to mainstream religious authorities — condemn them. Some Muslims even actively try to defend Christians, like the female police officers who lost their lives during the Palm Sunday attacks, and the men and women who rushed to mosques to donate blood for the injured. Clearly, what threatens Christians is not Islam but a strain of extremism within it.

Akyol goes on to say that the strain of Muslims who are carrying out these attacks are seeking to uphold an earlier tradition by which Christians and other non-Muslims were considered dhimmis, communities that were inferior but could be tolerated.

However, a part of the modern crisis was also religious — and it was rooted in the very tolerance of classical Islam. This tolerance had been based not on equality but on hierarchy. Muslims were the superior rulers, whereas non-Muslims were protected but inferior communities called “dhimmi.” The latter had to pay an extra poll tax, their temples could not be too loud and new ones were rarely permitted, and they were subject to various social limitations. And while their conversion to Islam was encouraged, conversion from Islam to the faith of dhimmi could be a capital offense.

In the Middle Ages, this hierarchal tolerance of Islam was preferable to the alternatives at the time, such as forced conversion or mass murder. However, in the modern era, equality before law became the universal norm, and that is what the religious minorities rightly began to demand. (It is notable that the Ottoman Empire, the seat of caliphate, answered these calls with the Reform Edict of 1856, declaring Christians and Jews equal citizens of the empire.)

Most of all, the piece contains a shout-out to the Under Caesar’s Sword project that I direct in partnership with my friends at the Religious Freedom Institute. Drawing attention to incidents like yesterday’s attacks in Egypt, looking at how Christians respond, and promoting solidarity with them is what the project is all about.

One of my great frustrations is not having yet seen the movie Silence, Martin Scorcese’s film about Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan based on Shusaku Endo’s great novel by the same name. Up until its release, the film was much ballyhooed, even being called the greatest religious film and the like, but then flopped at the box office. I still want very badly to see the movie, convinced that the film is far better than the reception it got. Scorcese, one of the great filmmakers of the past century, worked on it for some 25 years and held it close to his heart as his life’s work.

I also want to see the film in order to compare it with some of the commentary that touted it. (An excellent review of this commentary is written by my friend Margaret McCarthy, who is on the faculty of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C.) One of the themes of the commentary was that the film is about how difficult it is to plant a “European” faith in non-European soil. In the novel, one of the Japanese officials says as much to one of the Jesuits. This is rather suspicious. In fact, the missionaries arrive in a Japan where there had once been Christian communities in the hundreds of thousands. Now Christians are hiding in small enclaves, where they crave the sacraments. The reason for this has nothing to do with the difficulty of cultural adaption, though. The reason is that the Christian community has been and is being brutally persecuted by the government. The novel tells of Christians who died the death of martyrs rather than renounce their faith. It is in this context that the main plot unfolds, where one of the missionaries, Fr. Sebastian, is brought to apostatize under questioning.

I’m interested in this story, too, on the basis of the ongoing project on persecution that I co-direct, Under Caesar’s Sword, which is precisely about how Christians respond to persecution.

Sounding the note of persecution just right is a review of the film by Thomas Hibbs, an homme de lettres at Baylor University, where he is Dean of the Honors College.

“The commentary has tended to ignore a more striking issue and perhaps one more relevant to our own time: namely, what happens to religious faith in a totalitarian political environment that actively and violently repudiates any religion that is not perfectly consonant with the dictates of the political regime,” Hibbs writes.  He describes the persecution thus:

Sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan were for a time welcomed and had enormous success. Political changes in the country led to growing suspicion of foreign influences and to a fear that the allegiance of the Japanese people would be ssplit between nationalism and the new religion. The governmental response was ruthless and systematic. By the use of bribery and threats, it set ordinary citizens against one another and especially against any priests remaining in the country. The centerpiece of the elimination project was a very public form of repudiation of the faith: the so-called fumi-e (literally, “to step on a picture”), the stepping, and in some cases spitting, on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

He continues:

What sort of religion can survive in this setting, where religious liberty is systematically denied? If anything endures, it is minimalist and completely privatized; indeed, what remains is so private that it cannot emerge from the interior of the soul. In everything external to one’s thoughts and feelings, there must be complete conformity to the dictates of the state. Nothing less than public complicity with and docility toward the state is acceptable. If the film raises questions about the silence of God, it draws our attention equally to the silencing of religious speech and action. In the service of a totalitarian ideal, government agents exhibit a kind of enlightenment rationalism. They are meticulous, patient, thorough, articulate, and confident in their control and ultimate victory. One of the more instructive characteristics of Japanese rule in the film is that it is not just a regime of terror, desecration, and destruction. The surrealist nightmare of isolation, torture, and death that it constructs for believers stands in contrast to the world enjoyed by apostates, to whom, the officials offer comfort, work, community, and the esteem of both the elites and the common people. The strategy is smartly designed to suppress memories of, and longing for, any higher calling, any end beyond the scope of the state.

The Japanese rulers in the film were pioneers of a craft perfected in the twentieth century.

 

 

 

 

 

The following piece is reprinted from The Observer at the University of Notre Dame, February 22, 2017, where it was titled, “Stand Against Persecution and Exclusion.”

By now, a wide array of critics of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on refugees — including a passel of United States Catholic bishops — have explained with force and perspicacity how the action amounts to a failure of charity, hospitality and justice. Among the many baneful dimensions of the order is President Trump’s rhetorical insistence that Christians are to be favored and Muslims disfavored for entry into the U.S.

In fairness, the order itself does not privilege Christians or bar Muslims per se, and, in fact, makes religious persecution a factor that enhances a refugee’s case for entry — arguably a positive development that has historical precedent in the refugee policy of the United States. Even this gain, though, is offset by an indefinite bar of all refugees — whatever their religion — from Syria, one of the worst sites of religious persecution in the globe.

More troubling still, though, are Trump’s many statements that have advocated banning Muslims from immigration to the U.S., spoke of Muslims in derogatory terms and called for privileging the protection of Christians. These statements, undoubtedly designed to please the president’s most ardent supporters, are unjust and unwise. Making this case and denouncing the order are numerous leaders of Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical churches and of Christian organizations dedicated to relief, development and the alleviation of persecution.   

I applaud the protest of these leaders as co-director of a project, “Under Caesar’s Sword,” whose purpose is to promote solidarity with the world’s persecuted Christians. Based jointly at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington, D.C., and funded by a grant of $1.1 million from the Templeton Religion Trust, “Under Caesar’s Sword” is the world’s first systematic global investigation of Christian responses to persecution.

The project is timely and urgent. Nearly 3/4 of the world’s population lives in a country where religious freedom is strongly curtailed, and Christians suffer persecution and discrimination more than people of any other faith. The advocacy group Open Doors reports that persecution only increased in 2016, when some 90,000 Christians were killed for their faith and some 215 million Christians faced persecution. Among the worst violators are the governments of North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Eritrea and India, as well as the Islamic State.

“Under Caesar’s Sword” reports the reality of this persecution but more centrally conveys the range of Christian responses to it, many of these hopeful and courageous. A better understanding of these responses can help the rest of the world, not least a Catholic university, stand in solidarity with persecuted Christians. On Thursday, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades will be celebrating a mass for persecuted Christians at 5:15 p.m. in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, followed by the screening of a short documentary film on the subject in Washington Hall at 6 p.m.

Solidarity with persecuted Christians, though, in no way justifies the exclusion of vulnerable Muslims from sanctuary in the U.S. or indifference to any human right of Muslims. Religious persecution of any kind and against anyone is a violation of the human right to religious freedom, which several major human rights conventions articulate. The Catholic Church committed itself to this human right definitively in its landmark declaration of 1965, “Dignitatis Humanae,” rooting religious freedom in the dignity of the human person and his or her search for religious truth.

Muslims themselves suffer the violation of religious freedom in great numbers. In some countries, Muslim minorities like Shias, Ahmadis and Sufis are persecuted at the hands of Sunni Muslim governments. Elsewhere, Muslims face repression at the hands of governments dominated by other religions, like Hindu India and Buddhist Burma, or secular governments, as is the case in China, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and several Central Asian republics. Muslims have faced harsh discrimination in the West, too. Even in the United States, which is relatively tolerant and open to Muslim assimilation, Muslims have been denied the right to build mosques and attacked by other citizens, as they were in a wave of incidents following President Trump’s election.

This is not to deny the frequency of violence committed by Islamist militants in the U.S. and around the world. President Trump’s policy, though, will do little to reduce this violence. The vetting of refugees is already remarkably stringent. The U.S. has accepted some 750,000 refugees since Sept. 11, 2001, not a single one of whom has committed a terrorist attack. 

Worse, the policy is likely to set back, not privilege, the cause of persecuted Christians. First, it undermines the credibility of these Christians’ appeals to universal human rights, makes their protests look like special pleading and hinders their already difficult task of gaining sympathy from human rights groups, the mainstream media, Western governments and international organizations. 

Second, the policy bequeaths recruiters of terrorists a perfect argument, confirming their contention that the United States wishes to fight a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam.

Finally, the policy suffocates a narrative that deserves far more attention: that of solidarity between Christians and Muslims in common cause against violence and persecution. One of the major findings of “Under Caesar’s Sword” is that Christians often respond to persecution by forming bonds with people of other faiths as a bulwark against extremists. “Under Caesar’s Sword” scholars document such cooperation with Muslims in Nigeria, Kenya, Syria, Iraq, India and Indonesia.

After Islamist attacks on Coptic Churches on New Year’s Day in 2011 in Alexandria, Egypt, Muslims joined hands in a human shield around Coptic churches during their worship services, and Christians likewise surrounded mosques. In the U.S., when Florida pastor Terry Jones burned the Quran on the ninth anniversary of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders joined to demonstrate against Jones’ deeds. 

We best promote religious freedom for one faith by doing the same for all faiths, and when we promote the religious freedom of one faith to the exclusion of others, we undermine our efforts even for that one faith.

Daniel Philpott

professor of political science

Feb. 20

This op-ed in this past Sunday’s New York Times is one of the profoundest pieces I’ve read on military ethics in a long time. Again and again we hear about the allegedly excruciating dilemmas — can we torture this person to save scores of others?, and so on. The author, a soldier in Iraq, argues something very different: to compromise on ethics not only undermines the purposes the U.S. is fighting for but delays and hinders victory. He commends his piece to us in this age of Trump. Rightly so.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refugees have much to do with Islam. They are outrageous, in my view, and I will have more to say about them in a post to come soon. The orders are likely to play into a culture war over Islam that has been going on in the West at least as far back as the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It’s the same debate over and over again, flaring up every time there is an incident somewhere involving a Muslim or group of Muslims committing violence: Paris, San Bernardino, Berlin, Benghazi, ISIS, and so on. There are hawks who think that Islam is hardwired for violence and doves who think that Islam, like all religions, is basically peaceful but has its extremists.

Who is right? I take up this question through two pieces published in Public Discourse. See here and here. My arguments preview a book that I am revising for publication, Religious Freedom in Islam? Intervening in a Culture War. To preview my position, both hawks and doves are right and wrong. Understanding how can calm the culture wars and give us a more constructive approach to Islam, both within and outside the West. The key to it all is religious freedom.