Religious Freedom - arcoftheuniverse

March 25, 2023March 26, 2023

The Justice of War, the Justice of Peace in Ukraine

This coming Tuesday, March 28th, an international conference, joinable by zoom, on the justice of war, is taking place at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both taught that a just war is one fought for a just peace. What does a just peace consist of in the current war between Ukraine and Russia? And how does it inform the just aims of the war? Here is the form to register for the conference. Here is the link for joining the conference.

The conference is sponsored through a Notre Dame – Ukrainian Catholic University Faculty Collaboration Grant

August 26, 2022August 26, 2022

The Catholic Church in Nicaragua is Under Caesar’s Sword

The Catholic Church is being repressed at the hands of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. His government placed under house arrest the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando José Álvarez, on August 3, shut down Church radio stations on August 1, and has banned religious protests and processions. In March, it forced into exile the papal nuncio to Nicaragua.

Ortega represses the Catholic Church to secure the rule of himself and his party. He has been president since 2007 and won a fourth consecutive term in 2021, an election in which he faced no political opposition and had indeed arrested his opponents. The Catholic Church is the remaining civil society organization that retains, or struggles to retain, freedom from the state, as this piece in the New York Times explains well:

But as Mr. Ortega, 76, last year began to purge the few remaining dissidents in politics, civil society, news media, academia, business and culture, the Catholic churches in this deeply religious Central American nation assumed an increasingly pivotal role. More than sources of spiritual solace, they became the only places in the country where citizens could speak their minds and listen to speakers who were not appointed by the state.

Mr. Ortega’s already authoritarian rule tipped into systematic repression last year when it became clear that he lacked a popular mandate to win another term in the general elections held in November. To retain power, he turned the country into a one-party state, jailing all opposition presidential candidates and then moving to silence all other dissident voices. Now, with the last influential clergyman silenced, Nicaragua has reached a milestone, according to human rights activists, former officials and priests: cementing its position as a totalitarian state.

In the book God’s Century (2011), coauthored by Monica Duffy Toft, Timothy Samuel Shah, and myself, we advanced the thesis of late political scientist Samuel Huntington that the Catholic Church was a motor of the wave of global democratization that began in 1974. The Church opposed dictatorships most powerfully in countries such as Poland and the Philippines in the 1980s, where it had preserved independence from state in authority in its governance, finances, personnel, and other aspects of authority, and was co-opted by authoritarian and violent states such as Rwanda and Argentina, where it was weaker and far less independent. Doubtless Ortega perceives this. He must control the Church, he reasons, if he is to remain in power unopposed.

Exemplary among global responses has been that of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, Italy. Here is his view as reported in an article in the National Catholic Register.

Cardinal Zuppi underlined that “with dismay and incredulity we receive news of the harsh persecutions that the people of God and their pastors are undergoing because of fidelity to the Gospel of justice and peace.”

“In recent weeks we have followed with concern the decisions taken by the government against the Christian community, also implemented through the use of force by the military and police forces. Lately we have learned of the arrest of H.E. Msgr. Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, Bishop of Matagalpa, together with other people, including priests, seminarians and laity,” the cardinal said.

It is a “very serious act, which does not leave us insensitive and which induces us to keep our attention high on what happens to these brothers of ours in the faith,” and which took place in circumstances and contexts that “arouse particular apprehension not only because they take it aims at Christians who are prevented from the legitimate exercise of their beliefs, but because they are part of a moment in which the most elementary human rights appear to be strongly threatened.”

Italy’s bishops, therefore, join “the requests of the international community, which have also found a voice in the recent declarations of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres. We therefore ask the political leaders to guarantee freedom of worship. and of opinion not only to the exponents of the Catholic Church, but to all citizens.”

Nicaragua reminds us that the persecution of Christians, and religious freedom in general, continues to be violated around the world. The Under Caesar’s Sword project serves as a forum for educating the world about the persecution of Christians.

This coming Monday, August 29th, begins a six-week online course, “Under Caesar’s Sword: Christians in Response to Persecution,” taught by The Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. It is not too late to sign up!

This past summer, Notre Dame student Joseph London updated the Country Profiles of Under Caesar’s Sword, which describe persecution in 25 countries and serve as a resource for education. The profiles were first developed around 2015-2017 and so have needed to be updated. The countries alas do not include Nicaragua, whose persecution was not acute in 2014, when Under Caesar’s Sword’s research scholars were recruited to study designated countries first hand.

November 13, 2018November 12, 2018

Religious Freedom There, Here, for Everyone

I am grateful to have been interviewed on religious freedom, along with my good friend and colleague at Notre Dame Law school, Rick Garnett, for an article by Ines San Martin for Crux. We spoke of religious persecution overseas but also about challenges to religious freedom in the U.S., both of which Rick elaborated on, too.

A couple of excerpts:

“I would like to see religious freedom incorporated into what’s called ‘High Foreign Policy’, which includes defense, diplomacy, alliances and foreign aid. Right now, it’s a little corner of the State Department,” said Daniel Philpott, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

And:

According to Philpott, in the West there are two faces of religious freedom.

“One is the issues surrounding sexuality, like the contraception mandates under the Obama administration,” he said,” involving “the increasing creation of conscience issues for institutions.”

The second is the use of anti-religious rhetoric, which has become clear under Trump, he said, as the way the president speaks of Muslims or the travel ban, has led to a sharp spike in anti-Muslim incidents and also a growth of anti-semitism.

“I would call for both left and right, each in their own way, to understand what religious freedom means for them and understand the religious freedom on the other side,” he said.

“The left thinks teachings on contraception are crazy, but they are issues of conscience, and we have a long tradition of respecting that in the United States,” he said. “But we also have a tradition of being welcoming to people of all faiths. At large, we have a good history of respecting both Muslims and Jews. They’ve been able to find a home where they can flourish here in a way they can’t in other countries, and I would hate to see that change.”

Rick Garnett on whether religious freedom is still a “special,” or distinctive, right:

The challenge in the U.S., [Garnett] said, is not a “theocratic desire to persecute us and punish us for our beliefs,” but the fact that increasingly, religion is not a part of the life or the upbringing of Americans, so the importance of religious freedom is not obvious.

“They wonder what is so special about religion: ‘Isn’t religion like what sports team you like, a club?’” Garnett said. “That used to be something we could take for granted, because our Constitution makes religion special and our tradition has treated religion specially. But I think increasingly it’s seen as a luxury good, so if it conflicts with something else we care about, you see a growing number of people who think religious freedom should lose.”

For him, there’s no room for doubt: “The right way to think about it is that religious freedom is this foundational good that makes so many other things we care about possible.”

August 24, 2018August 24, 2018

Review of Under Caesar’s Sword

“Informative, enlightening . . . relevant . . . will remain the standard text in this field” reads a review of Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution by Peter Admirand of Dublin University, writing for Reading Religion, a blog of the American Academy of Religion.

The review opens thus:

At interfaith events at a Dublin synagogue which I attend, an elderly Jewish man always raises the issue of the persecution of Christians and laments over why the world remains silent. The book under discussion does not delve deeply into that specific question, but offers the most informative, enlightening, and (sadly) relevant treatment of the current global persecution of Christians and the diverse ways Christians respond to the violence and injustice unleashed against them. In terms of statistics, five hundred million Christians, roughly 20% of the global total, live in countries where “they are vulnerable to severe persecution” (10).

And here was an insightful paragraph:

In some Christian circles, the story of Christian persecution of the Other is the dominant trope: Christians who burned heretics and committed genocide against Native Americans and other indigenous groups and cultures; Christian persecutions and violence in the long history of Jewish-Christian relations; Christian crusades against Muslims; and so on. These damning and humbling failures must always be taught. However, the requirement to speak out and condemn all violence and injustice remains a priority. In too many places globally, Christians are victims of ghastly violence and retribution, or are systematically restricted from practicing and spreading their faith and beliefs.

The whole review is well worth reading.

August 20, 2018

Yes, It’s Genocide; Yes, It’s Religious — The Case of the Rohingya Muslims

Last week, I covered the case of the Uighur Muslims in China. The Rohingya Muslims in Burma are also an egregious case where Muslims are denied their religious freedom — in this case, in the context of what is arguably genocide.

The Religious Freedom Institute has just released an excellent report on the violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. The report shows that the violence is widespread in scale, warranting a genocide designation, that is strongly religious in character, and that it severely violates religious freedom. It covers violence against other peoples in Burma as well. It is produced by RFI’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, of which I am a member (though I had no hand in the report).

Here is the report’s summary:

Nearly one year ago, on August 25, 2017, a wave of violence was unleashed against Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State, Burma. Thousands were killed in brutal fashion and more than 700,000 were displaced. In a new report, the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) considers the facts of what happened in August 2017 and the broader context of religious freedom violations in Burma. The report also puts forward concrete recommendations on what is to be done.

The Rohingya Crisis: The Shameful Global Response to Genocide and the Assault on Religious Freedom adds to the mounting documentation of the plight of the Rohingya, an ethnic and religious minority of Burma (Myanmar) and is a call to action.

This report should serve as a reminder of the needs of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who flooded into Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Burmese military attacks in August 2017. While the influx of refugees has largely subsided, the needs of the individuals, families, and communities who survived the crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide perpetrated by the government because of ethnicity and religion still remain.

The Rohingya are not alone in their endurance of blatant attacks to their rights to religious freedom. Christians among the Kachin, Chin, and the marginalized Naga communities of Burma face are still facing rights restrictions. They are once again seeing targeted military campaigns, in some cases perpetrated by the very same units who targeted the Rohingya.

This report is in response to the unresolved refugee and humanitarian crisis that extends beyond the Rohingya and threatens to be forgotten. The report provides an overview of the historical, ethno-religious, humanitarian, and international dimensions of this particular crisis, and emphasizes that the overwhelming evidence merits the label of genocide and crimes against humanity be applied to the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya by the Burmese military and other actors.

Regardless of what label is applied, the evidence of atrocities against the Rohingya is overwhelming. In light of such evidence, the Burmese government and international community must ask themselves, are they unaware or unconcerned about the genocide being perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims of Burma?

These violations of religious freedom and acts of genocide against the Rohingya of Burma cannot go unanswered. The international community, individual governments, and faith leaders and their congregants around the world, must not be silent in the face of such a blatant assault on religious freedom and such a violent act of genocide.

April 6, 2018April 6, 2018

The Christian Response to Persecution of Archbishop Bashar Warda

In the aftermath of the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, what is the future of the Christian church there? Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the population of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from 1.6 million to just under 400,000 in 2016 (estimates vary). Will they continue to exit? Return? Rebuild as a smaller church?

One of the leaders in answering these questions and shepherding the church in Iraq is Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Church, based in Irbil, Iraq. Warda has been an international voice for the church, has provided pastoral care and facilitated relief services for 20,000 people, supported refugees, promoted inter-religious dialogue, and inaugurated a Catholic university in 2015.

Earlier this semester, the Under Caesar’s Sword project here at Notre Dame hosted Archbishop Warda with the support and sponsorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture. Warda spoke in several venues in the United States, including Georgetown University, where he was hosted by the Religious Freedom Research Project, partner in Under Caesar’s Sword. Warda exemplifies what Under Caesar’s Sword is all about: the response of Christians to persecution. He exemplifies one of the most salient findings of the project, namely that Christians respond to persecution even under the most difficult of circumstances through constructive efforts to build ties with other communities and contribute to the common good, thereby strengthening their freedom and position in society. Outsiders who understand this response can better assist Christians living under persecution.

Warda’s talk at Notre Dame was well attended and well received. Several students afterwards asked how they could be involved in helping persecuted Christians. One student, Zach Pearson, wrote up the talk in Notre Dame’s renowned student publication, The Irish Rover. As Pearson describes, Warda’s first point was a challenge to Muslims:

He stated that “if there is to be any future for Christians and other religious minorities … in the Middle East, there must be a change and correction within Islam.”

He was predominantly concerned with the ideology of political Islam, including the enshrining of sharia as state law, which causes non-Muslims to effectively become second class citizens. He called it a “ruling system that preaches inequality and justified persecution,” which therefore needs to be stopped in order for Christians to survive. This realization has been made by leading Muslim minds in Asia, but has not yet found its way to the Middle East, the archbishop noted.

In reference to ISIS, the archbishop said that “while the fighting force of Daesh [ISIS] may have been defeated … the idea of the reestablishment of the caliphate has been firmly implanted in many minds throughout the Muslim world.” He made the point that it is a change in ideology along with a prevention of violence that is key to saving the Christian presence in the Middle East.

His second point was about how the West could help Christians survive in Iraq:

He highlighted a few main points: the importance of prayer; efforts from Western leaders to support equality for minorities in countries where persecution is taking place; and material and intellectual support focused on helping create sustainable Christian communities, specifically in the realms of education and healthcare. Additionally, the archbishop cited the importance of not allowing a sense of “historical relativism” to cloud the reality of persecution.

When asked what college students can do to actively contribute to helping persecuted Christians, he said that “praying for us is important.” He spoke to the importance of social media to raise awareness for persecuted Christians, who, he reminded the audience, are “the most persecuted religion today.” He referred to students who have come to help teach in schools and volunteer in these communities for anywhere from a one month to a whole year. Finally, he called students to speak out publicly on campus, asking rhetorically, “when the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campus here hold demonstrations and carry signs that [say] ‘We are all Christians’?”

To me, one of the most remarkable of Warda’s points was a response to persecution that he recounted Christians in Iraq exercising: forgiveness. Christians have forgiven and continue to forgive their persecutors. This does not preclude at all their efforts to secure help, bolster their position, or defeat ISIS decisively. It is one response of Christians, though, that amounts to a distinctly Christian response.

April 2, 2018

Religious Freedom: The Muslim Question

Today the Religious Freedom Institute launches its Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team in Washington, D.C. As a Senior Associate Scholar at RFI, I’ve seen first hand the Institute’s unfolding of a vision since its founding in 2016, one of the most impressive dimensions of which is the establishment of action teams of activists and scholars to promote religious freedom in various spheres – a South and South Asia team, and ones for the Middle East, the United States, International Religious Freedom Policy . . . and now Islam. Heading up the Islam team is Jennifer Bryson, an ArcU contributor, no less.

Here at Arc of the Universe, much attention is given to the persecution of Christians around the world. It is critical to stress that religious freedom is a human right for all human beings and to shine the spotlight as well on other religions, regions, and contexts in which widespread and egregious violations of religious freedom take place. One is Islam. Muslims number 1.8 billion adherents and are 24% of the population (that’s from the Pew Research Center in 2015), form a majority of the population in 47 countries (give or take a few depending on how you count) and have large populations elsewhere (consider India, where Muslims are 14% of the population and number 172 million – nearly 10% of the world’s population of Muslims!).

Most importantly, religious freedom issues are rife among Muslim populations. A piece in The Spectator dated this past Saturday, March 31, expresses valence of these issues in its title, “When Will the West Take A Stand on the Persecution of Muslims?” Critics in the West routinely tar Muslims as violators of religious freedom, overlooking that they are, in large numbers, among the violated.

The piece opens:

Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria to China, is part of an even broader phenomenon. Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensions being raised by new political methods. And in many countries — Sri Lanka, India, the Central African Republic and elsewhere — it’s Muslims who have the most reason to fear violence. In Burma, they may even have been victims of genocide.

That, at any rate, is what UN officials are trying to investigate after a wave of brutality which has forced 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the coastal region of Rakhine State since last August. Burmese soldiers, police and armed civilians carried out a campaign of diabolical violence, in which hundreds of villages were burned to the ground and helpless civilians were machine-gunned and dumped in mass graves.

There were warning signs — in 2012, 200 Rohingyas were killed and more than 100,000 displaced — but Western observers missed them. Sanctions were lifted, foreign investment surged, Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed as her country’s saviour. As the human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers observes, the international community was ‘too quick to embrace positive signs. It was almost inconvenient to be confronted with what was happening to the Rohingyas and others’.

The scene in India is eye-opening, too:

In India, too, ancient tensions have been emphasised by new movements, in this case Hindu ones. The RSS, a volunteer network of millions, sees India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and runs programmes to convert Christians and Muslims. This tradition has its extremists — some of whom are close to power.

Officials from the ruling BJP party, an offshoot of the RSS, have rewritten school textbooks to bring them closer to the nationalist story. (For example, the fact that Gandhi’s killer was a Hindu fanatic goes unmentioned in some classrooms.) One of the party’s star campaigners is the firebrand Hindu priest Yogi Adityanath, who once told an audience: ‘If they kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.’

Every few months someone is killed by a lynch mob on suspicion of possessing beef. Hindi has recently gained a new word, gautankwad, which literally translates as ‘cow terrorism’. A spokesman for Minority Rights Group International tells me that there are ‘degrees of state complicity’ in these incidents. And when the authorities tighten legislation against cow slaughter and on ‘forced conversions’, it can ‘provide a cloak of legitimacy to anti-minority violence and discrimination’. Yet, the plight of India’s Muslims — four million of them in the province of Kashmir, where the Indian army stands accused of countless human rights abuses — goes un-remarked by western leaders uncomfortably aware of India’s economic clout.

Of course, “the Muslim Question” also must be asked of Muslim countries, factions, and schools of thought that are unfriendly to religious freedom. Mustafa Akyol, who writes regularly for The New York Times, is a pioneer for religious freedom in Islam, and is a dissident who has suffered for his stands, including being detained in Malaysia last year, penned a piece in the Times a week ago Sunday arguing that religious repression causes Muslims to leave the faith — and, conversely, that a regime and atmosphere of freedom promotes a vital faith:

As a Muslim who is not happy to see my coreligionists leave the faith, I have a great idea to share with the Iranian authorities:

If they want to avert more apostasy from Islam, they should consider oppressing their people less, rather than more, for their very oppression is itself the source of the escape from Islam.

That truth is clear in stories told by former Muslims, some of which I have heard personally over the years. Of course, as in every human affair, motivations for losing faith in Islam are complex and vary from individual to individual. But suffering from the oppression or violence perpetrated in the name of religion is cited very often.

A final plug: My interest in the Muslim Question is strong, having just completed a book manuscript on the issue that Oxford University Press will be publishing, tentatively titled, Religious Freedom in Islam? Intervening in a Public Controversy. I wrote the book under the auspices of what has now become the Religious Freedom Institute. More to come on this.

Today, my congratulations and best wishes go to Jennifer Bryson and the new Islam & Religious Freedom Action Team at RFI.

April 26, 2017April 26, 2017

Report Out On Christian Responses to Persecution: “Some Things Are Worth Standing For”

Last week, the Under Caesar’s Sword project released a major report on Christian responses to persecution around the world at a symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The report is being translated into four languages and will be distributed around the world. Here is the press release for the report. Several media stories have appeared; here is one representative piece. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. kicked off the symposium with a convicting keynote address: “Some things are worth standing for,” he repeated.

The report profiles Christian responses to persecution on over 25 countries, presents eight findings, and makes a whole slew of recommendations for actions for various sectors. Is there an overarching finding?

Overall, the report finds that Christian responses to persecution embody a creative pragmatism dominated by short-term efforts to provide security, build strength through social ties, and sometimes strategically oppose the persecution levied against them. The fact that these efforts are pragmatic should not obscure that they often are conducted with deep faith as well as creativity, courage, nimbleness, theological conviction, and hope for a future day of freedom.

See also our documentary film. This summer, curricula for schools and churches will be posted.

February 4, 2017February 9, 2017

Arguing More With the New Critics of Religious Freedom

Over the past year or so, I and my colleague, friend, and fellow ArcU contributor, Tim Shah, have been arguing with what we call the “new critics” of religious freedom. They hold that religious freedom is a Western principle, reflecting Western power and history, and should not be exported, especially to the Muslim world. We demur. Some previous pieces are here, here, here, and here.

Now, Tim and I have written an extended review essay of their most recent work, published in the Journal of Law and Religion. It’s our most extensive critique yet. We welcome continuing debate!

May 11, 2016

Religious Freedom Is For Muslims

This blog has given much attention to the religious freedom of Christians. A human right, religious freedom is for everyone. Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty — whose 50th anniversary was celebrated in December in Rome at the conference of Under Caesar’s Sword — teaches that religious freedom arises from human dignity.

Today, the religious freedom of Muslims merits attention. U.S. politicians direct angry rhetoric against Muslims for political gain. Donald Trump has called for an end to Muslim immigration into the United States. He extolled an early twentieth century incident where an American general summarily executed Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with bullets “dipped in pigs’ blood.” 31 governors have refused to allow Syrian refugees into their state, often appealing to anti-Muslim sentiment. In 2009, Tennessee residents sought to block the building of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee on the grounds that Islam is a violent philosophy, not a religion (while others supported the Mosque). The list goes on.

Two recent pieces are worth reading on this issue. One is by Chad Bauman, professor of religion at Butler University in Indianapolis, one of our Under Caesar’s Sword scholars, and an expert on the religious liberty of Christians in India. Writing for Religion Dispatches, he recounts an incident at a backpacker’s hostel where a Hindu proprietor, seeking to elicit solidarity, said to him and his friends, “Americans hate Muslims, too.”

Bauman explains:

Still today, when I travel in India, Hindus presupposing my agreement frequently make off-handed and derogatory comments about their Muslim neighbors. For those concerned about the effectiveness of the United States’ advocacy for religious freedom around the world, the perception that “Americans hate Muslims, too” should be a matter of great concern.

As I have written elsewhere, India’s Christians suffer from various forms of social and legal discrimination, and are vandalized, kidnapped, or attacked (occasionally even fatally) about 250-350 times a year. This is a serious problem, and one deserving international approbation. However, the repression and persecution of India’s Christians pales in comparison to that of its Muslim minority.

The perception that “Americans hate Muslims, too” helps to feed the view that American advocacy of religious freedom is little more than Christian advocacy:

In fact, Indians are also widely aware of the problem of hate crimes committed against Muslims in America, where, according to FBI statistics, and proportional to the respective national populations, they are roughly as common as attacks on Christians in India. (One of the reasons that this problem is of particular interest in India, of course, is that those intending to attack Muslims in America often mistakenly attack Indian American Sikhs or Hindus, as reported in this Times of India story.)

All of this, of course, simply serves to confirm the impression of many Indians that “Americans hate Muslims, too,” and that our advocacy for religious freedom is really just Christian advocacy. Overcoming this impression, so that the United States might become a more effective, credible advocate for religious freedom in India will require consistent, intentional work.

In my view, it is worth stressing that U.S. religious freedom policy is not just for Christians. By law and in practice, the U.S. government offices that promote religious freedom cover all religions, everywhere, and do a remarkably thorough job of it. The annual reports of the U.S. State Department Office of International Religious Freedom and of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom are the best reports of international religious persecution and discrimination that one will find anywhere. Bauman’s point is well taken. For the U.S. to merit an international reputation that matches the balance of policy, it must publicly denounce the curtailment of the religious freedom of Muslims — and of everyone — with focused effort.

The other piece, by Laurie Goodstein in yesterday’s New York Times, details the efforts of imams in the West to teach a theology that counters that of ISIS. At a time when so much attention is focused on ISIS and when such attention reinforces a view held by many that Islam is hard-wired for violence and intolerance, the piece documents intensive and courageous efforts by imams to offer a different voice. The imams have suffered death threats from ISIS:

It is a religious rumble that barely makes headlines in the secular West since it is carried out at mosques and Islamic conferences and over social media.The

Islamic State, however, has taken notice.

The group recently threatened the lives of 11 Muslim imams and scholars in the West, calling them “apostates” who should be killed. The recent issue of the Islamic State’s online propaganda magazine, Dabiq, called them “obligatory targets,” and it said that supporters should use any weapons on hand to “make an example of them.”

The danger is real enough that the F.B.I. has contacted some of those named in the Islamic State’s magazine “to assist them in taking proper steps to ensure their safety,” said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the F.B.I.’s field office in Washington.

It is critical that we hear all Muslim voices and encourage those who take risks for peace. To do so will not hurt, but rather will give credibility to, the cause of persecuted Christians. And, on account of human dignity, it is just the right thing to do.