The
Politics of Persecution
Melani
McAlister
Teenagers
staff an overseas service booth at the
2005 Creation Festival, a Christian music
event. (Stephanie Keith) |
The
video opens with a young Sudanese boy being interviewed
outside a hut. “They wanted me to become a Muslim,”
he says through a translator. “But I told them
I wouldn’t. I am a Christian.” “It was then,”
a deep male voiceover intones, “that he was thrown
on a burning fire.” The boy looks away from the
camera as he lifts up his shirt to reveal horrific
burns over one side of his thin body. In Sudan,
the video later explains, “a government set on
jihad” is persecuting Christians. There is footage
of soldiers, then of women lying on the ground,
their mutilated limbs and open wounds in view.
Bodies—violated, damaged bodies—are on display.
Another
scene features a Chinese pastor who was imprisoned.
He almost lifts up his shirt to show a scar,
but does not. There is a close-up of a young
Indonesian girl who tells, weeping, of having
a knife to her throat. The narrator translates:
“They tried to get me to deny Christ.” “But she
refused to deny her savior.”
Each
tale is told as a melodrama of steadfastness:
“All around the world,” the narrator continues,
“Christians are dying for their faith. They could
save themselves by denying Christ. But they didn’t—and
they won’t.” Off a revolving globe spin the names
of nations that persecute Christians: Sudan,
Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, among others. “These
people are not heroes or statistics; they are
‘family.’”
The
video, Faces of Persecution (2000), was
produced by the Voice of the Martyrs, a Bartlesville,
Oklahoma-based group that has been “serving with
the persecuted church since 1967.” It is simultaneously
a “documentary” and a fundraising document, circulated
in churches and at conferences, and available
for purchase on the group’s sophisticated website,
where one can also read the latest news of the
maltreated faithful and sign up for a monthly
newsletter or a weekly e-mail update. Faces
of Persecution is of a piece with the group’s
other films and publications, such as a series
of books for teenagers about martyrdom issued
in tandem with the Christian pop act, dc Talk,
best known for its 1995 anthem “Jesus Freaks.”
Not infrequently, Voice of the Martyrs materials
paraphrase the church father Tertullian: “The
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
The
Voice of the Martyrs is a conservative evangelical
organization, but by the turn of the twenty-first
century, a passionate concern with the persecution
of Christians united not only conservatives,
but liberal and moderate evangelicals as well.
Evangelicals saw Christians being martyred all
over the world, prevented from spreading the
Gospel and targeted for their faith. Chronicled
in magazines ranging from conservative venues
like World to the moderately conservative Christianity
Today to the left-leaning Sojourners,
described in books and on websites, pictured
in fundraising newsletters and DVDs sold in church
basements, “the persecuted body”—the physical
body of the believer and the body or church of
Christ—became an article of faith and a springboard
for political activism.[1]
Countries
of Concern
The
anti-persecution movement can boast of concrete
political achievements. In 1998, Congress passed
the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA),
the result of years of intense lobbying led by
evangelicals, with the participation of Jews,
Catholics and Tibetan Buddhists. The law mandates
that every year the United States produce a list
of “countries of concern” that are guilty of
violating religious freedoms. The president is
then required to choose from a set of graduated
sanctions, ranging from expressions of concern
to trade cutoffs, to impose on each country named.
If he sees fit, the president can waive the sanctions
for reasons of national security.
IRFA
created an Office of International Religious
Freedom in the State Department and established
the post of ambassador for religious freedom.
It also established a separate unofficial body
dubbed the US Commission on International Religious
Freedom, to monitor government and make sure
that “political necessity” did not trump the
moral necessity of fighting religious persecution.
The
backdrop to this legislation was the US relationship
with three countries in particular. First was
Sudan, where the most active front of a long-running
civil war pitted the Islamist government in Khartoum
against the non-Muslim populations of the south,
perhaps 70 percent of whom are at least
nominally Christian. To what degree the war in
the south could be described as a religious war
was a matter of great debate, but for at least
some anti-persecution activists, Sudan’s government
was the foremost example of the Islamist threat
to Christians everywhere. Second was China. There,
the official Christian church was large and growing,
but many believers worshipped at illegal “underground”
churches. They were vulnerable to harassment
and arrest. In addition, China occupied Tibet
and oppressed Tibetan Buddhists, attracting a
few Hollywood liberals to the evangelicals’ cause.
The third country was Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslims
are not allowed to worship publicly (and Shi‘i
Muslim observances are severely restricted).
IRFA
was signed into law in the teeth of strong opposition
from big business and the Clinton administration,
and in the face of concern from traditional human
rights groups, who saw it as too narrowly oriented
toward the victimization of Christians. Its passage
was, in large part, a testament to the clout
of the anti-persecution grassroots and a high
point for evangelical activists who wanted to
make global issues central to their community.
Their success was due to good organizing, but
also to a new “common sense” emerging in the
evangelical public sphere, where for more than
30 years religious persecution had been the stuff
of novels, memoirs and magazine articles.
Movement
in the Making
Local
evangelicals and foreign missionaries
pray together in Swaziland. (Luiz Maximiano/WpN) |
Not
long ago, the concept of Christian martyrdom
had little purchase for evangelicals, who saw
in the veneration of martyrs a suspect Catholic
practice tainted by excesses of emotion and even
idolatry. In 1956, however, the demise of five
young American missionaries in Ecuador made martyrdom
an evangelical issue. The group of missionaries
had traveled, two of them with their wives, to
a remote jungle area to witness to the Waorani
tribe. Shortly after their arrival, having made
only tentative contact with the Waorani, the
five men were speared and hacked to death. Later,
the two wives returned, and several Waorani were
converted to Christianity. The story was told
in a bestselling book excerpted in Reader’s
Digest.[2]
American
Christians were also called to attend to a different
kind of persecution—the quotidian dramas of the
“suffering church” under communism. In the late
1960s, the most famous “living martyr” in the
United States was a Romanian Jewish convert and
minister, Richard Wurmbrand. Wurmbrand had been
imprisoned twice for his activities as an “underground”
minister before he finally escaped to the West
in 1964. In 1966, he offered remarkable testimony
to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Standing before
the cameras, Wurmbrand stripped to the waist
and turned to display his deeply scarred back.
“My body represents Romania, my country, which
has been tortured to a point that it can no longer
weep,” he said. “These marks on my body are my
credentials.”[3] Wurmbrand went on to found Jesus to the Communist
World, later renamed the Voice of the Martyrs.
Evangelicals also knew “Brother Andrew” Vanderbijl,
a Dutch pastor who made his name smuggling Bibles
into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He
published his bestselling memoir, God’s Smuggler,
in 1967. During the Cold War, then, American
evangelicals married missionary enthusiasm to
anti-communism to forge their own kind of bipolar
vision, of Christians everywhere besieged by
those without God.
Then
the events of 1989 shattered that vision, with
its comforting Cold War certainties. Evangelicals
poured into Eastern Europe to proselytize the
liberated peoples of the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile,
their numbers in the global south were way up;
conversions in Latin America and Africa, in particular,
were creating millions of new believers. In 1989,
evangelical leaders around the world began to
remap their global dreams. That year, the Second
International Conference on World Evangelization
met in Manila, and 4,300 evangelicals from 173
countries constructed for each other a model
of border-crossing Christian community. There
was a “millennium bug” in the air, one participant
said, as evangelicals began to imagine reaching
“all the world” for Christ by the year 2000.[4] All
the world, yes, but now new parts of the globe
demanded particular attention. Argentine evangelist
Luis Bush gave a rousing speech calling upon
evangelicals to focus their missionary work on
the “10/40 window,” that area between 10 degrees
and 40 degrees north of the equator that encompasses
the Middle East and much of Asia. It is there,
Bush said, that Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism
“enslave” the majority of the inhabitants—“billions
of spiritually impoverished souls.” Of these,
Islam was clearly the biggest threat.
Enslaved
people must be liberated, of course, and evangelicals
turned to the secular language of “human rights”
to highlight their cause. During the Cold War,
evangelicals had considered “human rights” the
domain of the political left, but in the post-Soviet
era, they too had to adapt to the concept’s increasing
hegemony. In July 1992, Christianity Today initiated
the process with a special issue on the “persecuted
Church,” implicitly integrating the diverse Christian
experiences in the former Soviet Union, China,
Latin America and the Middle East. The issue
included many Amnesty International-style images.
Several years later, Max Stackhouse, the internationally
regarded, theologically conservative professor
at Princeton Theological Seminary, would argue
that, for Christians, human rights and God are
inseparable. Belief in God—a Christian view of
God—requires a commitment to human rights. But
this also works in the reverse, Stackhouse claimed:
“Without the impetus of theological insight,
human rights concepts would not have come to
their current widespread recognition, and…they
are likely to fade over time if they are not
anchored in a universal, context-transcending,
metaphysical reality.”[5] Stackhouse insisted that not all religions are equal on this
point. Those parts of the world where Christianity
had been most influential were “the safest havens
for non-established and non-majoritarian religions.”[6] This argument was crucial to the rising tide of fear of Islam
among evangelicals. In the same 1992 issue of Christianity
Today, Diane Knippers, executive vice president
of the Institute for Religion and Democracy,
a deeply conservative Washington think tank,
insisted that Christians should not let down
their guard against religious persecution. Yes,
Marxism, “the twentieth century’s scourge on
religion,” was being rooted out of Europe. But
the emerging threat “looming on the religious-freedom
horizon” was Islam. A movement was in the making.
In
1995, Michael Horowitz electrified evangelical
elites with an editorial in the Wall Street
Journal that blasted Islamic countries for
persecuting their Christian minorities. The stories
were horrific. Some were widely known incidents:
three Iranian pastors killed in 1994; the routine
abduction of children in southern Sudan. Other
examples seemed pulled from folklore: a pastor
in Ethiopia whose eyes were put out by local
Muslim officials; Christian students in Egypt
“routinely” beaten and called “devils” by their
classmates. But the overall argument was that
Christians had for too long stood by while “in
a growing number of other countries, the rise
of Islamic fundamentalism has effectively criminalized
the practice of Christianity.”[7] Horowitz’s
piece led to the first International Day of Prayer
for the Persecuted Church in 1996, and with his
support, it became an extraordinarily successful
annual event. The first year, 5,000 churches
participated. In 1997, organizers claimed that
70,000 churches had received materials (including
all 40,000 member churches of the Southern Baptist
Convention).
That
same year, the emerging movement got its activist
manifestoes. Nina Shea, director of the Puebla
Program at Freedom House, published In the
Lion’s Den: Persecuted Christians and What the
Western Church Can Do About It. Short, lurid
and lightly documented, Shea’s book repeated
the standard script that there were two zones
of global concern for Christians: Islamic countries
and the still extant communist world. Paul Marshall,
also at Freedom House, produced the more detailed
and scholarly study with an equally sensationalist
title, Their Blood Cries Out. These two
books became for the anti-persecution movement
what Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth had
been to a rather different group of activists
in the 1960s—angry, righteous documents of suffering
that were carried around from meeting to meeting.
Marshall
focused quite extensively on the dangers of Islam,
but also discussed everything from the status
of evangelicals in Russia to the “forgotten outcasts”
in India, Burma and other countries. (His book
was also the original source of what would become
the all-but-official numbers used by activists:
200 million Christians live in countries
where Christians are persecuted; another 400 million
live in situations of “non-trivial” limits on
their religious freedom.) Marshall did not just
focus on persecutors; he also took aim at American
Christians. He attacked Protestant liberals for
tiptoeing around the truth, especially regarding
China and Islam. But Marshall strongly criticized
evangelicals as well, for their complacency,
relative ignorance about the rest of the world,
excessive nationalism and over-investment in
end-times prophecy. “Concern with American families,
American values and American morality—eclipses
a sense of worldwide Christian presence.”[8] It was time, he argued, that American
Christians looked beyond their fences and started
doing something.
Setting
the Agenda
Evangelicals
were far from united in their views on what they
should do. Work on “human rights” was increasing,
but what that meant for defending persecuted
Christians was far from clear. In fact, Alan
Hertzke, who has written a useful but hagiographic
account of the Washington lobbying of the anti-persecution
movement, recounts that some evangelical leaders
who attended a 1996 strategy meeting convened
by Freedom House said they were not particularly
interested in political engagement. What evangelicals
did best, they said, was praying for the persecuted
and feeling inspired by them. These non-activists
had two concerns. The first was pragmatic: The
draft legislation included proposals to ease
asylum requirements for people facing religious
persecution. Some leaders worried about the effect
of such provisions on churches in the global
south. In the Middle East, in particular, churches
might be “emptied out,” thus undoing “the labor
of Christian missionaries and martyrs over centuries.”[9] The
second concern was theological: If “the blood
of the Christians is the seed of the church,”
then the suffering of believers can lead to conversions
and greater faith. Persecution might be part
of God’s plan. The Voice of the Martyrs video
implicitly makes a similar point: “We can be
confident that [our brothers’ and sisters’] suffering
is prelude to coming revival.”
But
the activist faction won out on Capitol Hill.
In 1996, in anticipation of coming legislation,
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), chair of the Subcommittee
on International Operations and Human Rights
of the House International Relations Committee,
called witnesses to discuss “Religious Freedom
and the Persecution of Christians.” Like many
Congressional hearings, this was designed as
a performance—this time, to display the suffering
of Christians from the global south. Over the
next two years, the House and Senate would hold
five more hearings on persecution and the bills
drafted to address it.
Two
bills were wending their way through the House
and Senate in 1996 and 1997. The Freedom from
Religious Persecution Act, co-sponsored by Rep.
Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA),
focused on stopping “widespread and ongoing persecution”
of persons on account of their personal beliefs.
The Wolf-Specter bill was provocative, in that
it demanded immediate action against any nation
found guilty of serious repression of religious
practice. The alternative, co-sponsored by Sens.
Don Nickles (R-OK) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT),
was the “diplomatic” option, containing a broader
definition of persecution, but giving the president
great leeway in deciding how, or if, to respond
to findings of persecution in a given country.[10]
Of
course, no one in Washington was in favor of
religious persecution, whether directed at Christians
or anyone else. And there was a broad consensus
that the issue itself was quite real. “To suggest
that the persecution of Christians is not a serious
problem is nonsense,” William Schulz, executive
director of Amnesty International USA, told a
reporter.[11] Nonetheless,
traditional human rights groups like Amnesty
and Human Rights Watch, as well as some liberal
mainline Protestant denominations, were concerned
about “a questionable selectivity of participants”
at the hearings.[12] Almost
all of the witnesses, indeed, represented conservative
Christian organizations. Liberals worried that
the anti-persecution movement was uninterested
in the larger human rights agenda, that in fact
it only cared about Christians. They further
thought that the Wolf-Specter bill, in particular,
was too blunt an instrument, one designed not
so much to protect religious freedom as to assert
US commitment to it.[13]
The
Clinton administration also opposed the Wolf-Specter
bill. The administration’s strategic arguments
were the same as those of the liberal groups,
namely that confrontation with offending countries
was not always the best path to reform. But the
White House also had an ulterior motive, as the
bill was quite consciously written to hamstring
the State Department and prevent the president—that
president, in particular—from sidestepping tough
action. Hertzke reports, in fact, that one evangelical
activist was disturbed by what she saw as excessive
partisanship: “The whole discussion was that
‘religious freedom’ is the Achilles’ heel in
the Clinton administration. We can defeat Clinton
in November 1996 using this.”[14]
Finally,
free-trade Republicans allied with the National
Foreign Trade Council, the National Association
of Manufacturers and USA Engage, a large coalition
of businessmen, farmers and trade unionists,
worked hard to defeat the religious freedom bills.
Senators led by Rod Grams (R-MN) blocked an initial
vote on even the more flexible Nickles version.
In a commentary, Christianity Today snarled
that evangelicals “felt abandoned by otherwise
supportive business leaders who put profits ahead
of morality.”[15] Criticism of business elites’ seemingly amoral posture came
from the secular left as well—Mother Jones published
a damning exposé of USA Engage titled, “So You
Want to Trade with a Dictator.”[16]
But
supporters of the legislation were certain they
were on the winning team. To Nina Shea, who was
deeply involved in lobbying for the Wolf-Specter
bill, liberal human rights groups were elitists
who did not want to work on behalf of Christians.
“No one is paying attention to anything they
say or do or write anyway,” said Shea. “I’ve
got the numbers. I’ve got the endorsements in
all the Christian communities. I’ve got the power.
It’s our side that is setting the agenda now.”[17]
In
the end, the Wolf-Specter and Nickles-Lieberman
bills were fused into IRFA. The combined bill
allowed for graduated sanctions and gave diplomatic
flexibility to the executive branch. But it also
demanded the annual lists of “countries of concern,”
a requirement parallel to the extant requirement
for general State Department human rights reports,
which were also designed to be embarrassing to
diplomacy as usual. In this case, however, the
White House and State Department could expect
to be responsible to a constituency that would
be watching them carefully. And the separately
constituted US Commission on International Religious
Freedom would write its own reports and provide
a space for other public performances of concern.
The
Spectacle of Persecution
Nasir,
Upper Nile State, southern Sudan. (Sven
Torfinn/Panos Pictures) |
Diplomatic
historians often debate the role of culture in
shaping policy, but they have far less frequently
examined the role of policy in stimulating and
shaping popular culture. In the case of IRFA,
a policy decision gave renewed impetus to the
movement on behalf of persecuted Christians.
IRFA was also, in Foucault’s terms, an incitement
to discourse: After 1998, there was a remarkable
proliferation of materials that constructed a
particular image of “the persecuted.” In books
and magazines, and increasingly online, believers
could consume vivid stories and images of suffering.
A host of organizations—the Voice of the Martyrs,
Open Doors, Christian Freedom International,
Compass Direct—raised money and solicited prayers
for Christian sufferers in Africa, the Middle
East, China and elsewhere. The Voice of the Martyrs
saw its membership increase threefold.
“Persecution”
now so dominates the evangelical representation
of the global south that even traditional aid
programs have been reframed in those terms. An
advertisement on the website of Christian Freedom
International, for example, promotes a sponsor-a-child
program like that pioneered by Save the Children.
Instead of asking for help for hungry children,
the advertisement exhorts viewers to sponsor
“persecuted children.” The money, nonetheless,
goes to provide food, clean water and vocational
training.
The
materials on persecution are not all produced
by Americans or Europeans. In the evangelical
public sphere, there are scores of books, articles,
websites and videos that are written or produced
by believers in the global south. At dozens of
evangelical conferences each year, Christians
from around the world arrive as speakers and
attendees. Those from the global south describe
the imprisonment, social isolation and rampant
discrimination they endure in the struggle to
practice their faith. They tell their stories,
but they also raise money for their projects
and request political support.
Clearly,
for some audiences, these performances of persecution
are an internationalizing and, in some sense,
democratizing form of political speech. In the
late 1990s, Jars of Clay were a Christian rock
band with a mainstream following and a few Grammy
awards under their belts. Their music was typical
of Christian pop—apolitical, mildly counter-cultural,
mostly about loving Jesus. With their “narrow
worldview,” lead singer Dan Haseltine wrote,
the band had not realized that “there is a world
beyond the safety of our insular church culture.”
Then Haseltine read an article about Christian
persecution in the Sudan. “I had seen the pictures
of torture victims [before]. I had read the reports
of Christian women and children sold into slavery.
I had been confronted with the tales of murder,
rape and starvation. But all I knew were stories
that seemed to fill that morbid curiosity that
draws us to car wrecks and real-life TV shows.
These people were not real to me. They were not
brothers and sisters.”[18]
Then,
in the spring of 2000, guided by a leader of
the anti-persecution movement, several Jars of
Clay members traveled to Vietnam and China, where
they met with underground Christian groups. They
came back deeply concerned about the “persecuted
Church.” Jars of Clay spoke out in interviews,
and they worked with Brother Andrew to reissue God’s
Smugglers as a gorgeous volume, The Narrow
Road, complete with a compact disc featuring
a new song and a photo gallery. They held a benefit
concert for Amnesty International and began taking
up collections for persecuted Christians at their
shows. In interviews, the band spoke with what
seemed to be deep admiration for the people they
visited: “Every experience I had there caused
my faith to be shaken and my eyes opened to a
big God…. These people live in countries where
God’s provision is all they have to rely on.
As an American, I can’t say I’ve ever been in
that position.”[19]
At
its worst, however, the spectacle of suffering
can combine a kind of schadenfreude with
a sense of righteous victimhood. At the spring
2004 international meeting of the World Evangelical
Alliance, held in Orlando, Florida, representatives
from India, Egypt, Jamaica, England and seven
other countries compared notes. The riveting
main speaker was Johan Candelin, a Finnish national
and then head of the Alliance’s Religious Liberty
Commission. He cited example after example of
anti-Christian persecution, showing terrible
pictures: a young Sri Lankan woman whose boyfriend
threw acid at her when she refused to convert
to Islam; another girl tortured by her Muslim
employers after the US bombing of Iraq; Christians
attacked by Muslims, Hindus, communists—but mostly,
over and over, by Muslims. Many of the stories
seemed to be more about personal conflict than
systematic persecution, but the point was to
put damaged people on display, their faces and
bodies scarred, and to decry the Muslims who
did these things to them. Candelin had a comic’s
timing, a zealot’s energy and, in the end, a
prophet’s message of hope: The persecuted always
win, because their suffering is righteous, and
they will live and die with God. The lecture
was not presented exclusively to Europeans and
Americans to incite pity for the less fortunate.
It was given to an audience of evangelicals from
all over the world. To see the unspeakable, together,
was a form of community building. There was a
border-spanning power worked by visions of the
body in pain.
The
evangelical embrace of sanctified bodily suffering
also helps to explain the extraordinary popularity
of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Released in February 2004, the film quickly became
the highest-grossing movie of the year, earning
$611 million at the box office. But even
before it opened, The Passion had become
a major cultural event for American evangelicals,
who rented out theaters for group screenings
and promoted the film in sermons and Sunday school
lessons. R-rated and brutally violent, The
Passion is nothing like the gentle films
that evangelicals have traditionally embraced.
And Gibson’s highly traditional form of Catholicism
is overt. The film venerates Mary and shows Jesus
stopping at each station of the cross—the Catholic
version, not the shorter Protestant one.[20] Twenty years earlier, such a film would not
have been so enthusiastically embraced by evangelicals.
In 2004, however, many of them described the
act of viewing The Passion in sacramental
tones.
The
Passion’s unexpected appeal might be best
understood from the fact that, fundamentally,
it is a torture film. For most of its 126 minutes,
it depicts the flogging, scourging and excruciating
cries of Jesus as he makes his way through
the streets of Jerusalem and then suffers a
horrific death. One flogging scene lasts for
several minutes, with the camera following
each lash as it cuts into the body. By the
end, Jesus is literally covered in blood and
gore; there are close-ups of his hands and
feet nailed to the cross.
Evangelicals
had not traditionally focused on Jesus’ suffering.
Indeed, their common criticism of The Passion was
that it downplayed the resurrection. But every
major evangelical magazine covered the film positively,
and each argued that Christians should be willing
to suffer the images in the film, in order to
understand and embrace the reality of what Jesus
had done.[21] “None of the violence is gratuitous,” Charisma magazine
insisted, “and it is necessary in order to maintain
the realism for which Gibson was aiming.”[22] Evangelicals who recommended
the film to their congregations cited the graphic
depictions of bodily torture repeatedly. “It
is extremely violent because the cross was violent,”
said Jack Graham, president of the Southern Baptist
Convention.[23]
Evangelicals’
embrace of The Passion’s “realism” and
their nearly universal willingness to overlook
the film’s Catholic motifs bespeak the impact
of the persecuted Christian discourse. For years,
that discourse had highlighted the spectacle
of the body in pain, insisting on the reality
of suffering and the moral imperative not to
turn the other cheek. In the process, the suffering
of Christians of all denominations in the global
south built a bridge between evangelicals and
Catholics.
For
some evangelicals, the refusal to avert one’s
eyes was a political imperative as well. When
the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were revealed in
May 2004, the descriptions of the violence done
to detainees, and the stunning pictures of bodies
in pain, resonated with the images and stories
of decades of the persecuted Christians movement.
It was perhaps no surprise, then—but nonetheless
striking—that after the Abu Ghraib revelations Christianity
Today ran a cover story titled, “Five Reasons
Why Torture Is Always Wrong.” The story leads
with descriptions of three people being tortured:
one electrocuted, one asphyxiated, a third humiliated
in a bra and thong. It ends with a peroration
that brings “rights talk” to bear at home:
We
do not want to call torture what it is. We do
not want to expose our policies, our prisons
or our prisoners to public view. We deny that
we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners
are really prisoners. When pushed against the
wall, we remind one another how evil the enemy
is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception
that is characteristic of a descent into sin.[24]
On
to Sudan
After
IRFA, evangelicals returned with gusto to their
agitation for robust US intervention to protect
the Christians of southern Sudan. The Sudan activists
had a vocal new ally in the US Commission on
International Religious Freedom mandated by the
act. Not only were evangelicals heavily represented
on the commission, but Catholic friend of evangelicals
and Sudan crusader Nina Shea also has served
the commission continuously since it began (she
is the only person to do so). In its 2001 report,
the commission declared Sudan “the world’s most
violent abuser of the right to freedom of religion
and belief.”
The
Sudan issue was emblematic of the complex politics
of the movement after 1998. Just as the language
of universal human rights opened up new worlds
for evangelicals, it could also be used to frame
other agendas—such as the anti-Islam politics
that came to the fore after the September 11,
2001 attacks. And once again, the push to protect
Sudanese Christians sometimes pitted the activist
base against pillars of the Republican establishment.
Civil
war had wracked Sudan since the mid-1980s, as
a series of more or less Islamist governments
tried to extend their authority over the south,
an area rich in resources, particularly oil.
With varying degrees of single-mindedness, Khartoum
also attempted to impose Islamic law on a population
that was almost entirely made up of Christians,
practitioners of traditional African religions
and people mixing elements of both belief systems.
In some regions, particularly Bahr al-Ghazal,
Arabic-speaking tribes destroyed villages and
abducted women and children into forced labor—slavery—in
the north. Starting in the 1980s, the Southern
People’s Liberation Army became the de facto
government over much of southern Sudan, although
various factions also engaged in deadly infighting.
The people of the south paid dearly, with estimates
of the dead from war, famine and disease as high
as two million. By the late 1990s, the south
was only one front in the rebellion of peripheral
regions against the domineering policies of Khartoum
(a pattern into which the conflict in Muslim
Darfur, starting in 2003, also fit).
But
many evangelical groups, and others, engaged
the complex Sudanese civil war in a simplistic
way. Their task, as they saw it, was to raise
awareness that “Arab Muslims” in the north were
oppressing “black Christians” in the south—murdering
the men and taking the women and children as
slaves. Evangelical media, and more so, evangelical
fundraising, embraced a vision of the Sudan conflict
as a religious war—or, sometimes, a religious-racial
war. That view involved not only a misreading
of the identities of the antagonists, but also
a simplification of the multiple concrete political
issues at stake. Many people in the south were
not Christian, and their “blackness” was generally
defined by language or region, not by “race”
in any Western sense. The southern rebels often
disagreed about whether they wanted independence
or simply more participation in the national
government. They were certainly determined to
get a greater share of the profits from oil,
as well as a degree of autonomy from Islamic
law; both provisions were ultimately built into
the peace agreement signed in 2005.
In
the US and Europe, however, many activists enthusiastically
advanced the notion that Sudan was a combat zone
in a grand “clash of civilizations” that, in
the words of prominent spokeswoman Baroness Caroline
Cox, arrayed “jihad warriors” against Christian
believers.[25] Indeed, this vision of epochal
battle made for fine local drama. Activists in
President George W. Bush’s boyhood home of Midland,
Texas (not coincidentally, the base for the International
Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church in 2001
and 2002) organized a series of concerts and
reenactments. Sudanese exiles had built a model
Sudanese village as part of a vigil; later, the
exiles and Texans staged a mock raid, in which
parts of the village were burned down and some
“fled” into the surrounding desert.[26]
The
conflict in Sudan became, for some white evangelicals,
a calling card for a certain racial liberalism.
Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and a prayer
leader at both of Bush’s inaugurations, made
Sudan a signature issue. Writing in the Wall
Street Journal in 2000, he suggested that
religious and racial prejudice explained the
West’s failure to intervene where a “Muslim government
is waging a brutal war against Christians.” “Just
as the West responded on behalf of the Muslims
in [the former] Yugoslavia,” Graham wrote, “it
is vitally important that Christians in Sudan
be granted basic human and religious rights.”
But perhaps Christians were being ignored. “Or
are the lives of Europeans more valuable than
those of Africans?”[27] Subsequent to the September 11 attacks, the Sudan campaigners
ratcheted up their rhetoric. Paul Marshall has
consistently tied persecution of Christians in
Sudan to that in Vietnam and later to the anti-Christian
“ethnic cleansing” perpetrated by insurgents
in Iraq. Sudan and Iraq, Marshall wrote in 2004,
are fronts in a larger war against “Islamofascism.”[28]
The
religious-racial framing of the Sudan conflict
mobilized African-American Christians as well.
African-American leaders like talk show host
Joe Madison and Boston minister Gloria White-Hammond
traveled to southern Sudan, usually with the
Switzerland-based Christian Solidarity International,
to perform dramatic “slave redemptions.” Even
when some of these activists offered caveats,
their reports back home helped to frame the politics
of Sudan in terms that resonated profoundly with
the history of slavery in the United States.[29] This
loose coalition of white evangelical and black
congregations, together with synagogues, would
later take up the cause of Darfur in a campaign
that, initially, was suffused with the same religious-racial
framing.
As
with IRFA in the late 1990s, the Bush White House
aligned itself against the Sudan activists, who
had banded together behind the Sudan Peace Act,
a measure that called upon the US to press Khartoum
to come to an agreement with the southern rebels.
After September 11, the Bush administration tried
to suspend Congressional discussion of the Sudan
Peace Act, in order to enlist Khartoum in the
war on terror. As with IRFA, the evangelicals’
allies in Congress wanted the toughest possible
bill. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) proposed an
amendment prohibiting oil companies that did
business in Sudan from US stock exchanges. “When
you have to make a choice between dollars and
lives,” Bachus said, “you choose lives.”[30] In
the end, the Bush administration quashed the
Bachus amendment, but could not resist the momentum
of the evangelicals, who after all composed a
vital portion of the Republican Party’s political
base. Due to IRFA, President Bush already faced
the annual embarrassment of having to waive sanctions
on Saudi Arabia. The Sudan Peace Act passed in
2002, and, as it happened, the resulting US pressure
on Khartoum helped to bring about the peace accords
with the southern rebels, finalized in 2005,
which, though fragile, have greatly reduced attacks
against civilians in the south.
Where
Are the Liberals?
In
the 1980s, American evangelicals awakened to
the global Christian community of which they
were a part. They embraced international human
rights—a general commitment that both challenged
and enhanced their specific commitment to protecting
other Christians. In its globalized form, particularly,
the anti-persecution movement marked both a fearful
sense of embattlement and an expansive dream
of freedom.
Elizabeth
Castelli argues that religion can serve as “a
critical theory of suffering.” We see “on the
one hand, religion’s capacity to illuminate the
suffering, to focus our attention on it, to provide
practices for tending to it, and for critiquing
the conditions that bring it into being—on the
other hand, religion’s capacity to rationalize
suffering, to inscribe it with divine sanction,
to blunt the impulse to alleviate it.”[31]
Beautiful
as Castelli’s formulation is, its logic misses
the interplay of narratives, the intersecting
gestures of solidarity and universality, in the
messiness of lived religion. The movement built
to protect persecuted Christians became, at least
sometimes and for some people, a foundation for
humanitarian and social justice activism that
has, ultimately, transcended the need to put
Christians first. It inscribed suffering with
divine sanction and it proposed practices for
critiquing the conditions that brought it into
being.
Consider
what happened to Jars of Clay. After the band
returned from their trip to Vietnam and China,
vocalist Haseltine was invited to tour parts
of Africa (including Uganda and Malawi); later,
the band went to South Africa and elsewhere.
They came back galvanized by the issue of HIV/AIDS,
which they understood immediately as connected
to structural economic problems. They also realized
that people in Africa suffered from other waterborne
diseases, and that their fundamental needs included
(among other things) clean well water. Jars of
Clay founded a charity, the Blood:Water Mission,
to support well digging and to raise HIV/AIDS
awareness. They got involved with the ONE Campaign,
the global anti-poverty program founded by U2
frontman Bono. They joined a larger group of
evangelicals who prayed for aid for Africa at
the G-8 summit in 2005, and soon, Haseltine started
speaking out politically as well. “Over the years,
we really got tired of being lumped in with so
many things we didn’t believe,” he told a reporter.
“As the political process seems to be narrowing
in on ‘Republicans are all Christians, Christians
are all Republicans,’ we decided we don’t really
want to fall into those categories.”[32] Today, rather than pass the
plate for persecuted Christians, Jars of Clay
asks concertgoers to contribute to their HIV/AIDS
and clean water projects.
American
evangelical Christians are afraid: They believe
that Christians around the world are persecuted,
that Islam is a global threat and that their
fundamental values are under assault by a secular
culture. American evangelicals are fearless:
They are assertive and self-confident, energized
and powerful enough to enact legislation that
promotes their particular vision of international
human rights. These concomitant realities do
not form a contradiction so much as a mutually
enabling construction. In the last three decades,
evangelical fears of persecution have become
the impetus for a remarkable surge of activism.
The moral geographies of the new evangelical
internationalism are in flux. These contain both
the seeds of global solidarity and the threat
of increasing hostility. Whatever the future
holds, however, this history should make one
thing clear: We can no longer analyze evangelical
politics through the lens of the Moral Majority.
Nor does the impending end of the Bush administration
herald the end of evangelical influence over
US engagement abroad and the cultural imagery
that informs it.[33] More than 30 percent of white evangelicals voted for President-elect
Barack Obama. A new world has come, and the embodied,
border-spanning faith of evangelicals is shaping
it for us all.
Endnotes
[1] Elizabeth
Castelli has examined the rhetoric of persecution
among US Christians in “Persecution Complexes:
Identity Politics and the ‘War on Christians’,” Differences 18/3
(Fall 2007) and “Praying for the Persecuted Church,” Journal
of Human Rights 4/3 (September 2005).
[2] Elizabeth
Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor (New
York: Harper, 1958).
[3] New
York Times, May 7, 1966.
[4] The
documents from Manila are accessible online at
http://www.lausanne.org/nl/manila-1989/manila-1989-documents.html.
[5] The
article, written in 1998, appeared as Max Stackhouse,
“Why Human Rights Needs God: A Christian Perspective,”
in Does Human Rights Need God? (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), p.36.
[6] Ibid.,
p. 39.
[7] Michael
Horowitz, “New Intolerance Between Crescent and
Cross,” Wall Street Journal, July 5, 1995.
[8] Paul
Marshall, Their Blood Cries Out: The Untold
Story of Persecution Against Christians in the
Modern World (Nashville, TN: Word Publishers,
1997).
[9] Alan
Hertzke, Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely
Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 183–236.
[10] Mary
Cagney, “Senators Champion Rival Bill on Religious
Persecution,” Christianity Today, May
18, 1998.
[11] New
York Times, December 21, 1997.
[12] Hertzke,
p. 187.
[13] Winnifred
Fallers Sullivan, “Exporting Religion: Where
the Religious Freedom Act Fails,” Commonweal,
February 26, 1999.
[14] Hertzke,
p. 175.
[15] Tony
Carnes, “Curbing Religious Persecution Difficult,” Christianity
Today, October 5, 1998; New York Times,
April 20, 1997; Washington Post, January
26, 1998.
[16] Ken
Silverstein, “So You Want To Trade With a Dictator,” Mother
Jones (May/June 1998).
[17] New
York Times, December 21, 1997.
[18] Introduction
to Brother Andrew, The Narrow Road (Grand
Rapids, MI: Revell, 2001), p. 7.
[19] Krishana
Kraft, “‘My Faith Was Shaken,’” Campus Life (March/April
2002).
[20] David
Neff, “The Passion of Mel Gibson,” Christianity
Today (March 2004). As for the controversy
over whether the film was anti-Semitic, revived
by Gibson’s later anti-Semitic rant at a traffic
stop, evangelical intellectuals generally accepted
Gibson’s claim that he wanted to show that all
people, not only Jews, were guilty of the sins
that sent Jesus to the cross.
[21] See,
for instance, Judy Coode, “Cover Your Eyes—But
Wonder,” Sojourners, February 26, 2004;
and Todd Hertz, “Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion’ for Christ,” Today’s
Christian (March/April 2004).
[22] Erika
Larson, “Screen Savior,” Charisma (March
2004).
[23] Quoted
in Lindy Warren, “Witness to the Passion,” Outreach (February
2004).
[24] David
P. Gushee, “Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong,” Christianity
Today (February 2006).
[25] Interview
with Baroness Caroline Cox, Wheaton, Illinois,
November 6, 2006.
[26] Hertzke,
p. 266.
[27] Franklin
Graham, “Stand Up for Sudan’s Christians,” Wall
Street Journal, March 15, 2000.
[28] Paul
Marshall, “Fundamentalists and Other Fun People:
To Know Them Is Not to Despise Them,” Weekly
Standard, November 22, 2004.
[29] See,
for instance, Kimberly Davis, “The Truth About
Slavery in Sudan,” Ebony (August 2001).
[30] Hertzke,
p. 282.
[31] Elizabeth
Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian
Culture Making (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007), p. 360.
[32] Kate
Bowman Johnson, “So Much to Sing About,” Sojourners (November
2005).
[33] Andrew
Bacevich gets this precisely wrong because he
defines foreign policy so narrowly. See “Evangelical
Foreign Policy Is Over,” Boston Globe,
November 6, 2008.
