REVIEW: Persecution

September-October 1997

By Carol L. Veldman Rudie

MINNEAPOLIS—Why should we and our government be concerned about pursuing international religious human rights?

Human rights theorist Paul Marshall, in his book Their Blood Cries Out (Word Publishing, 1997), not only offers an answer, but also helps us understand why we deny the problem. Freedom of religion is the most widely abused right in our world today. Yet Westerners can scarcely imagine a situation where going to church would be punished by death. So Marshall first proves that people are suffering and dying for their faith.

To do this he brings to light the unknown world of small organizations that operate clandestine support systems in closed societies around the world. He allows these sources to tell us about the brutal murders, rapes, and imprisonments of countless contemporary Christians. By the time we finish the book's first section, entitled "An International Lament," we are convinced that religious persecution—by far the greatest being directed against Christians—is the norm for a significant part of our globe.

Why is this persecution going on? Today's Christians are persecuted for the same reasons they were during the days of the early church. As in ancient Rome, so too in many modern states, the authorities cannot tolerate groups of citizens who claim an authority higher than Caesar's.

Marshall's country-by-country review of persecution highlights a very interesting link between Christians and pluralism. The two very often become synonymous. The mere existence of Christians makes religious minorities the single greatest threat to authoritarian and totalitarian states. And the persecution seems to be the greatest in countries such as China and Kuwait which hold most firmly to their own single-minded ideology and recognize the danger of religious dissent against it.

That Marshall feels the need to share these stories and analyses with us indicates part of the problem he is addressing. Too many American Christians simply ignore or deny the persecution that is taking place. Too many want peace at any price. Some of us want inner peace, some outer peace, some international peace.

Christians also lack knowledge because of the myopia of our society. Marshall's critique underscores this basic problem. Our culture cannot comprehend religious persecution because its worldview does not allow for an adequate understanding of the role of religion in human life. As a result, even the most blatant religious persecution is not recognized for what it is. Experts try to explain conflict in almost any terms except religious ones. And in cases where the causes of persecution are multifaceted, the religious element is almost always ignored.

In the final chapter, Marshall begins to suggest how Western Christians can help our brothers and sisters while also calling for the expansion of global human rights. The book does not develop a detailed foreign policy argument and does not show how the concern for religious human rights should be related to other international concerns in complex foreign policy decisions such as the recent one on granting Most Favored Nation status to China.

The author does insist, however, that Christians need to help their governments realize that they need to acknowledge, understand, and recognize religious persecution. The U.S. government, he writes, does not know much about religion and "either it doesn't know or doesn't care that it doesn't know much." No government can escape dealing with the issues of human rights whenever it deals with nations that systematically deny them. Christians, therefore, should insist that any government trade agreement entered into by the U.S., for example, should include government acknowledgment of religious human rights. Christians "may indeed be called to turn the other cheek in attacks on ourselves. We have no such call in attacks on others."

This book is just the beginning of what promises to be a new awareness among Christians. Marshall's name is increasingly linked to Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, Nina Shea of Freedom House, and Michael Horowitz, a neo-conservative Jewish member of the Hudson Institute, who wrote the introduction to this book. [See, for example, Jacob Heilbrunn, "Christian Rights," The New Republic, July 7, 1997—Ed.] For various reasons, all have taken up the cause of persecuted Christians. Marshall's book offers the platform for an appeal to justice, which should underlie any Christian advocacy in this area. His perspective provides a focus on institutional issues and responsibilities without losing sight of the suffering individual.

[Ms. Rudie, a free-lance writer living in Minneapolis, chairs the board of the Center for Public justice.]