Hollow Cries
Jeff Taylor January/February 1998
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"We Christians face persecution right here in America!" said the balding gentleman sitting to my right at a recent banquet.
"It's true," the young mother across the table said. "I read about a high school in Michigan that was forced to take down a picture of Jesus that had been there for 30 years. It seems some student complained that the picture caused him psychological problems. And Lord knows the secular media has it in for us Christians."
"The situation here is getting terrible," said another person at the banquet table. "If believers don't fight back, we are going to lose all our freedoms."
Sorry, but as the managing editor of a publication that concentrates only on the persecution of Christians in other countries and as someone who's met with beleaguered believers all over the world I must admit that I'm not very impressed by the claims of Christian persecution in America.
In fact, I'm not impressed at all not when an estimated 160,000 Christians have been martyred for their faith worldwide each year since the fall of the iron curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union; not when two thirds of the world's population live in areas in which either severe discrimination or blatant Christian persecution is happening right now; not when Christians in other lands face the kind of challenges that most believers in America with their VCRs, two-car garages, and summer vacations to the islands can't even begin to imagine.
For example: Four of Iran's leading pastors have been murdered since
1994. The latest, Mohammed Bagher Yusefi, 34, was murdered in Iran in September 1996 and his body hung in a forest. An Iranian pastor living outside the country said, "They are determined to eliminate the pastors, one or two every year. Some pastors have left the country, or they would kill them, too. Now after four or five years there is hardly anyone left."
Muslim converts to Christ in Pakistan can be easily imprisoned under the country's "blasphemy laws." Any Muslim can simply claim that the convert has "blasphemed the prophet Muhammad," and that convert will be hauled off to jail, even though the claims are usually made out of revenge or for monetary gain.
Ayub Masih, a Pakistani Christian, was arrested on October 30, 1996, after a Muslim youth accused him of blasphemy. All 14 Christian families in Masih's village were removed from their homes by a mob after his arrest. Local Christians say the blasphemy charges are a cover-up for a land dispute.
The government of Sudan continues its campaign to force Islam on the country. The result has been the death or displacement of thousands of Christians in southern Sudan, populated historically by Christians and animists. Hundreds of Christian children have been kidnapped and sold into slavery by Muslim traders.
In Saudi Arabia the penalty for converting from Islam is death by beheading. Even expatriate Christians working in Saudi Arabia are severely treated for any attempts at worship or evangelism. Even wearing a cross can be grounds for expulsion.
Many Christians in Asia are also suffering severe oppression for their faith. The Chinese government intensified its efforts in 1996 to force house churches to register officially. Four house church buildings were demolished with dynamite and bulldozers in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, in May 1996, one example of China's desire to control religious expression totally.
Amnesty International, in a July 1996 report, accused the Chinese government of misusing new regulations governing religion to harass, fine, and imprison unlawfully Christians belonging to independent groups.
In Indonesia more than 55 Christian churches were destroyed in 1996 by mobs ignited by Muslim extremists, including four churches that were burned the day after Christmas in western Java. Indonesia's 20 million Christians expect the attacks to continue.
In Latin America Pastor Manuel Amador was gunned down near his church in the remote town of Chigorodo, Colombia. His wife heard the gunshots and rushed out of her home. "I found my husband on the ground," she said. "I picked him up, hoping he had some final words for me. There were none."
Such senseless killings are not unusual in many areas of Colombia as rival guerrilla groups battle for control between themselves and with government forces and drug cartels. Though Christians refuse to take sides, they are often unjustly accused of belonging to opposing factions--and the result is threats, kidnapping, even murder.
Closer to home, in Chiapas, southern Mexico, evangelical Christians have suffered for more than three decades, facing death, beatings, and expulsion from their homes at the hands of Mafia-like landowners called caciques. A cacique's economic well-being depends on his ability to control the local trade, including the sale of alcohol and items used in celebrating religious festivals. Evangelical Christians are seen as a threat to the caciques' power because they refuse to participate in the lucrative yet often immoral activities of the caciques. Retribution can be swift and deadly.
Octavia was only 14 the night she saw her parents murdered. Three hundred angry caciques stormed her small village. She was forced to watch as four men butchered her parents, both evangelical Christians. Octavia was found the next morning lying next to her lifeless parents.
My first personal contact with a Christian who had suffered persecution came in 1980 in Hong Kong. A colleague had arranged for me to meet a Chinese Christian woman who had escaped from the mainland only a few weeks earlier. The listeners in the room were silent as she told of being imprisoned on five different occasions because of her religion. Yet she spoke more of God's faithfulness than of her trials; she spoke more of the "mission field" in the prisons in which she was held than of her desire to be free. She actually talked as if suffering and persecution were normal parts of the Christian life, as if it were God's will for her to be in prison!
"I am just amazed," said one Christian who has worked for years with Chinese believers, "at how people who have suffered so much can be so joyful. In the midst of the pain, loss, and tribulation, they still find God a loving companion. My faith takes strength from that. I'm so glad God is so big that people who have lost everything can say--when they find Him--that it was worth losing everything to know Him."
A few years ago in Cuba I met with a pastor who was enduring almost constant harassment from Cuban authorities; he faced threats against his family, menacing phone calls in the middle of the night, and weekly interrogation sessions at the local police station. I asked him, "Aren't there times you want to give up?" He stood thoughtfully for several moments before responding. With tears in his eyes he finally replied, "If there were no battles, there would be no victories."
Because of people like these, who can be multiplied countless times in so many countries, I have little sympathy for complaints about the "persecution" of Christians in America. The claim rings exceedingly hollow.
But isn't there an anti-Christian bias in the American media? To a degree, yes. Does the court system sometimes go too far in maintaining the separation between church and state? I personally believe it does. Haven't some Christians been discriminated against at work? It happens, no doubt. Isn't there an "assault on faith," as the Christian Coalition often claims? Of course. However, according to Paul, believers will always be in a spiritual battle: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12).
But this isn't persecution. Maybe those American Christians who sat at that banquet table with me and think it is ought to visit some of their brothers and sisters in the Middle East or Asia, and then they might realize just how good they have it here in America. Then they'll understand that persecution isn't being mocked by a late-night comic on TV or being forbidden to hang a picture of Christ in a public school hall; persecution is being threatened, beaten, imprisoned, even killed, for your faith.
Jeff Taylor is managing editor of Compass Direct, a Christian news service reporting on areas in which Christians suffer severe persecution.
"God's Gift to the Church?"
One of Vietnam's most influential Christian leaders, the Reverand Dinh Thien Tu, now in his 50s, pastored a struggling church of 40 members in Saigon in 1972. When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Communists, Tu stayed. By 1988 his church of 5,000 was one of the largest in the country. Such growth was too much for the government to ignore. They forced senior church officials to require his resignation.
Tu was ready. He had been building a cell structure since 1984, when his members outgrew their church building. "We tried to get permission to extend it," he says, "but we weren't allowed. So you could say the government started the house church movement!"
Tu's movement now numbers more than 40,000, the largest single group in the Vietnamese house church phenomenon, which is believed to number 80,000 Christians.
He's a small man, dapper, with obvious charisma. "Christians are like strings on a violin," he says. "In order to play good music, you have to tighten them." Tu stresses one theme continually: "Persecution is God's gift to the church."
He should know. He was jailed in 1991 for two years. As he labored in fields near the Cambodian border, he encountered a minority tribe and witnessed to them daily. To his astonishment, they were more responsive to the gospel than any Vietnamese he had met.
After his release he challenged his movement to take seriously the needs of the 64 tribal minorities scattered throughout Vietnam. Some caught the vision and made for the central highlands, where most of these tribes live. Now 33,000 of his members are from this forgotten group of disparate peoples. But Tu is quick to draw his essential lesson: "Only in prison could I have gained a vision for these tribal peoples. Otherwise I would have stayed in Ho Chi Minh City [Saigon] and never met them."
The pressure is still on. He counts off on his fingers the names of six of his pastors who are currently in jail for their faith. Four were given three-year sentences. He can recount many harrowing stories. "As long as persecution continues, we as a church will grow healthy."
He adds, "The greatest trainer of pastors in Vietnam today is the Vietnamese government." Because persecution promotes growth.
"Indeed," he beams, "it's a simple equation: persecution equals growth, but I have found it to be unpreachable to those with no experience of persecution."
He stops, hesitates, not wishing to offend, then says quietly, "Maybe you have to go through it to know it."