Saturday, December 13, 1997

Anti-Christian persecution pervades in much of world

By KENNETH JOST / Congressional Quarterly

In his many trips to Sudan over the past five years, John Eibner has listened to horrific accounts of Christians suffering persecution -- villages bombed, children taken away to slavery, prisoners and refugees denied food and other humanitarian assistance by Muslim troops.

"There are well-documented cases of churches being bulldozed or burned down, clergymen and lay leaders who are arrested and imprisoned and clergymen being murdered by government troops," says Eibner, an official with the Swiss-based human-rights group Christian Solidarity International.

The anti-Christian persecution stems from the brutal 14-year civil war in Sudan, which has claimed more than 1.3 million lives and has spread destruction across the vast nation, Africa's largest. The conflict has been especially bitter since 1989, when the militant National Islamic Front gained power and began imposing its stringent religious views on a country that includes millions of Christians as well as Africans practicing traditional religions.

The result, according to United Nations and private human-rights observers, has been severe religious persecution, especially in the south, where Christians make up a majority of the population.

"They come and kill us because we are not Muslims," an officer with the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army told Eibner last year. "They believe that if they die, they will go straight to heaven, because they are fighting infidels."

For many Westerners, the scenes of anti-Christian persecution are difficult to envision. Christianity has advanced over the last two millennia to become the world's largest religion. But Christians in scores of countries say they face discrimination or persecution at the hands either of government authorities or religious extremists that governments cannot or will not control.

More than 200 million Christians -- about 10 percent of the world total -- live in daily fear of repression or discrimination, especially in communist and militant Islamic countries, according to Paul Marshall, a Canadian scholar and author of the book "Their Blood Cries Out."

"In Sudan, Christians are enslaved," Marshall says. "In Iran, they are assassinated. In China, they are beaten to death."

Marshall and other Christian activists say the plight of their persecuted fellow believers has been all but ignored in the United States and the West up until the last few years. But in the past two years, a vocal campaign has been waged around the issue, taking the form of prayer, relief missions and, in Washington, a concerted lobbying drive for legislation to penalize countries where religious persecution occurs.

"There are lots of people who are worried about the immorality of our foreign policy," says Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the conservative human-rights organization Freedom House.

Shea has written a book that serves as a rallying cry for the current campaign, called "In the Lion's Den." "More Christians have died for their faith in the 20th century than in the previous 19 centuries combined," she writes.

The campaign against persecution of Christians has energized the evangelical community in the United States and gained the support of many mainstream Protestant denominations as well as the U.S. Catholic Conference. It is a top priority of the conservative Christian Coalition.

But some experts question whether the focus of this crusade is too narrow.

"The religious persecution of Christians is in fact dropping worldwide," says John Witte Jr., director of the law and religion program at Emory University in Atlanta. "And Christians aren't the only ones who are being persecuted, and often aren't the worst victims of persecution."

The campaign has clashed with some liberal human-rights organizations as well as the country's largest ecumenical church group, the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC). Leaders of these groups accuse the campaign of singling out Christians and ignoring mistreatment of people of other faiths as well as broader human-rights concerns.

"We prefer for the religious-freedom issue to be in the context of other freedom issues," says the Rev. Albert Pennybacker, associate general secretary of the NCC. "As religious people, we're concerned about the persecution of anyone for any reason."

The debate has been especially acrimonious between the campaign's chief strategist -- Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official -- and the head of the liberal group Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth. Horowitz took up the Christian-persecution issue two years ago, enlisting political and media support for the cause and drafting the sanctions legislation now pending in Congress.

Horowitz accuses human-rights groups of practicing "a double standard" about religious persecution. "Political dissidents they're really concerned about," Horowitz says, "but religious dissidents are a lesser concern."

"The people who make that accusation haven't read our reports," responds Roth. He says the group covers religious freedom in its annual human-rights survey and has written detailed studies on religious persecution in a number of countries -- nine reports on China, for example, within the past five years.

The sanctions legislation, co-sponsored Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., won approval from the House International Relations Subcommittee on Human Rights in early September. But the bill failed to advance further, stalled by opposition from the State Department and business groups and questions from lawmakers in both parties.

Wolf vows to continue pushing the bill next year. "If the bill comes up," he says, "I think it will pass comfortably."

In any event, the anti-persecution campaign already has forced the Clinton administration to devote more attention to religious-freedom issues. Acting under a congressional directive, the State Department published a detailed report on religious persecution in 76 countries in July, including a particularly scathing critique of China.

In addition, the department last year created a 20-member advisory panel on religious-freedom issues, with representatives from most major faiths. The panel is due to submit an interim report later this year and a final report by the end of next year.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)