COMMENTARY: Who will speak for the world’s persecuted Christians?

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.) (RNS)-Nero was notorious for many things, including […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-Nero was notorious for many things, including persecuting Christians and fiddling while Rome burned.


In an irony he would no doubt enjoy, Christians today are fiddling while fellow believers are being burned, enslaved and murdered around the world. Is Nero having the last laugh?

The suspicion that he may be arose a few weeks ago as almost 100 Christian activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the ongoing persecution of Christians around the world. Those of us who listened to the terrible stories of torture, enslavement and slaughter were also painfully reminded that not only is our government silent on this issue, but so are Western Christians.

Many at this conference, which was sponsored by the respected human-rights organization Freedom House, wondered aloud what could be more important to the churches than the mass murder of fellow believers.

The answer was delivered in a brief item in the Wall Street Journal published, ironically, the same week:”Evangelical leaders representing 1,000 churches plan a network of `Noah’ congregations for a $1 million campaign to safeguard protection of endangered species.”There it was. The spotted owl and the bug of the month, it appears, hold a more important place in the evangelical heart than persecuted co-religionists.

How utterly devastating this news would be to the victims of persecution-similar, one imagines, to how Daniel would have felt had friends come to the edge of the pit to fret about the health of the lions.

It is time to be clear about our priorities.

David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates that each year, 160,000 Christians are killed by governments and mobs of unrestrained citizens. Persecution is exceptionally intense in Communist China, Vietnam and Islamic countries, where Christians can be charged with blasphemy for merely expressing their faith. Unlike the West, blasphemy is taken seriously in many Islamic countries-it carries a death sentence.

In the Sudan, the enslavement and murder of millions of Christians has been brought to light by a few organization and writers, including Michael Horowitz. Horowitz, who is Jewish, praises Christians for forcefully supporting persecuted Jews during the Cold War, but he is puzzled about why they are silent when the victims are fellow Christians.

As tales are told of entire congregations being rounded up and imprisoned, Horowitz’s warning that Christians will be the 21st century’s Jews in terms of widescale persecution seems frightfully prescient.


All the more reason to pressure our government to act on behalf of the persecuted church. One would think, to be sure, that such intervention would come naturally. America, after all, is a nation built upon a fervent belief in human liberties, the first of which is freedom of conscience. Yet in the case of persecuted Christians, our government has all but abandoned this commitment and instead bent over backwards to accommodate intolerant and oppressive governments.

Sometimes the groveling is not of great consequence, as when American visitors to the recent U.N. Conference in Beijing were asked-by the U.S. government-to leave their Bibles at home lest they offend their hosts. The proper response, of course, would have been to decline the invitation to book banning and instead ask the communist government what it had to fear from Bible readers.

In a more troubling case, a former foreign service officer at the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, charges that Christian religious services were ended at the consulate in 1994 after protests from the Saudi government. Tim Hunter, who says he was expelled for protesting religious restrictions, says the Saudis also wanted to end the sale of alcohol, pork, and American literature, but that these money-making activities continue. Religious worship, it appears, was expendable. The State Department denies this version of events, but does acknowledge that there are no services on the consulate grounds.

The huge Chinese market is indeed important, as is the desire to maintain calm international relations, but neither is worth the cashiering of our principles.

In addition, countries such as Egypt, which accepts a huge amount of U.S. foreign aid, should be made to answer for the persecution of its Christian population, and any nation that values its most-favored-nation trade status with the United States should be forced to maintain basic standards of human decency.

Otherwise, Nero laughs last.

LJB END COLSON

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