The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

280 Pages·2013·1.32 MB·English

by  John L. Allen Jr.

Copyright © 2013 by John L. Allen Jr.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random
House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
IMAGE is a registered trademark, and the “I” colophon is a trademark of
Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon
request.
eISBN: 978-0-77043736-7
Jacket design: Base Art Co./Drue Dixon
v3.1
This book is dedicated to Laura Hebert Frazier, my grandmother,
who died at the age of ninety-eight as the manuscript was being
written. I doubt she would have read the finished product, even
if her short-term memory hadn’t pretty much evaporated by the
end. She was always proud of my work, but not always eager to
consume it. She would often say my writing is too long and too
complicated, and people who’ve stumbled across my stuff over
the years might well share that assessment. Even if it wasn’t
necessarily her cup of tea, everything in this book, and
whatever else I’ve accomplished, in many ways is the fruit of
her inspiration, support, and love. St. Laura, pray for us!
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE:
ANTI-CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION AROUND THE WORLD
1. Overview
2. Africa
3. Asia
4. Latin America
5. The Middle East
6. Eastern Europe
PART TWO:
MYTHS ABOUT THE GLOBAL WAR ON CHRISTIANS
7. The Myth That Christians Are at Risk Only Where They’re a
Minority
8. The Myth That No One Saw It Coming
9. The Myth That It’s All About Islam
10. The Myth That It’s Only Persecution if the Motives Are Religious
11. The Myth That Anti-Christian Persecution Is a Political Issue
PART THREE:
FALLOUT, CONSEQUENCES, AND RESPONSE
12. Social and Political Fallout
13. Spiritual Fruits of the Global War
14. What’s to Be Done
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Over the course of my career, I’ve had many occasions to come into
firsthand contact with victims of anti-Christian violence and persecution.
I’ve met Christian refugees from Syria attending an open-air papal Mass
on Beirut’s waterfront, people who have no idea if they’ll ever be able to
go home and whose most desperate message they wanted to relay to the
West was, “Don’t forget about us!” I’ve stood in the ruins of bombed
churches in Nigeria and spoken with a Nigerian evangelical pastor
named James Wuye who once led an armed Christian militia into
pitched battles with Muslims, losing his right hand in the process, and
who today partners with a Nigerian imam in promoting peace and
reconciliation. I’ve sat in rectories in Eastern Europe listening to
Christian clergy, both Orthodox and Catholic, describe their experiences
in Soviet gulags. Several of these clergy still bore the physical scars of
the experience, in the form of limps where their legs had been shattered,
coughs from untreated diseases, and gnarled digits where the fingers on
their hands used to administer blessings had been broken. I’ve
interviewed a twentysomething Chaldean Catholic refugee from Iraq
named Fatima, a survivor of the siege of the Basilica of Our Lady of
Salvation in Baghdad on October 31, 2010. She made it through by
playing dead, pulling the corpses of two slain Christian friends over her
on the church floor and waiting for four hours for the church to be
liberated, thinking every moment might be her last. While I am not an
expert on religious persecution, it’s fair to say these personal experiences
inspired this book and shaped my approach to it.
That said, the vast majority of the detailed accounts I summarize
throughout this book are not the fruit of my own reporting. While I don’t
cite individual source material, because doing so would be too
cumbersome, I want to acknowledge the main organizations, media
outlets, and individual experts upon whom I’ve relied:
• The annual World Watch List published by Open Doors, which
provides a global overview of anti-Christian persecution during
the year under consideration, and country-by-country accounts
of places where Christians face the gravest danger.
• Aid to the Church in Need, a widely respected Catholic relief
organization based in Germany, which also publishes occasional
reviews of anti-Christian persecution, including detailed
incident reports from a variety of different countries.
• Fides, the Vatican’s missionary news agency, which publishes an
annual report on Catholic pastoral workers killed around the
world during the previous year, including bishops, priests,
brothers, deacons, nuns, and laywomen and -men who worked
professionally for the Catholic Church.
• Asia News, another Catholic news agency sponsored by the
Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions and directed by Fr.
Bernardo Cervellera, a dynamic Italian who, among other
things, is one of the best Sinologists in the Catholic world. In
my experience, Asia News probably does the best job, day in
and day out, of documenting cases of anti-Christian persecution
in the developing world, not just of Catholics but of all stripes
of Christians.
• Forum 18, a Norwegian human rights organization that
promotes religious freedom, and which is especially adept at
monitoring the situation in the former Soviet sphere. Its regular
news bulletins and analyses are extremely useful for
understanding what’s happening in that part of the world.
• Nina Shea, Paul Marshall, and others at the Hudson Institute,
who have done yeoman’s work over the last two decades to
bring the issue of anti-Christian persecution to the forefront of
American consciousness, and who continue to provide regular
dispatches and overviews.
• The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, D.C.,
which provides the most reliable hard data on religious
harassment and persecution around the world.
• The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-
Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton,
Massachusetts, which has pioneered the statistical investigation
of Christian martyrdom and remains the lone serious source for
estimates of the number of contemporary martyrs.
• The Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), which has
almost a century of experience delivering humanitarian and
pastoral support to the churches of the Middle East, assisting
not just Catholics but people of all faiths, and whose personnel
often know the lay of the land better than anyone.
• Francesca Paci, a veteran print and broadcast journalist in Italy,
whose 2011 book Dove muoiono i Cristiani (Where Christians are
dying), published by Mondadori, was so good that I almost
decided not to write this one. Communications 101, however,
teaches us that sometimes the key to getting a point across is
repetition. I hope this book accomplishes in English some of
what Paci achieved in Italian.
Obviously, any misrepresentation or inaccuracies in the presentation
of the incidents described in these pages is my fault alone and shouldn’t
be attributed to any of the organizations or individuals listed above.
Looking back, it’s often hard to know exactly where the inspiration for
a book came from, but I can date with precision the first time I
considered global anti-Christian persecution as a possible topic. It was
during a 2009 conversation with Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York,
who mused that perhaps Christians haven’t roused themselves to
confront the problem because we don’t have our own Holocaust
literature. He meant that Christians haven’t told the stories of their new
martyrs in a compelling way, in the same fashion that Jewish authors
have described the horrors of the Shoah. This book is my own small
contribution to a budding Christian genre dedicated to telling these
stories, and I want to thank Cardinal Dolan for that nudge.
I’d like to take this chance to express gratitude to the team at Image,
including Gary Jansen, Johanna Inwood, Carrie Freimuth, and their
colleagues. As I’ve had the opportunity to say to them personally, they
are “the best, the very best,” and this book would not exist without their
support. As always with my book projects, thanks also go to the editorial
team at the National Catholic Reporter for tolerating both my growing
obsession with the subject of anti-Christian persecution and my
occasional absences to produce the manuscript.
Finally, the most profound thanks go to my wife, Shannon, and our
beloved pug, Ellis, without whom … well, they’re my sine quo nihil—
without whom, nothing.
INTRODUCTION
This book is about the most dramatic religion story of the early twenty-
first century, yet one that most people in the West have little idea is
even happening: the global war on Christians. We’re not talking about a
metaphorical “war on religion” in Europe and the United States, fought
on symbolic terrain such as whether it’s okay to erect a nativity scene on
the courthouse steps, but a rising tide of legal oppression, social
harassment, and direct physical violence, with Christians as its leading
victims. However counterintuitive it may seem in light of popular
stereotypes of Christianity as a powerful and sometimes oppressive
social force, Christians today indisputably are the most persecuted
religious body on the planet, and too often their new martyrs suffer in
silence.
The Me’eter military camp and prison, located in the Eritrean desert
off the coast of the Red Sea, is a compelling place to begin the tale.
The prison’s signature bit of cruelty is the use of crude metal shipping
containers to hold inmates, with so many people forced into these 40-by-
38-foot spaces, designed to transport commercial cargo, that prisoners
typically have no room to lie down and barely enough to sit. The metal
exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone-chilling cold at
night and wilting heat during the day. When the sun is at its peak,
temperatures inside the containers are believed to reach 115 degrees
Fahrenheit or higher. One former inmate, lucky enough to be released
after serving up a coerced confession, described the containers as “giant
ovens baking people alive.” Because prisoners are given little water, they
sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.
When not in lockdown, prisoners are forced into pointless exercises
such as counting grains of sand in the desert at midday, and scores die of
heatstroke and dehydration. There are no toilets inside the containers,
just crude buckets overflowing with urine and feces, placing inmates at
risk of infection with diseases such as cholera and diphtheria. Prisoners
have no contact with their families or friends, no legal representation,
and no medical care. Forms of torture at Me’eter (also transliterated as
“Meiter” and “Mitire”) include making inmates kneel on a tree trunk and
beating the soles of their feet with rubber hoses; hanging prisoners by
their arms and exposing them to the sun, sometimes for forty-eight hours
or more; and forcing prisoners to walk barefoot over stones and thorns,
with beatings for not going fast enough. Survivors say sexual abuse is
also common.
Me’eter was opened in 2009 by Eritrea’s single-party regime,
controlled by the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, and is still
going strong, despite the fact its horrors are well documented.
Diplomatic cables released in 2011 by WikiLeaks reveal that U.S.
officials had interviewed escapees from Eritrea’s concentration camps
and passed along reports to the State Department.
Here’s how one female survivor described life at night inside the
shipping containers in a 2009 book:
A single candle flickers, its flame barely illuminating the darkness.
They never burn for more than two hours after the door is locked;
there’s not enough oxygen to keep the flame alive. The air is thick
with a dirty metallic tang, the ever-present stench of the bucket in
the corner, and the smell of close-pressed, unwashed bodies.
Despite the proximity of so many people, it’s freezing cold.
This survivor described being forced to squat on her haunches and lift
three different sizes of rocks while moving them from one side of her
body to another, over and over again. At one point she was tossed into a
container with a female inmate who had been beaten so badly her uterus
was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to
push the uterus back in, but cries for help went unanswered and the
woman died in agonizing pain.
The unavoidable question is why the abuse at Me’eter doesn’t arouse
the same horror and intense public fascination as the celebrated
atrocities that unfolded at Abu Ghraib, for instance, or at Guantanamo
Bay. Why hasn’t there been the same avalanche of investigations, media
exposés, protest marches, pop culture references, and the other typical
indices of scandal? Why isn’t the whole world abuzz with outrage over
the grotesque violations of human rights at Me’eter?
In part it’s because Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were operated
by the United States, a country that styles itself a champion of
democracy and the rule of law. Nobody really has the same expectations
of Eritrea, a one-party state ruled since 1993 by a strongman who
prevailed in a bloody civil war. More basically, however, the difference
comes down to this: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay formed chapters