In their tragic slide toward the far left in the 1970s and
1980s, America’s Mainline churches and their ecumenical councils
largely lost interest in religious freedom and even the plight of
persecuted Christians. Engagement with communist regimes and their
allies took priority. In more recent years, liberal Protestants
often have preferred similar collaboration with Islamist regimes
rather open advocacy in defense of their Christian and other
minority religious victims.
Of late, there have been some small, refreshing exceptions
to the scandalous church silence about persecuted Christians, at
least by the National Council of Churches, World Council of
Churches, and the United Methodists.
In mid-October, Sudanese church leaders were hosted by the
National Council of Churches (NCC) in New York. Not so many years
ago, the NCC infamously hosted Fidel Castro, who assured a largely
sympathetic church audience there was no religious persecution in
communist Cuba. These Sudanese doubtless offered a very different
message. Mostly from southern Sudan, which is majority Christian,
these church leaders have survived decades of Islamist persecution
by Khartoum. The Islamist regime’s war against southern Sudan,
which the Bush Administration helped negotiate to a precarious
truce, killed 2 million. In January, southern Sudanese will vote on
potential autonomy for themselves, amid widespread doubts that
Khartoum will peacefully respect the result.
American Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and human rights
groups championed southern Sudan in the 1990s and early 2000s,
which helped bolster the Bush Administration’s focus. But liberal
religious groups, especially Mainline Protestants, were usually
quiet. In the mid-2000s, liberal religious groups eagerly touted
the plight of Sudan’s predominantly Muslim Darfur region in the
west. Standing with Darfur’s victimized African Muslims against
Khartoum’s more Arabized Islamists evidently did not discomfit
liberal religious groups as much as supporting Christians against
Islamists. Commonly, Khartoum’s Islamist motivation was ignored,
and the Bush Administration was faulted for somehow failing to
impose a peace in Darfur.
In an NCC news release, NCC chief Michael Kinnamon boasted
the National Council of Churches has “for years” campaigned against
the killing in Darfur, where more than 300,000 have died from
Khartoum’s war. Oddly, the news release cited Darfur’s struggle
between Khartoum-backed militias and “black Christian and animist
Africans,” obviously confusing Darfur’s mostly Muslim population
with southern Sudan’s mostly non-Muslim people. Kinnamon insisted
the NCC’s concerns extend beyond Darfur to all Sudan. Referring to
the Save Darfur Coalition, which an NCC official now heads,
Kinnamon explained: “While this coalition started as a Darfur
organization because of the genocide, our mission has evolved into
an all-Sudan policy, including…the upcoming referendum.” He
promised about the Sudanese Christians: “We support our sisters and
brothers during this difficult and unpredictable
period.”
Kinnamon referred to the NCC having passed a resolution
about southern Sudan almost a decade ago, which vaguely urged
“religious tolerance among Christians, Muslims and those practicing
African Traditional Religions” in Sudan, without mentioning that
the real problem was Khartoum’s Islamist ambitions. Now, the NCC
seems more serious in its interest in southern Sudan. The Sudanese
church delegation that visited the NCC in October included Sudan’s
Anglican primate, two Catholic bishops, and the head of Sudan’s
council of churches. They rightly warned, as the NCC news release
noted, that “the safety and human rights (including the right to
freedom of religion) of southerners living in northern Sudan [i.e.
mostly Christians] are in jeopardy before, during and after the
referendum.”
Interestingly, the delegation also included Samuel Kobia,
a Kenyan Methodist pastor who recently departed as head of the
Swiss-based World Council of Churches, which, like the NCC, rarely
evinced interest in southern Sudan under Kobia or his predecessor.
The WCC’s new chief is a Norwegian pastor who is steering in a
somewhat different direction. An October WCC news release
refreshingly spotlighted the plight of an escaped North Korean
Christian who addressed the recent evangelical Lausanne Congress in
South Africa.
The 18-year-old North Korean woman reportedly moved her
audience to tears when describing how her father, a former aide to
Kim Jong-Il, became a Christian and has probably been executed by
North Korea on charges of treason and espionage. “This is often the
fate of confessing Christians in North Korea,” the WCC news release
accurately admitted. In previous years, the WCC and other Western
ecumenical groups have fawningly visited Pyongyang, obligingly
visited its show churches, and blamed America for North Korea’s
poverty, with nary a word about religious persecution.
“Brothers and sisters here in this place, I humbly ask you
to pray that the same light of God’s grace and mercy that reached
my father and my mother, and now me, will one day soon dawn upon
the people of North Korea, my people,” the young woman implored, as
the spellbound audience erupted into applause.
Meanwhile, the United Methodist Church’s lobby office
denounced China for banning Chinese Christians from attending the
same evangelical conference in South Africa at which the North
Korean woman had spoken. “No government should have authority over
the church,” a spokesman with the United Methodist Board of Church
and Society asserted. “Thus, the actions by the Chinese government
to restrict travel and intimidate Christians are an offense against
the basic rights of all humanity.”
The Methodist agency, with the collaboration and probable
prodding of a United Methodist evangelical group, even commended
the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. It urged
prayers for “brothers and sisters in Christ” who are “suffering
through persecution in places like Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan,
Vietnam, Burma and Iran.” Also citing Sudan and North Korea, it
noted that Christians in these countries are “economically and
politically marginalized, physically brutalized, and even killed
simply because they follow Jesus.”
Over 20 years ago, purported North Korean Christian
clerics dispatched by North Korea’s communists were hosted by the
United Methodist lobby office on Capitol Hill to gain legitimacy
for North Korea’s communist tyranny. Today, that office, and other
Mainline Protestant agencies that once routinely apologized for
North Korea, are now advocating on behalf of persecuted Christians
in North Korea and elsewhere where they are imprisoned and martyred
by communists and Islamists. The new found interest in religious
freedom may be incremental, but it is progress.
