Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
In his landmark book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, political scientist Samuel Huntington drew attention to the dramatic changes in global geopolitics that occurred following the collapse of Communism. In this sermon, Senior Minister Rob Yule shows how the fall of Communism has had an equally profound effect on how Christians are likely to be persecuted. Preached at Greyfriars Classical Service on 19 July 2009, Rob's message shows the fresh forms that persecution takes today, and challenges us whether our lifestyle is such that will arouse persecution.
Since the dramatic events of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the shape of persecution has dramatically changed. Till the nineteen eighties, atheistic Communist regimes were the main driver of Christian persecution. With the fall of Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that has dramatically changed.
In addition to some hold-out Communist states like North Korea and China, the leading persecuting countries today now include Colombia, India, Pakistan, Sudan, and Nigeria.
A number of new factors are driving this resurgence of persecution. There are four main engines of global persecution today:
The Balkan War of 1992-1995 heralded the rise of religious nationalism as a driver of intolerance and persecution. The phrase 'ethnic cleansing' entered our language with that conflict, as Orthodox Serbs waged genocide on Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics. It was a revival of ancient conflicts that date back centuries, to the 1520s when Muslim armies invaded southern Europe and nearly reached Vienna.
Till 1996 there had only been thirty eight registered cases of violence against Christians in the whole of India. Since then there has been a skyrocketing of violence against Christians in that vast nation, including killings, rapes, church burnings and looting of Christian property.
International concern mounted after the gruesome killing of fifty-eight-year-old Australian missionary Graham Staines, burned alive with his two boys, Philip aged ten, and Timothy, aged seven, in Manoharpur, Orissa, in the early morning of 23 January 1999. They were sleeping in their jeep when an extremist mob hacked at them with axes and knives, pushed lighted straw under the vehicle, and wedged planks against the doors to prevent them escaping.
Turning a blind eye to the violence was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - the political front for an extremist Hindu organisation which promotes a fascist interpretation of Indian history that only Hindus have a right to live on the great plain of the Indus and the Ganges. They have been called the 'Hindu Taliban'.
Similar extremist movements have arisen in the Buddhist world, in places like Sri Lanka and Myanmar (Burma). During the violent conflict in Sri Lanka, the Buddhist Times alleged that Christians supported the ruthless Tamil Tigers, promoted pornography and child abuse, and despoiled Buddhist statues. In the wreckage of a church destroyed by militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Christians found damaged Buddhist relics scattered among the rubble, planted there to discredit them and provide justification for the attack.
You might be surprised that I don't discuss Islam under the heading of religious nationalism. But Islam is not nationalistic, it is a pan-national religion. Radical Islamists want to make the whole world subject to Islam and Islamic law.
Western liberals often claim that Islam is a religion of peace. In fact, the word 'Islam' means not 'peace' but 'submission' - it demands the submission of every person on the planet to Sharia law and the dominance of Islam. This is why the very existence of Israel is an offence to radical Muslims, because it calls in question Islam's claim to superiority, particularly in its Middle Eastern heartland.
A generation ago Islam was much more tolerant than it is now. Christians and Muslims coexisted in Lebanon, and Jews and Arabs lived together in Israel. All that changed with the Iranian revolution of 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini's radical regime ousted the Shah and took over control, sending shock waves throughout the more moderate Islamic regimes of the Middle East. The Iranian regime promotes revolutionary terrorism around the world (through groups like Al Qaida), and in the Middle East (through its proxies Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza).
Ironically, United States' foreign policy is partly to blame for the rise of radical Islam. The Americans armed and supported radical Islamic groups waging war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These groups have grown to bite them, and now the United States and Britain are trying desperately to subdue the very movements they foolishly once encouraged and funded.
Ironically, although radical Muslims vigorously oppose and persecute Christians, they share a number of concerns in common with evangelicals Christians - including opposition to Western materialism, sexual permissiveness, and pornography.
Under 'totalitarian insecurity' I include the countries of what remains of the Communist Bloc, and the more recent phenomenon of warlordism and gangster states.
Thirty years ago atheism was the main engine of persecution, but no more. Around the world Communism is a largely defunct, discredited ideology. Only in North Korea, China, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, does old-fashioned Communist totalitarianism continue to have any hold.
But some of the most persecuting authoritarian entities today can be found among the drug cartels of Columbia, the pirate warlords of Somalia, or the mafia-style crime syndicates of large cities like Mumbai (Bombay) or Calcutta in India.
Thomas Anson is a Christian who has taken on the criminal underworld and sleaze merchants of Kamatipura. Kamatipura is a square mile of squalor in downtown Mumbai - one of India's largest and most progressive cities. Its fourteen narrow lanes contain unbelievable human misery. Seventy thousand prostitutes work there, thirty thousand of them minors. Kidnapped, drugged, and starved, they are abused by pimps and policemen as well as paying clients. Prostitution is illegal, but brothel keepers bribe the police to turn a blind eye, and the police often take payment in the form of sex with underage girls.
But twenty-three-year-old civil servant Thomas Anson felt the call of God to 'make the red light district into a green light district.' He began by organising night shelters for the young children of prostitutes, who otherwise roamed the streets while their mothers worked. He then started raiding brothels to rescue minors forced into the sex-trade against their will. He has rescued more than eight hundred girls.
Every rescue is an ordeal. Anson has to chivvy the police and judiciary to do what they're legally required to do - and ensure that they don't revert to cooperating with the brothel keepers. The flesh trade flourishes because the political authorities and the police are corrupt, preferring bribes to justice. The police even pay to be assigned to Kamatipura so they can receive larger kickbacks from the brothel owners.
The churches are nowhere to be seen. Rescue ministries are too extreme for them. Anson says, 'They are happy running schools for the prostitutes, but that way you are only helping the trade to continue. They only raise a hand if they know they won't burn a finger.'
Anson has got burnt. The brothel owners have linked up with Hindu extremists, fomented mobs, and accused him of 'converting Hindu sex workers.' The police have banned him from Kamatipura. Death threats have been made against him. His worst fear is that they will kidnap or kill his daughters. Afraid, but undaunted, he observes: 'Well, they say children only throw stones at a ripe mango tree, so I must be doing something right to be in this much trouble for Christ!'
Though we still haven't seen many cases of outright persecution, Western democracies are becoming increasingly intolerant towards evangelical Christianity.
In 2005, two Melbourne pastors, Daniel Scot and Danny Nalliah, were taken to court for maligning Islam. What had they done? In 2002 they had organised a well-researched seminar to help Christians 'understand Islamic beliefs and culture and, after the September 11 attacks, why some Muslims engage in terrorism.' Did they know anything about their subject? Yes they did - Scott had grown up in Muslim Pakistan, and Nalliah was born in Sri Lanka!
In the United Kingdom, an Anglican church agreed to refrain from evangelism in order to receive a government grant. Now no one who uses that church facility can do or say anything that encourages a person to become a Christian.
In the secular West, people have bought the Dalai Lama's line that 'Everyone should stick to the religion they were born in - that's the only way we can ensure social harmony.'
Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish Catholic philosopher comments on this growing pressure in secular Western societies to be tolerant:
'…when tolerance is enjoined upon us nowadays, it is often in the sense of indifference: we are asked, in effect, to refrain from expressing - or indeed holding - any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others. This kind of tolerance is something entirely different, and demanding it is part of our hedonistic culture….'
I experienced this on the eve of becoming Presbyterian Moderator in the year 2000. The gay community, on the basis of a single sermon of mine on Romans 1 on my church's website, expounding Paul's comments about homosexuality, mounted a nationwide campaign to block my installation as Moderator. This was despite the fact that my candidacy was entirely valid and had been supported by an overwhelming majority of Presbyteries. It was solely because it was perceived that I did not approve of homosexual conduct.
Western culture is bedevilled by a fateful legacy of the European Enlightenment - the disjunction between fact and values. Religious beliefs are no longer regarded as historical or scientific facts. They are reduced to the realm of 'values': private opinions, viewed as virtually synonymous with 'prejudices'. Secularism has come to assume that it has the right to rule the public square. Christian faith is privatised and reduced to the sphere of personal opinions.
Tony Blair made the rather sad observation after he ceased to be British Prime Minister, that he refrained from sharing his faith during his prime ministership, for fear that people would regard his political views as suspect and flaky. This is a good illustration of the mounting pressure to conform in secular societies. You are made to feel as if your deodorant has run out.
William Barclay once famously said that New Testament Christians had three notable characteristics: they were 'absurdly happy', they had an 'irrational love for everybody', and they were 'always in trouble'.
Are you in trouble for Jesus? If not, something is wrong. Paul said to Timothy, 'everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.' (2 Timothy 3:12). If you're not having an impact, what has happened? Is your powder damp? Has your witness become wet and limp?
Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, author of Faith that Endures (Grand Rapids, Revell, 2006), a book on contemporary persecution that I have consulted for this sermon, says, 'Whatever culture we are in, we are always being subtly coerced into spending our money, or time, on what is not of Christ' (p. 327). If you are not being persecuted, is it because you are being subtly seduced by our hedonistic, consumer culture? Are you going with the crowd.
Persecution rarely comes the way we expect it. Hitler made the trains run on time, made the parks safe for women to walk in, gave a demoralised Germany fresh pride and identity as a nation.
Don't compromise your faith, lest the time come when you yourself will be compromised. As Martin Niemoller, leader of the resistance to Hitler, famously said:
'First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak our because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.'
Rob Yule, 19 July 2009
© 2009, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
