Oppression of Christians Is Ignored

The great publicity that has come with Hollywood’s crusade for Scientologists facing discrimination in Germany has proved the film industry’s astonishing influence.

Recently Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, Oliver Stone and 30 other celebrities placed open letters in European newspapers with scorching denunciations of Germany’s exclusion of Scientologists from government jobs and a boycott of Scientologist Tom Cruise’s movie, “Mission Impossible.” The stars drew exaggerated parallels between the campaign against the Scientologists and the treatment of the Jews by Nazi Germany.

The impact was instant. The day the ads appeared, the State Department’s Nicholas Burns announced: “We believe that the members of the Church of Scientology have a right to practice their religion in Germany and in all other countries.”

Unfortunately, Hollywood is selective in its campaigns for religious freedom. The most persecuted religious group in the world today, one that is suffering not just discrimination and bigotry but the real terror of torture, imprisonment and death, has been all but ignored by America’s policy- and opinion-makers and media.

The group to which I refer is Christians.

Christian minorities living in the remnant communist countries and in societies where radical politicized Islamic movements hold sway are facing intensifying oppression purely for reasons of faith. Their plight makes Germany’s restrictions on Scientology pale by comparison. Consider the following facts:

Sudan is waging jihad, or holy war, against its Christian and non-Muslim populations. Government troops raze Christian villages, massacring the men and selling the women and children into slavery. Independent human rights assessors have determined that the campaign against the Christians in the Nuba mountain region has reached “genocidal proportions.” Saudi Arabia completely bans Christianity and all its vestiges; religious police raid private homes in search of secret worship services. Egypt’s Coptic community, believed to have been evangelized by the Gospel writer Mark in the 1st century, is vanishing under a violent onslaught by Muslim extremists. Tens of thousands of Coptic Christians were forced to flee or convert to Islam after large mobs of fanatical Muslim youths laid waste their villages in Upper Egypt in early 1996.

In China as many as 60 million Christians refuse to join churches controlled by the atheist government and daily risk their lives and liberty to worship in underground house-churches. Thousands of underground Christians, including two Catholic bishops, are in China’s religious gulag. Chinese Catholics and Protestants are saying that 1996 was the worst year of persecution for them since the Mao period. Vietnam tortures and imprisons popular Protestant pastors for “disseminating religious propaganda,” bars the Vatican from making key episcopal appointments, and sharply restricts who and how many can graduate from the Catholic seminary and be ordained as priests.

Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Nigeria, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Uzbekistan-- the list of countries where Christians are under siege is long.

With the remake of “The Crucible” fresh in their minds, Hollywood’s personalities may have trouble thinking of Christians as the victims of persecution rather than the persecutors. Or maybe Hollywood’s leading lights, despite the seriousness with which their foreign policy pronouncements are received, aren’t aware of the fate of the world’s beleaguered Christians.

Prominent American Christian leaders from many faith traditions launched a vigorous campaign a year ago to get the government to speak out about the persecution faced by Christians. Last January, the National Assn. of Evangelicals, a membership organization with 42,000 congregations across the United States, issued a “statement of conscience” declaring “dismay that the United States government has been indifferent to its obligation to speak out against the reigns of terror now being plotted and waged against Christians.” The statement (subsequently endorsed or commended by the Southern Baptist Convention, the American Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., and the United Methodist Church) specifically called for the president to publicly address the issue and implement a list of concrete reforms to ensure concern for persecuted Christians in American foreign and immigration policy. To date, few of these requests have been met.

Pope John Paul II also has repeatedly condemned religious persecution against Christians, and on Dec. 3 the U.S. Catholic bishops appealed to the secretary of state specifically on the atrocities committed against Christians by China. The bishops never received a reply.

In September, both houses of Congress took up the cause in a bipartisan consensus by adopting resolutions “condemning the egregious human rights abuses and denials of religious liberty to Christians,” and calling on the president’s foreign policy to reflect this reality. These, too, have failed to attract attention.

While the Hollywood community and the celebrity-driven media, with the U.S. government in tow, remain preoccupied with the relatively minor travails of the Scientologists, a multitude of foreign regimes continue to brutalize and murder Christians. How much longer will the world’s most influential power and its cultural elite remain silent?