The New Martyrs

The spate of church bombings across the Old South has left people wondering why? A jaundiced perspective might suggest that there's just something about the name of Jesus that attracts victimhood. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche as much as DID offer such a jaundiced view.

And Now Darfur?
Mass violence against civilians in Darfur began with a wave of attacks against villages. The people of Darfur have endured a vicious campaign of violence and terror which has led to huge numbers of deaths and forced more than a million people to flee from their destroyed villages in search of safety. Something must be done, and the time is now.

Two countries in northern Africa have been singled out as locations where "a truly endemic, raw anti-black racism and slavery today" exists -- Mauritania and Sudan (Darfur). " There, "Black people have been enslaved on such a scale that the term black became synonymous with slave." [See Serge Trifkovic]

"For the black populations in Sudan and Mauritania, independence marked the end of a slavery-free respite under colonial rule."

"The Anti-Slavery Society's findings (1982) and those of Africa Watch (1990) point to the existence of at least 100,000 'full-time' slaves and additional 300,000 half-slaves, all of them black." (Mauritania). Africa Watch says that the Mauritanian government has not tried to eradicate slavery and failed; it has not tried at all.

Amnesty International found that the old practice of using black slaves, forming them into armies, then unleashing them to take over black African villages has been revived. Thousands of these Haratines are forcibly recruited, armed and sent south to plunder, spoil and massacre the peaceable villagers. (p 177, Sword)

For many years Sudan under al-Bashir has afflicted its own black population, especially the Christians of Darfur, to a similar ongoing aggression. An extreme Sharia (draconian religious-based) law was instituted in 1983. Since that time, the United Nations and human rights groups have documented countless cases of slavery, often in reality the slavery is not merely degrading and demeaning but includes force sexual gratification. Dr. Susan Rice was sent there by the US government, and returned with a horrific account of rampant slavery.

Not Just Darfur
"Sudan shows that genocide need not be perpetrated by huge massacres. The government in Khartoum is doing so by attrition: slowly and methodically grinding down the society and economy of the Nuba and starving the entire population. Meanwhile, in the garrison towns and Orwellian-sounding 'peace camps,' the government is remolding the political and social identity of the Nuba by force: the aim is to transform them into a deracinated underclass, the loyal slaves of an extremist, Sharia fundamentalist regime. In each army attack, soldiers first arbitrarily gun down anyone they find. The government does not pay them salaries: their pay is the booty from the raids on the black villages. The elderly and sick are usually killed on the spot and their food granaries set ablaze. The main objective of 'combing' is to capture live, fit civilians. [p 178, Sword]       Sudan.

Slaughter in the Islands: East Timor was the victim of a "carnage on a scale worthy of Pol Pot." Amnesty International estimated that Indonesia had murdered 200,000 East Timorese (Christians) out of a population of 600,000 - 700,000. Under Suharto, Indonesia's treatment of religious minorities, many of them Christians, had already been witnessed by the world. Link. Beginning in the sixties, the tribal peoples of West Papua (Irian Jaya) began falling victim to the fanaticism of Suharto's (islamic) followers. The Papuans were Melanesians, most all of them animist, or else Christian converts. From primitive times, the pig has been a primary element of their basic economy, but the muslim regiments, offended by the "unclean" animal, slaughter the pigs in scores of peaceful villages. They soon proceeded to killing the villagers, up to an estimated 100,000 by 1990. (p 214, Sword)

Once East Timor was out of the way, the next target was the Christian minority in Indonesia itself. In 1999-2000 the persecution, destruction of property, and killing of Indonesia's Christians amounted to a deliberate campaign of religious cleansing, abetted by the Indonesian military which is overwhelmingly Muslim. The worst atrocities were committed on the island of Ambon, where an upsurge in violence followed the arrival of 2,000 Laskar Jihad -- a militant Muslim force determined to join the 'holy war' against the Christians on the island -- who sent its warriors from Java and South Sulawest. Indonesian soldiers sent to the Molucca Islands were fighting alongside militant Muslims, leading to calls by the Christians for a neutral U.N. peacekeeping force. Most of the fighting took place around the city of Ambon. Violence in North Halmahera has resulted in up to 100,000 people fleeing their homes for the jungles and mountains; the Christian communities were in disarray. (p 216, Sword)

In the Philippines, the kidnapping of Martin and Gracia Burnham by the Abu Sayyef eventually captured international attention. These renegade groups, against whom the government has long waged an ongoing campaign, sought to attract world spotlight (and extort ransoms) by abducting these vulnerable missionaries. While the Burnham's denied they were "mistreated" per se, Martin Burnham did lose his life for his faith, caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between the Government forces, and the Abu Sayyef militants. Gracia Burnham has since written an account of their harrowing experience, titled "In the Presence of Mine Enemies."

Pakistan has a constitution that guarantees religious freedom, but murders, endemic discrimination, and constant harassment of Christians is persistent. Any dispute with a Muslim -- most commonly over land -- can become a religious confrontation; Christians are frequently accused of 'blasphemy against Islam," an offense that carries the death penalty. Pakistan has some of the strictest blasphemy laws in the Muslim world. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidence -- even one man's word against another, and since it is invariably a Muslim's word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained.

The ease with which blasphemy charges can be made to stick has led to a spate of accusations against Christians, mostly malicious complaints motivated by personal enmity and greed, especially for the Christians' land. Some 2,500 people are said to be in jail or to face charges for blasphemy. Muslim rioters in Rahimyar Khan, a town in southern Punjab, burned a dozen churches in 1997 after attacking Christians they accused of throwing torn pages of the Kuran into a mosque. This turned out to be a fabrication invented by the surrounding Muslims as the pretext to occupy their land. Christians charged with blasphemy have been murdered by fundamentalists before their cases reached the courts. (pp 236-237, Sword of the Prophet)

On March 17, 2002, there was a grenade attack on a Christian church in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Five people were killed, including a US embassy administrator and her daughter. It was preceded by the slaughter on October 28, 2001, in a church in Behawalpur, when two Kalashnikov-brandishing terrorists massacred 18 protestant Christians. Apparently the perpetrators conceived the slaughter out of a Muslim solidarity to avenge American bombing of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. (p 237, Sword of the Prophet) What a dilemma for America's elected leaders, that Pakistan, a staunch US ally under Mushariff, seems unable or unmotivated to protect its Christian minorities.

Bhutan's precarious Christian community has long suffered in silence. Serving their local community with quiet service, they strive nonetheless to be faithful to a Higher Kingdom -- only wishing they might be granted full safety, and freedom of conscience.

Another strong ally of the US has been Saudi Arabia, yet with a powerful Wahabi constituency that Kingdom "remains the most intolerant Islamic regime in the world. Within Saudi Arabia the practice of any religion besides Islam is as strictly prohibited now as it was in Muhammad's lifetime. While Saudis continue to build mosques all over the world, thousands of Christians among the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers from India, Europe, America, and the Philippines must worship in secret, if at all. They may be mobbed, beaten, arrested, detained, flogged or lashed, humiliated, even deported for the crime of public display of their beliefs. (p 242, Trifkovic, Sword of Islam) See Moral Flogging (in Allah's name?)
Shari'a link.

In Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, the state of Zamfara, in the Islamic north of the country, has been seeking to impose a religious conformity in line with Shari'a. The state governor Alhaji Ahmed Sani, a devout Muslim, forged ahead with Shari'a imposition despite the objections of the black Christian minority in Zamfara, and protests from the rest of the country. Floggings are rife. Within weeks all bars were closed, cinemas and video parlors were shut down, and boys and girls were segregated into separate schools. Women now must cover themselves; amputations of limbs, stonings to death and beheadings are on the statue books for a variety of offenses; consumers of alcohol in any form are "severely flogged" if caught or implicated. More.

After the imposition of Shari'a in Zamfara, the effort spread to neighboring Nigerian states throughout the entire northern part of the country. Fanatics were emboldened and the victims were in many cases black Christians. Over 2,000 were killed in another northern Nigerian state, Kaduna. Dozens of Christian churches have been burned and desecrated all over northern Nigeria. (p 252, Sword)

Ironically, in some of the areas where the persecution has been most extreme, the earnestness of faith has, if anything, actually increased in tenacity. An excellent commentary along these lines is ... The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (by Philip Jenkins). Jenkins says that seismic changes are underway. The affluent West (pampered and spoilt) is losing its faith, while among the non-white populations worldwide, the gospel faith is experiencing a phenomenal growth.

What is going on, here? Obviously there is no single answer, but one is reminded how Christ told the elites of his day that the Kingdom of God is taken from them, and given to others more worthy.

Can Unearned Suffering be Redemptive

Martin Luther King,Jr. often quoted the following lines from Lowell:

Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.

What shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.