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Pride on Saving Christianity in Iraq

Jonathan Pride (Student, Harvard Law) has posted Saving an Ancient Community: Christianity in Iraq. The abstract follows.

The Christian community in Iraq has survived conquests by Arabs, Huns, and Turks over the two millennia since the birth of Christianity. However, the latest danger to Iraq’s Christians, who include Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Catholics, poses the largest threat that this community has faced yet. In post-Saddam Iraq, a lethal combination of a Western “other” Christian identity, Islamic extremism, and a depressed economy has taken an enormous toll on Christians in Iraq. Their communities all over the country have been devastated by violence against men, women, children, and community symbols like priests, bishops, and churches. Because they only numbered about 1.5 million before the fall of Saddam Hussein, these attempts to terrorize and scare away Christians threaten the very existence of Christianity in Iraq.

In response to violence inside Iraq, many Christians have fled the country or become internally displaced, fleeing to traditionally Christian areas in Northern Iraq. Though their situations outside Iraq as registered or unregistered refugees may be difficult, those who are a part of the Christian Iraqi diaspora are hesitant to return to their homeland due to the systematic violence and discrimination they have faced and may face again. Can international action or internal, government programs do anything to save Christianity in Iraq?

To answer this question, I will address a number of issues. First, I will explore the underlying causes of the historical violence against Christians, taking a deeper look at the construction of the Christian identity as the Western “other.” Second, I will consider the current situation facing Iraqi Christian refugees and internally displaced peoples. Finally, I will propose remedies that seek to encourage Christian Iraqis to either remain in or return to Iraq. These remedies include 1) deconstructing Christians’ “other” identity through constitutional changes and civil society initiatives, 2) creating a semi-autonomous “safe haven” for Christians inside Iraq, and 3) encouraging international economic assistance to revive devastated Christian communities. Though my suggestions are to promote a continuing Christian presence in Iraq, they are by no means a definitive solution. There is still time to save Christianity in Iraq, but it remains uncertain whether the community will ever fully recover from the devastation of the last ten years.

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Babie & Rochow, “Freedom of Religion under Bills of Rights”

Earlier this year, University of Adelaide Press published Freedom of Religion under Bills of Rights (UAP Jan. 2012) edited by Paul Babie (U. of Adelaide)  and Neville Rochow. The description follows.

How can a nation protect fundamental rights and freedoms, including religious freedom, within a liberal democratic context? The objective of the essays presented in this volume, taken as a whole, is to provide an overview of the principal models used to protect fundamental freedoms, and especially the right to freedom of belief, expression and practice of one’s religion, in major liberal democratic systems. While there is no effort made to be comprehensive about this, the book is clearly not simply about Australia — the chapters cover the range of methods typically used to protectsuch freedoms. This represents the significance of the volume: it prioritises no one approach. Rather, a range of viewpoints are presented in a comparative way in order to obtain insights, reveal strengths, weaknesses and differences of opinion, and to learn from the lessons of others, how religion might be and has been protected.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Philip Jenkins on Why He Won’t Be Donating for Pussy Riot

Over at Real Clear Religion, Baylor historian Philip Jenkins has a powerful essay on the Pussy Riot trial and the Western media’s failure to take seriously the religious provocation the stunt represented:

Putin may be a thug, and Pussy Riot might be feminist warriors for human rights, but the particular act for which they faced trial is much more controversial than is commonly reported in the West. A good case can be made that it was a grievous act of religious hate crime, of a kind that would be roundly condemned if it happened in a country that the West happened to like.

Jenkins recounts the long history of Christian persecution under the Soviets, which involved intimidation and murder on a massive scale, often accompanied by anti-Christian agitprop in sacred places. Jenkins writes:

Russia’s new religious freedom is a very tender shoot, and the prospect of future turmoil has to agonize those believers who recall bygone horrors. These fears are all the more pressing when modern-day activists seem to reproduce exactly the blasphemous deeds of the past, and even in the precise places. When modern-day Orthodox look at Pussy Riot, they see the ghosts of Alexandra Kollontai and her militiamen, or the old Soviet League of Militant Godless. Are they wrong to do so? . . .

So no, I won’t be giving to any Pussy Riot support groups.

I’ve written before that Pussy Riot has been in prison for long enough; a two-year sentence for what they did seems very disproportionate.  I’d have fined them for trespassing and let them go. But it is striking that so few in the West see the other side of the story.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Re: That Old-Time Religious Persecution

The Telegraph has more information about that incident in Pakistan, in which an 11-year old mentally disabled girl is said to have destroyed pages from a Quran. The Telegraph suggests that Muslim neighbors have been looking for a way to dispel a Christian community in their midst for months now and may have found a way:

As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.

On Sunday, houses on the backstreets of Mehrabadi, an area 20 minutes’ drive from western embassies and government ministries, were locked with padlocks, their occupants having fled to already overcrowded Christian slums in and around the capital.

One of the senior members of the dominant Muslim community told the Christians to remove all their belongings from their houses by 1 September. “I don’t think anyone will dare go back after this,” said one Christian, Arif Masih. “The area is not safe for us now.”

As for the girl herself, she has been charged with blasphemy, an extremely grave offense under Pakistani law. The law, the Telegraph reports, “has a proven track record of ensnaring people on the flimsiest of evidence and being cynically used to intimidate communities or settle quarrels over money and property.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Good Thing They Didn’t Try It in France

Anatole France famously observed that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges. What would he have said about this weekend’s events in Marseille? At a rally in solidarity with Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band currently in prison for hooliganism, a group of protesters donned the band’s trademark neon balaclavas (above). The police immediately arrested the protesters for violating the French ban on veiling one’s face in public. The ban, which went into effect last year, was obviously directed at Islamic niqabs. To avoid any appearance of bias, however, the law formally forbids face veils generally. If tried and convicted, the protesters are subject to a fine of €150 and a compulsory citizenship course. CLR published a symposium on the ban and other aspects of church-state relation in France in 2010 – check it out here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Re: That Old-Time Religious Persecution

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested an 11-year old Christian girl on blasphemy charges. She apparently was carrying a waste bag which contained some pages from a Quran. According to the BBC, police were reluctant to arrest the girl, who has a learning disability and seems unlikely to have destroyed a Quran on purpose, but “an angry mob demanded her arrest and threatened to burn down Christian homes outside the capital city of Islamabad.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

O’Donnell on Religion and Capital Punishment

I enjoy looking through Patrick O’Donnell’s bibliographies on various subjects, and this post — with some thoughts (generally negative) about the relationship between capital punishment and certain religious ideas — as well as the link to an instructive list of references, is both interesting and useful.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“Common Sense, Not Discrimination”

That’s the verdict of the Student Judiciary at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which has reinstated the local chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship as a campus student organization. Earlier this year, the Student Senate had revoked recognition because of Intervarsity’s requirement that leaders in the organization affirm traditional Christian beliefs, including beliefs about homosexuality. Last December, the chapter’s  treasurer, who is gay, told the university’s student newspaper that he had been pressured to resign because he would not sign a statement affirming the truth of Biblical passages, including passages condemning homosexual conduct. The Senate believed this episode showed that Intervarsity violated the university’s non-discrimination policy, but the Judiciary disagreed, arguing that one must distinguish between membership and leadership in a student organization. Intervarsity was open to all SUNY-Buffalo students, including gay students, the Judiciary explained; but  “it is common sense, not discrimination, for a religious group to want its leaders to agree with its core beliefs.” Similar disputes about the religious freedom of student groups have occurred recently at other American universities, including Vanderbilt, and of course, UC-Hastings Law School, the subject of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in CLS v. Martinez. Martinez held that an “all-comers” policy requiring student religious organizations to open their leadership to all students regardless of belief is constitutionally permissible. That’s not to say an all-comers policy is constitutionally required, however.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 2 Comments

That Old-Time Religious Persecution

Here is another example of a phenomenon I continue to observe — the “now that’s real religious persecution!” style of argument.  The points in Ms. Timbol’s piece seem to be these: (1) Christians today in the United States “have forgotten what it really means to be persecuted”; (2) “In some places in the world,” like Iran and Somalia, one can still see the genuine article, in the form of honest to goodness beatings, stonings, and maulings by wild animals of what the author feels are authentic Christians; (3) in light of these horrors, it is “reprehensible” that some inauthentic American Christians are claiming that “their religious freedom is being infringed” when they support traditional notions of marriage, including by showing support for Chik-Fil-A in the recent controversy; (4) “This shows just how much is wrong with Christianity today.”; (5) “Until Christians endure the same threats, mocking and ostracization that their LGBT brothers and sisters face every day, they can’t claim they’re being persecuted.”

Just an initial clarification: I had thought that what many felt was troubling — as a matter of religious liberty and free speech — about the Chik-Fil-A controversy was not that different points of view were openly clashing (that’s certainly ok), but that the state and/or its organs were threatening to keep Chik-Fil-A from operating at all in Chicago and Boston because the views that its owner expressed did not meet with the approval of sundry politicians.  So the distinction that this writer draws between government suppression here and abroad doesn’t really work.  Likewise, the ostracism of LGBT groups and persons that the she identifies is, as she says, coming from private parties, not the federal or local government. 

But I take it that the real challenge of the piece is to remind its readers about what real persecution looks like, and to accuse contemporary American Christians of being a “bunch of whiners.”  As I noted in my previous post on this subject, I am struggling to understand the basic point, though perhaps I just haven’t yet seen it.  Is it that we should wait to care about violations of religious liberty until they reach the sorts of persecutorial proportions that one sees in Iran or Somalia?  Is it that it might be a very good thing if Christians experienced some of that old-time persecution?  But why should one wish for that?  And why should one not want to recognize admittedly milder forms of troubling developments respecting religious freedom as worrisome, even if they do not rise to the level of stonings and government-promoted animal maulings?  I’ll be interested to see if this form of argument persists.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

.religion?

I’ve always been mystified by ICANN (the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers”), the US non-profit corporation that manages the internet. Somehow, and without governmental authority, ICANN has gotten users around the world to accept as authoritative its decisions on internet protocols and, in particular, “generic Top Level Domains,” or “gTLDs” — the familiar .com, .org, and .edu designations at the end of internet addresses. A good example of spontaneous ordering, I guess.

Anyway, this spring, ICANN invited proposals for new gTLDs. The organization is now taking public comments. Given the importance of religion on the web, it’s not surprising that many of the proposed new gTLDs involve religion, and that some of them are causing controversy. For example, the Vatican has requested that it receive a new gTLD, “.catholic.” Among the objectors to this proposal is Saudi Arabia, which points out that other Christian communions, for example, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, also refer to themselves as “Catholic”; the designation would thus create confusion. Actually,  Saudi Arabia has objected generally to new gTLDs that name particular religions – for example, “.islam,” – on the ground that no one entity should be able to claim the internet identity for an entire religion. It’s an interesting point. ICANN will accept comments on proposed gTLDs until September 26. (H/t: Christianity Today).