Rare News Desk
Senior Vatican analyst John Allen talks about his recently released book “The Global War on Christians.” Mr. Allen shares his insights on the prevalence of worldwide Christian persecution.
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1) What inspired you to write “The Global War on Christians”? Why tell this story now?
Well, a couple different things. I mean, one as a correspondent who covers the Vatican and the Pope, you know, John Paul and Benedict and Francis have traveled to many parts of the world. I’ve covered those trips. And on the ground, around the edges, I was repeatedly meeting people, Christians, who had experienced some form of persecution and hearing their stories. And you know, initially, my tendency was to think of it as tragic but sort of random and sporadic. Over time, it had occurred to me there was a pattern here. In the scope and in scale of what I call the global war on Christians, is much more vast than certainly I had imagined and, I think, most Americans, thinking about it have imagined.
The other is that I had a specific experience working on a book with Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York back in 2009. We were sitting around one night kind of musing about why the story of the global war on Christians doesn’t seem to get the attention that we both think that it needs. And he said to me, “Maybe part of the problem is that Christianity doesn’t have its own Holocaust literature” — by which he meant that Christians don’t tell the stories of their martyrs in the same way that say Jews do or members of other religious groups or other minority groups that are for various reasons in harm’s way.
And so the book, the idea behind the book, was to be a kind of modest contribution of trying to kick-start a new literary genre.
2) From your research, why has there been such an escalation in Christian persecution in the 21st century?
Well, part of it is simply that Christianity is growing phenomenally around the world. I mean, there are now 2.3 billion Christians in the world – two-thirds of whom live in places outside the West, such as in places as Africa, in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America. And in some cases, they were there in smaller numbers before but in many cases these were brand new churches that were born in the 20th century. And so you know, Christians today now represent 30 some percent of the human population. And, given that growth, it is just inevitable that a growing share of acts of religious violence are going to end up being directed at Christians.
Further, because Christianity’s growth is outside of the West, a lot of these folks end up as convenient targets for people who have axes to grind against the West — you know, Europe, the United States, whatever. You know, there are a lot of people around the world — who legitimately or not — rationally are not — are angry about what they perceive to be the injustices and all of that that they associate with the West and they are looking for somebody to look at to lash at. And you know, it’s hard to get to say, the American consulate, it’s not impossible, it’s difficult to do.
You know, it’s easier to smash the front plate of say a McDonald’s or a Starbuck’s as a way of demonstrating your rage — but even easier than that, because usually you have to go downtown to heavily patrolled neighborhoods to find those places. But you know — you can find local Christians everywhere. I mean, whatever neighborhood you live in, there’s probably a Christian community somewhere down the block. So, there is a tendency for these people, even though they are not Westerners, and even though they probably feel the same frustration of the Western policy that their neighbors do. Nevertheless, they become the repositories for all of that.
Now, look, I think those are explanations, I mean, for why this is happening. But they certainly are not excuses. I mean, you know, the bottom line is that the global war on Christians is the transcendent — it deserves to be — the transcendent human-rights issue of our time.
3) And why do you consider Christian persecution the biggest human-rights issue of our time?
Well, because statistically speaking, they are probably the single community most likely to be targeted for violations of human rights and human dignity. I mean now, let’s be clear, Christians are hardly the ones suffering. You know, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists — all of them suffer some forms of persecution: women, children, the poor, you know. But statistically speaking, a) Christians are the most persecuted religious body on the planet and b) they are probably the community that we, in the West, are best positioned to do something about because we share the bond of religious adherence with them and so, you know, we speak the same language — we have resources that can be mobilized.
But look, although I believe that Christians have a particular moral and spiritual responsibility to be concerned about anti-Christian violence, I don’t think it takes any religious or confessional beliefs at all to recognize this is a premier human-rights issue. In the same way, you didn’t have to be Jewish in the ‘60s or ‘70s to be worried about dissident Jews in the Soviet Union — you didn’t have to be black in the ‘80s to be outraged about apartheid in South Africa. You don’t have to be Christian today to be worried about poor minority Christians around the world who are being brutalized. And if we can’t rise up and do something about that, then I am deeply skeptical about our ability to move the ball forward in any other human-rights concern.
4) What’s a common misconception about Christian persecution that we, in the United States, have?
I think one common misconception is that something only counts as anti-Christian persecution if the motives for it were explicitly religious. You know, in Christian theology, we say that a martyr is somebody who’s killed in odium fidei – in hatred of the faith, which made a lot of sense when the primary threat was made by Roman emperors who wanted you to sacrifice to pagan gods, which is still happening today. You know, it’s far more common these days for Christians to be killed these days to be killed for taking stands in defense of justice — taking stands in defense of human dignity, and I’ll give you a classic example.
A female catechist in the Congo is shot to death because she’s trying to stand up to these paramilitary groups that are trying to enroll child soldiers, OK? Now, at one level, you could say, they didn’t kill her because she wasn’t a Christian, they killed her because they wanted her to shut up.
And so you say it’s not tragic, it’s not a martyr. Well, look at it another way. What if we bring her motives — why was she doing it? That female catechist was making a decision to put herself at risk because of her faith, because of her belief, this is what God was calling her to do, and because she believes the Christ of the gospels would have done that. So, in that sense, it had everything to do with her Christian faith. So, in a sound bite, I would say, we need to put the focus not just on what was on the hit of the trigger but also what was in the heart of being shot. And I think if we do that, what will end up is a much more expansive notion of what the global war on Christians really looks like.
5) What are the causes for the Christian persecution in India, China and North Korea? Is nationalism a root cause?
Well, the causes for that are staggeringly complex. You kind of have to go neighborhood by neighborhood. In India, the primary threat would come from Hindu radicalism and, in there, it’s a kind of combination of nationalistic fervor and a kind of radical current in Hindu theology that kind of comes together to produce this nasty cocktail. I mean, it’s a very small percentage of the overall Hindu population, but as we know, doesn’t take a lot of people to wreak real havoc if they’re determined to do it.
Now in other parts of the world — North Korea would be the classic example — the threat basically is from a police state that sees all minority groups, and in particular, those that are perceived to have links to the West, as a threat to their stranglehold on power.
In other parts of the world — Latin America would be a classic example — the primary threat would come from paramilitary groups and narco gangs who don’t like the fact that Christians are in the vanguard of standing up to them in defending justice, in defending dignity and so they are getting slaughtered by the scores.
So, it’s a complicated landscape out there is the point, and I think the quest for a single explanation on the global war on Christians is founded fruitless. What we need is a recognition that it’s a complicated situation, and therefore we need a complex strategy to deal with it.
6) In your chapter “It’s Not All About Islam,” you state that the “Global war on Christians is all about Islam is nevertheless, misleading.” How is it misleading?
Well, the misleading part — and you are absolutely right — that there is a real cancer with regard to respect for religious freedom in general. Generally, the hatred of Christians that is metastasizing in some circles of Islam, and what that means, is that many of the world’s 56 majority Muslim states are some very rough real estate for Christian minorities.
But you know, with that said, you know radical Islam can drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow, and that wouldn’t mean, you know, Christians are safe. That’s the misleading part of it, because the truth of it is in that Asia — in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa — even in an overwhelmingly Christian place like Latin America, and on and on. And you know, Christians are extraordinarily vulnerable.
Actually, if you look at the Center for the Study for Global Christianity, which tries to do a quantitative estimate of Christian martyrdom, they will tell you the greatest Christian killing field for Christians over the last decade has been in the Congo — which is not only overwhelmingly Christian but it’s an overwhelmingly Catholic country. So, a lot of this violence is actually Christian on Christian.
7) And what has the papacy been doing to try to address this issue?
Well, the Vatican in general, I would say, that religious freedom in recent years has been kind of emerging foreign policy priority. I mean, it is probably destined to be The Holy See’s — the episcopal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome — signature social and political concern in the 21st century. And that’s in part because of threats to religious freedoms in the West — the perception that in places like the United States and Europe — there is a kind of intolerance of Christianity that in some ways bigotry directed against Christians is the last socially acceptable prejudice and that translates to some difficulties in church-state relationships.
That’s part of the picture. But I think the bigger part of the picture is the recognition that every year thousands, tens of thousands, of Christians are being slaughtered around the world. Tens of millions are at risk of arrest, torture, arbitrary detention, physical harassment and so on for nothing other than their identity as Christians. That literal war on Christians has certainly gotten the Vatican’s attention. So, they have been using their various diplomatic entrees to try to raise consciousness about it. Popes have been talking about it. You know, one of the things I think popes do these days is in thinking about where they want to travel is think about “Is there a pocket there of Christians at risk that my presence might be able to help?” So, I think they are in a full, upright and locked position on the question. That said, I would not want to perpetuate a new myth about the global war on Christians which is that there is some big wig out there, whether it’s a pope or a president or a prime minister, who can ride in on a white horse and fix this problem for us.
In the first instance, the fixed of this has to be creating a grassroots culture around the world, in particularly in the West that says we are going to put our money where our mouth is. We are going to use our resources to raise hell about this and to make sure that there is blowback diplomatically, politically, culturally, you know, every time Christians are put in harm’s way.
8) How has writing this book — reporting on Christian persecution — shaped your worldview on the issue?
Well, I think the book is more a product of a new worldview that I acquired of two decades of covering the Vatican and covering the global Catholic Church.
Listen, what I have learned, having grown up in rural western Kansas is that you know, we are all creatures of our environment, and so there was a certain sort of perspective we developed growing up in the United States about what the issues in the church are and you know, what our priorities ought to be and stuff like that. And it sometimes takes stepping outside of your own skin, you know, to bring home this moment of clarity, you know, when you realize that your experiences and your own priorities may not necessarily be how the typical Catholic in sub-Saharan sizes what’s going on in the church or the typical Chaldean Catholic in Iraq or you know, the eastern-ranked Catholic in India.
And so I think that what came out of all that is a kind of root realization that in thinking about the Catholic Church in the 21st century, you really only got two choices: You either ought to think globally or you think dysfunctionally. OK? Those are the only two items on the menu. You know? And I think part of thinking globally is thinking about where Christians are most at risk in this world, OK? And this book is an attempt to tell their story.
