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"God sent a Jew into the world for the Gentiles to know God and be at peace with God," said Charles Colson, introducing Michael Horowitz at the annual William Wilberforce awards dinner the night before the National Prayer Breakfast two years ago. "He sent a Jew into our midst in 1996 to awaken us, a sleeping church."

Horowitz is a man of paradoxes, so much so that though a committed Jew, he was once mistakenly named to a magazine's list of the top ten Christians of the year. Some see him as a brusque PR machine who has latched onto an unlikely cause. Others, like Colson, see him as a person appointed by God for such a time as this. However he is regarded, everyone agrees that in recent years Horowitz has had an explosive impact in motivating the church to advocacy on behalf of its persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and in pushing Congress to pass the International Religious Freedom Act this past fall.

Horowitz became concerned with Christian persecution when he and his wife hosted an Ethiopian Christian refugee, named Getaneh, in their home. They learned Getaneh's story of being beaten and hung upside down while hot oil was poured over his feet because he refused to stop preaching about Jesus. Horowitz began to research the subject, and in a July 5, 1995, editorial in the Wall Street Journal, he denounced a half-dozen cases of Christians being persecuted around the world.

A tireless advocate since, Horowitz has found a ready reception among evangelical Christians, who in turn have organized such activities as the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church and successfully lobbied for the passage of antipersecution legislation.

Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., spoke with Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan years, about his surprising role as a defender of Christians.

Why do many governments around the world see Christians as a threat that needs to be suppressed?
By their very existence, Christian communities are forces for democracy and modernity and thus great threats to tyrants. Christian communities may not think of their prayers as "political" acts of opposition to the state. Nonetheless, the inherent message of Christianity is so clear a call for dignity and freedom and human autonomy as to make it necessarily subversive to tyrants. Our Judeo-Christian faith has taught the most radical political message of all times: the equality of all in the eyes of God. Thug regimes around the world know this and fear Christian communities for being powerful deliverers and exemplars of that divine heresy.

A line in Handel's oratorio Solomon describes the God we worship as one who seeks "love unbought by price or fear." What a subversive notion that is! If you are a regime that relies on bribes and threats to stay in power, brave believing communities prepared to risk all to worship Christ cannot be permitted to remain free.

There is a further reason for today's anti-Christian persecutions. If Christian communities can be wantonly persecuted—if there is a free hunting license on them—their persecutors can control everyone else by saying, "Look, the so-called Christian West doesn't care that we pull fingernails out of bishops. Who do you think will care if we turn on you?" If the West is silent while Christians are persecuted, repressive tyrants are given an easy go at intimidating the rest of their populations.

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March 1 1999, Vol. 43, No. 3