Soviet Christians Assert Legal Rights

In a dramatically bold legal gesture, a group of Soviet Protestants has asked the United Nations to intervene in behalf of victims of religious persecution. Their remarkable thirty-two-page plea, in the form of a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, is perhaps the best authenticated document of Communist repression of the Christian community ever to come out of the U. S. S. R.

“We would not turn to the international organization if we had only the slightest hope that our applications to the government in the U. S. S. R. would have a positive result,” the group declares. “But cruel war against the unregistered congregations widens.”

The letter, which reached the West on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, appeals repeatedly to legal guarantees under Communist law and indicates thorough familiarity with the Soviet penal code. An English translation is being distributed by the European Christian Mission in London.

“We intercede with you, U Thant, to organize a committee for the examination of the condemned believers,” the group pleads.

An appendix identifies 202 Protestants now said to be imprisoned and gives a virtually complete listing of names, addresses, legal citations,Slavic temperament undoubtedly underlies many spontaneous and unnecessary violations of Soviet law. The law and the authorities’ interpretation of it nonetheless represent something considerably less than religious liberty. dates of arrest and sentence, and number of dependents. Most of the alleged offenses took place in 1966, though some are recorded from as late as August of this year. Many more Protestants have been arrested, the letter says, but the information about them could not be collected.

The letter is signed by “The Council of Relatives of Prisoners” and gives a Moscow address to which a reply should be sent. The group is obviously part of the bloc of Protestants who have broken with the so-called Evangelical Christian Baptists sanctioned by Moscow authorities.

The letter charges that the faction is not allowed to have places of worship unless they are registered with the government and that all new congregations that have applied for registration have been refused.

The letter also says that the government has confiscated chapels in at least eighteen cities. Two homes where believers met for worship and prayer were bulldozed. Soviet militia have broken in on services and dispersed or arrested worshipers.

As a result of the intimidation, Protestants have begun to hold services in open woods, but they have been harassed by authorities there, too.

In Kiev alone, the letter declares, there was a wave of eighty-five arrests in ten to fifteen days.

Apartments of believers are searched repeatedly, and children are interrogated and taken from their parents. Prisoners are forbidden to have Bibles. At Barnaul, a religious prisoner is said to have been tortured to death.

Although the letter is a well-authenticated document that deserves sympathetic attention, little is gained by appealing to the U. N. The organization is powerless to intervene in cases where its Declaration on Human Rights has been violated. A U. N. spokesman said its policy is neither to confirm nor to deny receipt of such letters, of which it gets a great many. Normal procedure, he said, is to delete identification and then send the letter to the government concerned.

The letter recalls the incident in Moscow in January, 1963, when thirty-two evangelicals broke into the U. S. Embassy to present a list of religious grievances. The list was sent to Washington and to U. N. headquarters, but its effect has never been officially traced.

The letter is apparently being distributed quite widely in Great Britain. An agency of the British Council of Churches last month reported that it had before it “disturbing evidence of the persecution of Christians in the U.S.S.R.”

The persecution is not limited to Christians. It extends to adherents of the Jewish faith, and Jews in the West, well aware of the suffering, are becoming increasingly vocal about it. They have been purchasing large amounts of newspaper advertising space to call attention to the plight of Soviet Jews.

No corresponding effort is being made in behalf of Soviet Christians, whose plight is as bad or worse. So far, the American religious establishment has settled for exchanges of Communist-approved churchmen as its way of identifying with the Soviet Christian community. The latest such exchange is taking place this fall between the Church of the Brethren in the United States, which sent a three-man team and a translator, and the Russian Orthodox Church, which is scheduled to send a three-man team to the United States this month.

In contrast to American indifference, German Protestant leaders plan extensive research on the persecution of Christians around the world. The plan was prompted by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Christians of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria some months ago.

The persistence of widespread repression of religious activity in the Soviet Union is, of course, an indirect tribute to religious faith and to the believers there.

“The fifty years of Soviet struggle with religion add up to a case study of ideological failure,” says Peter Grose in the New York Times. “It is the doctrine of atheism, not faith in God, that is dying in Soviet Russia today.” He adds that “an intricate police operation is seeking to penetrate and control the church that could not be destroyed.”

Grose thinks the prevalence of middle-aged and elderly persons among the worshipers may not be so significant as it seems; many Soviet citizens, he says, “do not feel like disclosing their convictions until they have reached their professional peak or retired on a pension.” One Western resident of Moscow is quoted as saying he was “willing to bet that fifty years from now those churches will be just as crowded as they are today—and still with old people.”

The perennial plea of Soviet Protestants is for more Bibles. Religious News Service reports that since 1917 the Soviet government has sanctioned only three printings of the complete Bible: 25,000 copies in 1926, another 25,000 in 1956, and 10,000 in 1957. To capitalize on the demand, Soviet government publishers have been issuing various interpretations of scriptural accounts and revised narratives of biblical events.

Bill Kapitaniuk, Canadian-born evangelist of Ukrainian origin, reports that Siberia is experiencing a new surge of Christian faith. The reason, he says, is that believers who were shipped there years ago have influenced those who came later to populate rising cities and industrial areas. Kapitaniuk, who is working with the Slavic Gospel Association, estimates that since his last visit to the Soviet Union, in 1965, about 1,000 new churches have been formed. He adds: “The Communist tactics appear to be a mixture between wanting to crush the Church and destroy it, and yet at the same time not wanting to drive the Church underground where it would be harder to control.”

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

A Southern Baptist church near the Little Rock, Arkansas, Air Force Base lost five families when it decided to pioneer and solicit Negro members. Since then, however, membership and giving have nearly doubled.

The Southern Baptist Convention joined two Negro Baptist denominations in a six-night inter-racial revival in Harlem.

The 400,000-member Baptist association in North Carolina will now require its churches to limit membership to immersed persons, possibly forcing out Myers Park and St. John’s churches in Charlotte.

Fifty persons from eight Baptist denominations met in Chicago to lay plans for a 1968 evangelism congress and the 1969 Crusade of the Americas. The council of the non-participating American Baptist Convention sent best wishes to ABC members involved in the planning.

Baptist Bible Seminary, affiliated with the General Association of Regular Baptists, will move next year from Johnson City, New York, to a 153-acre campus in Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania, purchased from a Roman Catholic seminary.

A Methodist home near Washington, D. C., cut off from federal medicaid for alleged discrimination, was reinstated.

The American Lutheran Church Council will discuss in February background reports on whether to recommend that the denomination join the National Council of Churches in 1968.

The Reformed Churches in the Netherlands synod decided a 1926 declaration of the literal historicity of Genesis 1 and 2 is no longer binding on members; it now permits an understanding of the stories as myths or symbols. An accompanying statement affirmed the authority of Scripture and limited interpretation to the bounds of the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism.

A nationwide evangelism drive by Portugal’s thirty-six Baptist congregations led to 750 converts. Wide publicity in the press was used, and four Lisbon dailies carried news accounts.

Methodists in Cuba will form an autonomous church at a February conference.

PERSONALIA

The Rev. Howard B. Spragg was promoted to executive vice-president of the home-missions board for the United Church of Christ, to replace the retiring Truman Douglass. The press announcement claimed the agency “has led the ecumenical movement in American Protestantism.”

The Rev. Tom Foley, a Presbyterian from Jackson, Missouri, will be first Protestant chaplain at New York’s Kennedy Airport.

Albert H. van den Heuvel, formerly of the World Council of Churches’ youth department, is the new director of the communication department. He is a minister of the Netherlands Reformed Church.

The Rev. Robert Caul of the Graymoor Friars became the second Roman Catholic priest on the faith-and-order staff of the National Council of Churches.

Alvin Plantinga, philosophy teacher at Calvin College (Christian Reformed), won a $10,000 Danforth grant to study the relation between epistemological problems and the nature of scientific hypotheses.

Raymond J. Davis, general director of Sudan Interior Mission, was appointed president of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, which marks its fiftieth anniversary this year.

Church of England vicar Stephen Hopkinson has a hunch that homosexuality may be a socially and morally desirable answer to the population explosion. Honest.

Deaths

MRS. RUTH KERR, 73, Baptist laywoman and president of the Kerr Glass company who founded Westmont College as the Bible Missionary Institute in 1937; in Burbank, California.

HUGH MURCHISON, 71, California stock broker, radio executive, and Presbyterian elder, who served the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles and several other evangelical organizations.

W. P. Baugh, 95, oldest active Anglican priest in Canada until he retired from three rural parishes last year; said never to have taken a vacation; at Morin Heights, Quebec.

MISCELLANY

The World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church will sponsor a joint conference on world economics next April, probably in Africa. The WCC planner is evangelism staffer Philip Potter. “The gap between rich and poor nations” will be a major topic.

Toronto taxi drivers and druggists will hand out cards advertising the suicide-prevention telephone service of “the Samaritans,” led by Anglican priest Andrew Todd.

The Register quotes the archbishop of Quito, Ecuador, as saying that by the end of last month the nation’s Catholic Church had given up more than half its land as part of an agrarian reform program.

Only Muslims in Israeli territory had access to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock for the holy day marking Mohammed’s brief assumption into heaven. The next day, the constituent assembly of the World Islamic League in Mecca urged a holy war to regain the shrine city.

The “Freedom City” begun in Greenville, Mississippi, by National Council of Churches staffers will have fifty families build permanent homes under a $200,000 grant from the war on poverty, plus private gifts. Further east, at Grenada, a Negro Methodist church was burned Sunday, October 29; church officials call it arson.

Georgia’s new Sunday closing law was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, but Governor Lester Maddox may try another version. Maddox reportedly has asked state legislators to pledge not to smoke or drink.

The Montgomery, Alabama, Baptist Association voted to continue the ban on federal or state aid to its hospital.

A House committee killed for this year the proposal to make more long weekends by putting five national holidays on Monday.

Arizona’s Supreme Court approved state welfare payments to the Salvation Army on the grounds that the “true beneficiaries” are poor people, not the Army.

The U. S. Supreme Court reversed three lower-court convictions involving nudist magazines, some of which opponents said were aimed at homosexuals.

The student government at Wheaton College in Illinois pulled out of the U. S. National Student Association because it meddles in partisan politics too much. After CIA support was revealed earlier this year, Brandeis, Amherst, and Michigan also withdrew.

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