CT Institute: Freedoms under Fire

The end of innocents: A murdered chilid found on a Rio de Janeiro beach, likely the victim of “death squads.”

Despite communism’s decline, torture and persecution continue.

Talk of human rightes can make you either shudder or yawn. On the one hand, news of human-rights violations seldom leaves us unmoved. It is hard to hear of torture, unjust imprisonment, or religious persecution without an involuntary wince—or a prayer.

On theother hand, discussion of human-rights theory may seem like a passionless exercise best left to political pundits. Its connection to our daily lives or the imperatives of the gosple is not always obvious.

But we must combine the visceral with the thoughtful. We need to become both compassionate and knowledgeable.

The conventional wisdom is that conservative Christians should not be concerned about human rights because human rights isan agenda item of the political Left. But a little research shows that human rights are violated by governments both Left and Right, and that one of the most frequent violations concern religious liberties.

Consider these unsettling facts:

• More people have been killed for their faith in Christ in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen. This is according to statistician David Barrett.

• Despite the breakup of the Soviet bloc, worldwide human-rights violations continue there and elsewhere. In 1990, according to Amnesty International (AI), some 80 countries held prisoners of conscience—jailed solely for the peaceful exercise of their basic human rights. AI reported torture or ill treatment of prisoners in over 100 countries; disappearances or secret detentions in more than 25.

• Children are not immune to the violence. The British group Jubilee Campaign reports that homeless children in Brazil are frequent targets of “death squads” who kill and, in some cases, mutilate beyond recognition. Street children in Guatemala are regularly attacked, tortured, and killed by police.

These examples represent a bare sampling. As articles in this CT Institute demonstrate, persecution and oppression can be found on virtually every continent. If we lived with daily awareness of all the abuses, we would be unable to sleep.

But beyond piling up horror stories and evoking compassionate action, there is a need to look at the larger issues. If freedoms are under fire around the world, we need to ask why. We need to be reminded what those freedoms and basic rights are, how they can be protected, and, in some cases, reclaimed.

Concern with human rights has a long history in the pages of CT. This magazine’s inaugural issue contained an extended editorial on the topic of human rights and religious freedom, by CT’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry. Free persons, he wrote over three decades ago, “do not long remain free unless they understand what freedom is and promote it with an enthusiasm that exceeds the vigor of untruth.”

Religious persecution is the human-rights violation that will strike the closest to most readers’ hearts and the one we give the most attention to in the pages that follow. This is not to say it is the only human right Christians should care about. But it is the “first” freedom and a paradigm for thinking about other human rights.

The contributors to this special section do not all agree on the nature and definition of rights. But all believe that human rights are central to the working out of God’s purposes for all humanity.

CT senior writer Tim Stafford begins by telling how the torture of a Kenyan friend put a human face on the previously impersonal concept of human rights. Commentator George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center explores what rights are—and are not—at the end of what he calls “this bloodiest of centuries.” He also explores why belief in a Creator stands at the foundation of any effective scheme of protecting human rights. Diane Knippers of the Institute on Religion and Democracy explores the reasons for religious persecution and helps assess religious liberty’s newest threat—resurgent Islam. Fuller Theological Seminary president-elect Richard Mouw helps us understand God’s “unassailable ‘entitlement’ to our praise and obedience.” When it comes to freedom of conscience, he asks, “How Christian is the UN declaration of rights?” CT project editor Thomas Giles gives readers practical advice on using publicity as a lever in working for the release of the persecuted. And Carl F. H. Henry reminds us in a concluding interview that “the God of the Bible has much to say about the abuse of rights.”

By Timothy K. Jones.

For three years, Kimani wa Nyoike and I attended a Bible study together, often meeting in his home. He was every inch a politician: tall, charming, brilliant, ambitious. He could have been dropped over northern Canada by parachute, my wife and I joked, and within a year been elected president of the Eskimos.

But at the time, ten years ago, it looked as if Kimani would never get to employ his talents. He was a member of the Kenyan Parliament, a body so impotent that no member dared make even the most glancing criticism of the president. Kenya’s one-party political system had a stranglehold on change. Only sycophants would get ahead—and Kimani was no sycophant.

Our group studied the Book of Daniel. I had always read it for lessons in personal courage. For the first time I read it as a lesson in politics. To Kimani, and to others in our group holding politically sensitive positions, Daniel’s predicaments were as fresh as today’s newspaper—fresher, since they were uncensored. Again and again, Daniel and his friends were called to maintain their fundamental independence while serving within an ungodly political structure.

That was exactly my friends’ dilemma. All of them remembered a time—the 1969 Oathing Crisis—when Christians had been brutally beaten and sometimes killed for their unwillingness to take a quasi-governmental, quasi-tribal loyalty oath.

While I found it fascinating to discuss and pray over these issues, they still retained a thin shadow of the hypothetical. The fear of violent reprisal is just not easy for an American, born and raised in freedom, to understand.

Bravery And Fear

I returned to Kenya for a visit two years ago. On the first day my wife and I met Kimani, and we talked over tea in a downtown hotel. He had been in prison—solitary confinement—for more than a year. He had been tortured—“but I don’t like to talk about that,” he said, waving his hand as though batting away a fly. While in prison he contracted malaria, and without adequate medical treatment had lost 70 pounds. Not wanting a corpse on its hands, the government finally freed him, but not before using legal machinations to strip his family of much of its property.

Something in his manner told me he had changed. I felt a depth and a detachment that I attributed to suffering. Some good had come of it, he said: With only a Bible to read, he had consumed the entire Scriptures several times.

Another friend I visited had spent a lesser time in prison—just two weeks. Bedan Mbugua had succeeded me as editor of the Kenyan youth magazine I helped launch. Subsequently he had started a magazine for the National Christian Council of Kenya. When his magazine reported on election fraud, the government banned the publication and jailed Bedan. The flimsy charges were ultimately dropped, but Bedan was out of a job—and given warnings where his conduct might lead. We sat over a cup of tea—always, in Kenya, you drink tea—and he told me humorously how he had learned to eat his food quickly in prison, because other inmates would steal it from his plate.

Bedan had made a long trip in from western Kenya to see me. The only person brave enough to give Bedan a job was Alexander ‘Muge, an Anglican bishop. He had put Bedan to work in his communications department. During my visit, ’Muge was in the news nearly every day, openly criticizing the government’s dishonesty. No politician dared to do that.

On the evening we were to leave, news came on the radio: ’Muge had been killed. It was reported as an Vestige of oppression automobile accident, but as my Kenyan friends told me, no one in Kenya would believe that it was anything but murder.

Driving to the airport that night, I feared we might be caught in riots, killed in a crossfire. As it happened, the streets were quiet and our flight took off as normal. The next day, in London, my wife and I could find only one small paragraph in the newspapers about ’Muge’s suspicious death.

Torture and death, bravery and fear in Kenya had shrunk to nothing. Seen from a global perspective, they all but disappeared.

But for me, they did not quite disappear. I had never had a friend imprisoned or tortured. When I returned to the United States, I found that the term human rights took on new meaning. It had acquired a human face.

“Rights” are highly conceptual, but evil is not. In actual, human communities, the tendency to do evil is strong, particularly for the powerful. Around the world powerful people imprison, torture, even kill those who get in their way. What stops them? What can shield the weak? Not guns, in most cases. The strongest weapon most people have is this thin tissue of language—“rights” language, which asserts a moral consensus. It is not much in a locale where the powerful are accustomed to abusing others. Yet even there, affirmations of rights may make the powerful hesitate before they harm.

Evangelicals usually focus on a narrower category: religious rights. We say little in defense of purely political prisoners. To some extent, our priorities are right. If we do not stand by our sisters and brothers, who will?

Yet, we do not stand merely on the side of fellow believers. As Muslims stand on the side of fellow Muslims, Jews on the side of fellow Jews, we stand also on the side of good versus evil. So we ought to care about human rights in a much broader context than the merely religious, for evil operates in a much broader context.

Rights language provides a tool for restraining evil. This is not to say that we unthinkingly favor anyone who claims his or her rights were violated. Nor is it to say that the language of rights is the only way to stand against evil. Nevertheless, it can and does restrain evil. It gives me a way to defend my friends halfway around the world, and a language to ask others to join me in that defense. It offers a way of crying out for the weak, warning the thug, and protecting the innocent in an evil time. It is only a tool, but against others’—and our own—attraction to evil, we need every tool possible.

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