R E L I G I O U S
P E R S E C U T I O N:
T H EP R O T E S T O R S
R E L I G I O U SP E R S E C U T I O N:
T H EP R O T E S T O R S
F.B U C K L E Y, J R.
NEW YORK, October 10
As the government hovers over the proposed legislation on religious persecution, the perspective heightens on an ambient anomaly. One human-rights organization estimates that there are two hundred million Christians being persecuted. The most conspicuous American figures who are calling this proto-genocidal phenomenon to public attention are Michael Horowitz, A. M. Rosenthal, Arlen Specter, and Joseph Lieberman.Mr. Horowitz is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served before that as a budget official in the Reagan Administration, notwithstanding that his political convictions are liberal. Horowitz is a give-no-quarter polemicist whose rhetoric is in the tradition of James Carville, though the causes that ignite him are very different. The family of Michael Horowitz escaped from Hitler. He didn't piece it all together -- the meaning of his family's experience and the current situation regarding religious persecution -- until he learned from an Ethiopian man-servant what it can mean to preach the gospel in his country. It is to run the risk, in his case, of having boiling oil poured on the soles of his feet while being whipped by metal cables. The short-form position of Horowitz explaining his defense of persecuted Christians: ``I would be a bar of soap, a lampshade, were it not for the rooted faith of churchgoing Americans.'' In January of 1996 he produced a ``Statement of Conscience'' which has been adopted by the National Association of Evangelicals.
That statement, a story in the Washington Post by Paul Blustein reveals, had a singular effect on Abe Rosenthal, New York Times columnist and former editor. Rosenthal wrote that Horowitz had ``screamed me awake.'' Mr. Rosenthal has now written column after column documenting the persecution of Christians -- and Buddhists -- by Communist and Muslim governments. He has a problem, as do others, in formulating an immediately persuasive political platform to combat the persecutors, but he has won, in his own words, this much at least: ``peace of mind'' -- speaking of which he ends his most recent column, ``On March 16, Chinese police arrested Xu Yongze, a Protestant leader of China's underground churches, his wife, and six other Chinese Christians. The charge was 'disrupting public order.' Nothing was heard from him afterward. Now Compass Direct, a U.S. religious news service, reports that on September 17 he was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp.''
The bill being debated is called the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act, the product of Jewish Sen. Arlen Specter and (finally) Protestant Frank Wolf. It is a rather endearing effort to mount every weapon on behalf of the persecuted, including the kitchen stove. It would set up a White House office instructed to focus on religious persecution and classify its severity. If a country is found guilty, all kinds of sanctions are variously considered, from economic trade to denial of access to the United States. The bill is specific, or tries to be, in designating what kind of export should be expressly forbidden to such countries and, lo! we come upon handcuffs and cattle prods. The latter may require some technological finesse to produce, but one assumes that the know-how to make handcuffs was developed on the second day of the Iron Age.
The Specter - Wolf bill floats about the whole issue, deadly serious and appealing, but using language that would invite chaos. For instance, the bill would deny United States hospitality to anyone ``responsible'' for acts of torture or repression of religious communicants, which takes us from the man who poured the boiling oil on the Ethiopian up to the man who sentenced him up to the governor up to the emperor. At Nuremberg devolution of responsibility was attempted, but the prosecution would have none of it: Hermann Goering may never have stepped foot in a concentration camp, but he would be found guilty, whatever effort it took to formulate the exact crime he was guilty of (Nullum crimen, sine lege -- if it's really bad, there's got to be a law against it). And then there are the exceptions to be made if the President decrees a security interest. And so on: almost certainly an unworkable bill.
But honorable in its provenance and blessed in its purpose. Which brings us to the fourth humanitarian Jewish entrepreneur, Sen. Lieberman. In his statement on religious persecution he quotes Paul Wolfowitz, former U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, who ``suggested that the main goal of foreign policy in the days ahead should be to make sure the twenty-first century is not a repeat of the twentieth century. . . . according to some credible reports, more Christians have died because of their religious beliefs in the twentieth century than in the first nineteen after the birth of Jesus.''
But Rosenthal is correct. We want more merely than peace of mind.
