The musings and meandering thoughts of a crotchety old man as he observes life in the world and in a small, rural town in South East Nebraska. My Pledge-Nulla dies sine linea-Not a day with out a line.
27 December 2019
The Coming Oppression Of Christians
I am convinced that it's not just 'oppression' but outright persecution that is coming. From The American Conservative By Rod Dreher About an hour ago, I finished writing what will probably be the most
intense chapter of my forthcoming book about the lessons for us from the
experience of those persecuted by Soviet-bloc communism. It’s a chapter
on the meaning of suffering. It consists almost entirely of stories of
Christians who endured persecution, even torture, at the hands of
Communists. Most of it comes from original interviews I conducted, but
several occasions, I draw from testimonies of former prisoners that have
been published elsewhere. For example, this from an interview Father
Gheorghe Calciu, a Romanian Orthodox priest, gave in 1996 about the year
he spent in a dungeon cell caring for a fellow Christian who was dying
from tuberculosis and the battering he had received under torture:
They
had beaten him on his chest, on his back and had destroyed his lungs.
But he prayed the whole day. He never said anything bad against his
torturer, and he spoke to us about Jesus Christ. All the while, we did
not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the
justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he
became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and
would die.
… After he died, every one of us felt that
something in us had died. We understood that, sick as he was and in our
care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell. Then
we were alone without Constantine Oprisan.
China
will rewrite the Bible and Quran to ‘reflect socialist values’ amid
crackdown on the country’s religious groups, a report has revealed.
New
editions must not contain any content that goes against the beliefs of
the Communist Party, according to a top party official. Paragraphs
deemed wrong by the censors will be amended or re-translated.
Though
the Bible and Quran were not mentioned specifically, the party called
for a ‘comprehensive evaluation of the existing religious classics
aiming at contents which do not conform to the progress of the times’.
The
order was given in November during a meeting held by the Committee for
Ethnic and Religious Affairs of the National Committee of the Chinese
People’s Political Consultative Conference, which oversees the ethnic
and religious matters in China.
“Right
now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church
are the Chinese,” a senior Vatican official has said. Bishop
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social
Sciences, praised the Communist state as “extraordinary”, saying: “You
do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take
drugs”. Instead, there is a “positive national conscience”.
This
is important to know — which side churchmen like Bishop Sanchez are
one. Don’t you dare forget this. Nor dare you forget the courageous
witness of Christians like Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired archbishop
of Hong Kong, who is not having this Francis regime propaganda. Excerpt:
As
he has in the past, Zen criticized [Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal
Pietro] Parolin and his methods, saying “nobody can be sure” of what he
wants at a given moment.
“It’s a real mystery how a man of the
Church, given all his knowledge of China, of the Communists, could do
such a thing as he’s doing now,” Zen said, adding that in his view, “the
only explanation is not faith. It’s a diplomatic success. Vainglory.”
Zen
also criticized Francis’s approach, arguing that in his view, given the
pope’s moves on China, “he has low respect for his predecessors.” “He
is shutting down everything done by John Paul II and by Pope Benedict,”
he said, accusing Francis’s allies of giving “lip service” when they
insisted the pope’s moves are in continuity with his predecessors. “But
that’s an insult,” Zen said.
I’m telling you, folks: watch China.
I believe it is going to be a model for the West in the decades to
come, as we move into what I call “soft totalitarianism” — “soft”
because unlike in China, I don’t think our governments will resort to
prison camps, but I do believe they will adapt Chinese methods of social
control, e.g., the social credit system. I’ll explain why in the book.
Today The Guardian, which is The New York Times of the UK — that is, the mouthpiece for mainstream Left opinion — used its Christmas Day editorial to denounce conservative Christians. “The
battle to defend the rights and human dignity of all, irrespective of
gender, race or sexuality, is having to be fought all over again,” the
editorial warns, and concludes with praise of left-wing Christians,
urging secular progressives to join with them to resist the Religious
Right.
One is not surprised by The Guardian taking this
view, of course, but it is interesting to consider it in light of
China’s announced move to revise Christianity and Islam to harmonize
with the dogmas of Chinese communism — that is to say, to reflect “the
progress of the times.” We will see, and indeed are seeing, a similar
push in the West to compel Christianity to be the Democratic Party At
Prayer.
Of course it should not be the Republican Party At Prayer
either — and this is a problem for us traditionalist Christians. We
cannot avoid the fact that there are political consequences to the
Christian faith, but we must always work to keep it straight in our
heads that our politics must come from our faith, not the other way
around. Far too many American Christians of both the right and the left
get this backwards. Political Christianity cannot be true to itself and be fully a phenomenon of the contemporary Left or the contemporary Right.
Our research found that white evangelical Protestants believe atheists and Democrats would strip away their rights
Political
scientist Ryan Burge and I ran a non-probability sample survey from May
17-18 of 1,010 U.S. Protestants, conducted online through Qualtrics
Panels and weighted to resemble the diversity of Protestants in the
country. White evangelical Protestants made up 60 percent of our sample.
Of
those white evangelical Protestants, we found that 60 percent believed
that atheists would not allow them First Amendment rights and liberties.
More specifically, we asked whether they believed atheists would
prevent them from being able to “hold rallies, teach, speak freely, and
run for public office.” Similarly, 58 percent believed “Democrats in
Congress” would not allow them to exercise these liberties if they were
in power. By contrast, 23 percent think “Republicans in Congress” would
not respect their rights; those were primarily the views of a small
contingent of white evangelical Democrats in the sample.
These
are extraordinary proportions for a core question in democratic
societies: Are citizens willing to extend rights to groups they dislike?
If not, the political process can no longer fairly resolve disputes and
the nation may turn to violence — just as far-right commentators and
public officials are predicting.
Djupe says
emphatically that white Evangelicals are wrong about this, and cites
survey data to support his point. He also cites survey data showing that
white Evangelicals are more likely to strip atheists of those liberties
than the other way around.
I haven’t seen any criticism (yet) of
the Djupe piece, and I’m eager to read the informed commentary about it
(so post it if you find any from an academic source). I certainly don’t
have a problem in theory believing that white Evangelicals and other
right-of-center Christians are deeply fearful of what a secular left
regime would do to them. I am not an Evangelical, and heaven knows I’m
not stockpiling weapons and food to prepare for enduring leftist
tyranny, as one far-right conspiracy theorist preacher quoted in the Djupe piece says he’s doing.
But
I am confident that oppression, even persecution, is coming, and I
believe that pieces like Djupe’s serve both to discourage reasonable
critical awareness, and to lay the groundwork for secular leftists and
their progressive Christian allies to justify these measures. I’m not
saying Djupe intends to do that, but I think that’s the cumulative
effect pieces like this, and the Guardian editorial, will have.
To be clear, I see nothing wrong in principle with criticizing
conservative or traditionalist Christians, but the steady drumbeat of
demonization of them — of us; I am one of them — matters, especially as
Christianity fades as a force in our secularizing societies. As FiveThirtyEight reported recently, Millennials are leaving religion and will almost certainly not be coming back:
Why
does it matter if millennials’ rupture with religion turns out to be
permanent? For one thing, religious involvement is associated with a
wide variety of positive social outcomes like increased interpersonal trust and civic engagement that are hard to reproduce in other ways. And this trend has obvious political implications. As we wrote a few months ago, whether people are religious is
increasingly tied to — and even driven by — their political identities.
For years, the Christian conservative movement has warned about a tide of rising secularism, but research has suggested that the strong association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this divide.
And if even more Democrats lose their faith, that will only exacerbate
the acrimonious rift between secular liberals and religious
conservatives.
Of
course, millennials’ religious trajectory isn’t set in stone — they may
yet become more religious as they age. But it’s easier to return to
something familiar later in life than to try something completely new.
And if millennials don’t return to religion and instead begin raising a
new generation with no religious background, the gulf between religious
and secular America may grow even deeper.
“The strong
association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be
fueling this divide.” Does it not occur to these researchers and those
that report on them that the strong association between secularism and
the Democratic Party may equally be fueling this divide? I
don’t think it does. Because academics and journalists are heavily
liberal and secular, they assume that secular liberalism is normative.
They don’t see people like me and a number of my friends: theologically
and morally conservative Christians who are alienated from the
Republican Party — typically for reasons of economics, or the
environment, or war — but who feel compelled to vote Republican because
we are offended and even frightened by the rising tide of anti-Christian
spite on the Left.
About the coming oppression, I emphatically do
not believe that all of this, or even most of it, will come from the
state, either. I think it will be primarily — at least at first —
through actions by private institutions and businesses, like the disgusting, outrageous move Nordstroms in Seattle made the other day:
For
19 years, 85-year-old Dick Clarke has raised money for The Salvation
Army during the holiday season — 18 of them ringing a bell beside a red
kettle for donations outside Nordstrom downtown Seattle store. He loved
the conversations and the feeling of giving back through the more than
$100,000 he collected. He volunteered five days a week, six hours a day.
“The best thing I like about Thanksgiving is the next day I go to work,” said the retired teacher and principal.
Or
that’s how he used to feel. This year, Nordstrom told The Salvation
Army it would no longer allow solicitation in front of its doors.
Beyond
stating that policy, Nordstrom spokeswoman Jennifer Tice Walker did not
answer questions about the change. But Clarke said he was told in a
meeting last week with head of stores Jamie Nordstrom that LGBTQ
employees said The Salvation Army’s presence made them uncomfortable.
The
sacred LGBTQs! Anything they ask for, they must receive, according to
Woke Capitalism, because their feelings take precedence over everything.
Note well — seriously, pay attention to this — that no law compelled Nordstrom to do this. And: there is nothing that Donald Trump or any other politician could have done to have stopped this —
unless, of course, you want the state to have the power to dictate to
private business who they must allow to stand outside their stores
collecting money. We do not want that.
Take a look at this local TV news report about Clarke
— from 2016 — and realize that this dear old man was driven off the
street because LGBTQ employees say he makes them “uncomfortable,” simply
because he rings bells for the Salvation Army.
It is vitally
important to pay attention to the narratives that the political,
cultural, and economic elites tell themselves about the world — and the
narratives they teach to the rising elites in their institutions. Take a
look at this 2017 op-ed from the Harvard Crimson by Laura Nicolae, a student there whose father and mother lived under Communist persecution in Romania. Excerpt:
Roughly 100 million people
died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell
their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a
fad, and their deaths are not a joke.
Last month marked 100 years
since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you
precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus
paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its
authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the
world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most
destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized
narrative. Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché
Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s
declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The
new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in
these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many
students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe
about the world.
After spending four years on a campus saturated
with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates
will graduate with the impression that communism represents a
light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically
violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.
Statistics show
that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing
past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that
communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George
W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who
killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.
I
had a personal conversation with a Millennial the other day, a friend
of some local friends, who was visiting for the holidays. She mentioned
to me in casual conversation that she identifies with Communism. “It’s a
beautiful dream, that everybody can be equal,” she told me. Then she
asked me about what I do for a living. I told her about the book I’m
working on. Get this: she is a college-educated American, and had no idea at all that there was such a thing as the gulag. I could hardly believe it!
But I’m not as well educated about Millennial views on such matters as I should be. The 2019 report of the Victims Of Communism Foundation,
a US government educational NGO established by a 1993 act of Congress,
shows that only 57 percent of Millennials polled believe that the
Declaration of Independence “guarantees freedom and equality” better
than the Communist Manifesto. This, versus 94 percent of the Silent
Generation.
We are losing the young. This is going to have massive
consequences for our liberties, especially religious liberty, in the
years and decades to come.
This Millennial woman brought to mind
the students of a humanities professor from a heartland state college,
who said to me on the phone earlier this year that when she was at Yale
working on an advanced degree, fellow students shut her down every time
Marxism came up, and she tried to talk about life in the USSR. She said:
“I saw in them actual rage. They didn’t want to hear it.”
She told me her students are all fresh-faced, corn-fed white kids, and they all think socialism is peachy. She said:
Some
people tell me I’m being alarmist, but more and more agree with me.
Yesterday a colleague who teaches physics wrote me from [a coastal
state]. He told me that he wanted to speak out against [the campus
left-wing mob] but is terrified of becoming a pariah – not for his job,
because he’s tenured, but because all his friends would leave him.
In
my situation, at my university, I have to live an intellectual and
spiritual life underground. I’m silent about so many things with
[students and colleagues] because I know that they would honestly and
sincerely see me as some kind of monster because of the things I
believe, which are in no way radical.
In our phone
interview, she told me that she cannot stand Donald Trump, but has come
to see supporting him as the only way she can register any kind of
resistance against the left-wing campus commissars. She also said that
people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of
social media. But yeah, it’s the Republican Party, and
conservative Christians, that is entirely to blame for driving people
into secularism. Tell me another one.
To repeat: I don’t believe
in stockpiling weapons, food, and crackpottery like that. But I believe
that traditional Christians are fools if they can’t read the signs of
the times and make political decisions based on what they see. And as I
wrote in The Benedict Option, and will elaborate on with much greater detail in my next book (out September 2020), I strongly
believe that traditional Christians had better start preparing
themselves, their families, and their local communities for the long
spiritual struggle ahead. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:
There
always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here
such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century
is possible everywhere on earth.
You had better believe it. You had better not only believe it, but also act on that belief, while there is still time.
Sorry, I made a comment forgetting this wasn't Rod Dreher's website. My point was prepping is not "crackpottery" but what Americans with common sense have long done because we have natural disasters from just weather often, and this is what people should do, prep for those times. That being said, we have enough kookoos agitating that civil unrest could certainly happen and disruptions to the food chain are not impossible. Having backup access to water and food is just plain old American common sense, which Rod Dreher thinks is kooky. Perhaps Mr. Dreher's people never experienced shortages or the Great Depression and always had plenty.
Comments are subject to deletion if they are not germane. I have no problem with a bit of colourful language, but blasphemy or depraved profanity will not be allowed. Attacks on the Catholic Faith will not be tolerated. Comments will be deleted that are republican (Yanks! Note the lower case 'r'!), attacks on the legitimacy of Pope Francis as the Vicar of Christ (I know he's a material heretic and a Protector of Perverts, and I definitely want him gone yesterday! However, he is Pope, and I pray for him every day.), the legitimacy of the House of Windsor or of the claims of the Elder Line of the House of France, or attacks on the legitimacy of any of the currently ruling Houses of Europe.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I made a comment forgetting this wasn't Rod Dreher's website. My point was prepping is not "crackpottery" but what Americans with common sense have long done because we have natural disasters from just weather often, and this is what people should do, prep for those times. That being said, we have enough kookoos agitating that civil unrest could certainly happen and disruptions to the food chain are not impossible. Having backup access to water and food is just plain old American common sense, which Rod Dreher thinks is kooky. Perhaps Mr. Dreher's people never experienced shortages or the Great Depression and always had plenty.
ReplyDelete