PERSECUTION RISING?

This is what the Lord says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;ask for the ancient paths,ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.”

• Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

A few days ago, I read an essay from Rod Dreher’s “The American Conservative” titled “You Cannot Imagine the Worst.” 

The inspirational seed for the essay came from some e-mail correspondence between Dreher and a scientist who lived a good part of his early life in a Soviet-bloc country. The scientist was responding to a question Dreher was pondering out loud about whether, given the current anti-religious climate in the United States, persecution of religious believers was going to increase to intolerable levels. Dreher wasn’t sure that the threat to religious liberty was that dire. Like most Americans, he holds a firm belief in the idea that our Constitution and its First Amendment would protect us if things ever got out of hand.

The scientist, who is now a United States citizen, responded to Dreher in very stark terms:

“I think that you, and most of Americans, deeply misunderstand human nature; what it really is capable of. That’s what I loved about Americans. Unbounded and unfounded optimism, always willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. No longer. I see pent-up hatred all around me. People are looking for an outlet to vent it. Both sides. Myself included.”

He concluded his response to Dreher with a warning:

“I think that you cannot imagine the worst because it looks so normal outside. One can be hauled to the gallows even when it’s sunny and warm. It’s hard to explain but when I look out and it’s all beautiful I always think about what it is trying to hide, what’s in store.”

I now find myself asking the question – Are we Christians, pariticularly socially Conservative Christians, going to face increasing persecution in the not too distant future?

There’s a part of me that says that something like this could never happen in America. We have Constituional protections and, morever, we are a civilized people. We would never do something so abohorrent to such treasured American principles. We also place high value on societal peace and harmony. Yet, as much as I would like to believe the best of us, our own history warns us that we are not always as noble as we’d like to think we are.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln, who was only 28 years old at the time, spoke to a group called “The Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illiinois. The title of his address was in part a statement and in part an encoded question of sorts – “The perpetuation of our political institutions.”

Today, the address has come down to us with the simple title “The Lyceum Address.”

Lincoln began his remarks by reminding his audience of the providential history that had formed us a nation – “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.”

How, then, should such a nation preserve those highly prized freedoms? What is such a nation’s “task of gratitude” to those who bestowed those gifts and what is such a nation’s responsibility to posterity? How do we preserve them? At this point, Lincoln did not mince words. They were stark, foreboding words, but they had the ring of truth that still sounds with clarity and truth today, almost two hudred years after they were spoken:

“How then shall we perform it?–At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Lincoln, like most Americans, was an optimist at heart. He believe in the nobility of our national charter. He believed in the nobility of the American people. But, knowing he would be remiss in his duty, he spoke the following ominous words of warning:

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.”

Less than twenty-five years after Lincoln addressed those gathered at the Lyceum, America, the land that had been so blessed, was at war with itself.

Today, we in America find ourselves at another crossroad. We are the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. We are the most powerful nation in the world. Our culture is omnipresent. Everyone in the world, it seems, wants to be like us. We can travel the world; we can communicate with electronic devices that give us access to information that no civilization has ever had. 

Yet, as it was in Lincoln’s time, there are ominous signs on the horizon. I’m seventy-seven years old now. I’ve seen America in good times and bad. I’ve lived through the sixties, the Vietnam War, the racial divisions. I’ve lived through them and learned through experience that we Americans were somehow willing to find our way through these times, to solve what seemed to be intractable problems, to compromise, to dig our way out of deep holes in our society. But, there’s something very different about our current divisions. The hate is becoming increasingly bitter. The political divisions are becoming deeper. The chasm between those who profess faith, particularly Conservative Christianity, and those who are openly hostile to that faith is widening. 

In the light of Lincoln’s 1838 warning, I find myself asking what things might look like in the United States in the next twenty-five years. Have our political, social, and religious divides become so deep that there’s no turning back? Is a wave of Chrisitian persecution looming here in the United States. Is national suicide on our horizon?

“Such ideas are preposterous,” you say. We’re Americans. We’re civilized. We would never destroy ourseleves. We would nver persecutre anyone who disagrees with us poltically or religiously. 

That, I contend, is an exercise in self-deception. As much as we think we’d never stoop to such levels, history, expecially the history of the twentieth century, stands as a powerful witness against us.

A few years ago, I read Elie Wiesel’s “All Rivers Run to the Sea.” It’s as moving as any biographical work I’ve ever read. Wiesel was born in the small village of Sighet, Romania in the late 1920’s. In the 1930’s he undertook religious studies at a yeshiva near his hometown. Life seemed to hold great promise for Elie. In 1940, things changed dramatically. Hungary annexed the village of Sighet. Elie and his family were forced to live in Jewish ghettos. Within four years, things got immeasaurably worse. Hungary made a political agreement with Nazi Germany that allowed the Nazis to deport Jews living in Sighet to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The results were as predictable as they were tragic. By 1945, almost all of Elie’s family had been murdered. Only Elie and his two older sisters were liberated.

Some in Sighet saw the tragic events on the horizon even before they happened. There was a man in Sighet that everyone knew as “Moishe the Beadle (a minor religious official).” Some called him “Moishe the Madman.” He kept trying to tell his fellow villagers that the German soldiers who occupied Sighet in 1944 weren’t there for some noble purpose. The people didn’t believe him at first. The Germans were often seen handing out chocolate to the children. Any time Moishe would plead with them that people were being taken away, never to return,  they would respond, “These are the people who have given us Goethe and Schiller. They would never harm us.”

How tragically wrong they were. How prophetic were Moishe’s warnings.

Years after he was liberated, Wiesel wrote about those tragic years. Like any reasonable person, he asked how somethng like this could happen. How could one of the most civilized nations on the planet have stooped to such barbarity? Was it just a few cohorts of uncivilized barbarians who were responsible for all the evil?  Elie argued otherwise, noting the following: “I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor’s system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals.” 

While many refused to bow to the evil and preferred death at the hands of the nazis, far too many intellectuals, those who had positions of prestiege and power in society, became inteimately involved in the evil. Wiesel framed his observation in the form of a question:

“On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant.”

Hate isn’t the exclusive purview of the uneducated and unsophisticated. The well educated, intellectuals, and society’s elite citizens are every bit as capable of great evil as any other setment of society. In fact, they can be even more dangerous. First, the evil promoted by such groups develops compelling ideologies to butresss their hate. Second, they almost always hold powerful places in our social structures. They’re leader, movers, and shakers. Hence, they have the power to implement their ideologies. Third, they have clever ways of masking their hate. Ther agenda is always shrouded in the lie that they want what is best for every citizen.  Fourth, and I believe most important, there is a visceral hatred of Christianity, particularly Conservative Christianity, at the heart of their agenda.

While I can’t see twenty-five years into the future, I can sound the warning. We Americans aren’t immune to such evil. Societies every bit as civilzed as ours have done monstrous things. Germans have done it. Russians have done it. The Chinese and the Japanese have, as well as Cambodians, Syrians, Iranians. The list of shame seems endless.

Of course it can happen here in the United States. We can pretend it’s not possible, but that would be an exercise in self-deception. Jesus himself said “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15:18 – New International Version)

In seeing all of these unfold, I feel the need to sound the alarm, to act, so to speak, as a watchman in what has become a national wlderness. 

The warning signs are there. The national atmosphere is filled with hate and rage. If we continue along this disastrous path, it will explode. We will, as Lincoln feared, commit national suicide.