{"id":3561,"date":"2006-03-30T15:43:19","date_gmt":"2006-03-30T15:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/christians-lions-redux.html"},"modified":"2006-03-30T15:43:19","modified_gmt":"2006-03-30T15:43:19","slug":"christians-lions-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/christians-lions-redux.html","title":{"rendered":"Christians, lions, redux."},"content":{"rendered":"

An auxiliary bishop from Iraq speaks:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Baghdad\u2019s Auxiliary Bishop Andreas Abouna has given his bleakest assessment yet of the situation in Iraq, speaking of the despair that is driving more and more Christians to leave the country. Describing a worsening of the security situation since last December\u2019s parliamentary elections, the Chaldean prelate told how people were living in fear of their lives. Speaking to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Bishop Abouna said: \u201cThe Christians feel desperate and so many are leaving. In their hearts they do not want to leave the country, but because of the situation, they prefer to be outside Iraq.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He explained: \u201cSecurity is now very bad. There are a lot of police in Iraq, especially around Baghdad \u2013 you can find them everywhere and they are increasing all the time. The problem is that the quality of the policing is indifferent. Sometimes people feel afraid because \u2013 more so than before \u2013 they do not feel secure.\u201d Stressing that Christians have suffered no worse than others, Bishop Abouna said: \u201cWe still hope that Iraq will rise again but it is very difficult when we have a government who cannot decide anything. Can you imagine what life is like without any real form of government?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The bishop added: \u201cChristians are getting less and less. When you look inside the churches, they are full of Christians. But when you go outside you feel that Christians are finished in Iraq.\u201d Latest estimates give the number of Christians in the country as about 750,000, down from more than one million before the allied invasion.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A piece from the infamous new issue of The New Republic <\/em>looks at the problem. (Piece not online, I don’t think.)<\/p>\n

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But, however much the clergy may deny it, Iraqi Christians suffer for their faith. Along with kidnappings and assassinations, church bombings\u2014beginning with the destruction of five churches in August 2004\u2014have become a staple of Christian life in Iraq. To disguise their faith, Christian women, particularly in Iraq\u2019s south, tuck their hair under hijabs, while fewer and fewer attend church, performing Mass in homes and sometimes, like their ancient Christian ancestors, in crypts instead. Even the Kurds, so often depicted as saints in Iraq\u2019s morality tale, have taken to pummeling Christians; the Kurdish religious affairs minister said last year that \u201cthose who turn to Christianity pose a threat to society.\u201d Commenting on a recent pogrom against Christian students in Mosul, Yonadam Kanna, the only Christian elected to Iraq\u2019s new parliament, says, \u201cThe fanatics blame us for doing nothing.They blame us for being Christian.\u201d <\/p>\n

The blame accrues, in part, because of real and imagined ties to the West and to the Western power occupying Iraq. There is, in truth, a cultural affinity between Iraqi Christians, many of whom speak English (and, as such, account for a large percentage of the U.S. military\u2019s interpreters), and the mostly Christian soldiers occupying their country. \u201c[Local Christians] were very supportive of having us in Mosul,\u201d says Colonel Mike Meese, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in the heavily Christian city. \u201cThey\u2019d have our soldiers go to Mass with them.\u201d But, as soon as their American protectors departed, the city\u2019s Christians became targets\u2014their churches sacked and their archbishop kidnapped. In Baghdad, too, insurgents routinely execute Christians who work alongside the Americans. Threatened by her neighbors, a Christian friend of mine who worked in the Green Zone quit her job and today rarely leaves her house. <\/p>\n

To the lengthy indictment of Christians, their persecutors have also added the charge of proselytizing. Unlike American soldiers, who mean to save Iraqi lives, the American evangelicals who followed on their heels mean to save Iraqi souls. There is a difference. Evangelizing to Iraqis carries with it risks that evangelizing to, say, Latin Americans does not. The infusion of pamphlets and missionaries from organizations like the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention enrages Iraqi Muslims, who, Iraqi Christian leaders claim, increasingly conflate their congregants with \u201cthe crusaders\u201d\u2014and, too often, treat them as such.\u201cThe evangelicals have caused such problems for us,\u201d says Kanna.\u201cThey make the Sunni and Shia furious.\u201d <\/p>\n

Even though Iraq\u2019s Christians suffer in the name of their American co-religionists, their fate seems not to have made the slightest impression on much of the evangelical establishment. Their websites and promotional literature advertise the importance of creating new Christian communities in Iraq while mostly ignoring the obligation to save ancient ones. Nor, with a few exceptions, have mainstream church leaders in the United States broached the subject, either. Dr. Carl Moeller, the president of Open Doors USA, an organization that supports persecuted Christians abroad, pins the blame on Christianity\u2019s own sectarian rifts. \u201cThe denominations in Iraq aren\u2019t recognized by Americans,\u201d he explains.\u201cThe underlying attitude is, \u2018They\u2019re not us.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And from the Weekly Standard, <\/em>"The New Roman Lions"<\/a><\/p>\n

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A BROAD CONSENSUS EXISTS through much of the Islamic world that apostates from the faith deserve to be killed. This consensus could be glimpsed in Abdul Rahman’s case, where the judge, Ansarullah Mawlavezada, said<\/a>, "In this country we have the perfect constitution. It is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished." Even the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, expected to take a more moderate stance, called for Abdul Rahman’s punishment<\/a>, claiming that he clearly violated Islamic law.<\/p>\n

But apostasy laws stretch far beyond Afghanistan. At least 14 Islamic countries make conversion out of Islam illegal. The crime is punishable by death in at least eight of these states, either through explicit anti-apostasy laws or the broader offense of blasphemy.<\/p>\n

Official proceedings against those who convert out of Islam are rare, at least in part because most of those who leave Islam choose to keep it secret. More often the government looks the other way while irate citizens mete out their own punishment. In July Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, estimated that dozens of apostates from Islam had been killed throughout the world in the previous year. Bolstering Marshall’s estimate, the Compass Direct News Agency was able to identify 23 expatriate Christian workers who were killed in the Muslim world between 2002 and July 2005.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}