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News Articles
How to Win Friends and Influence Culture
A prominent Jewish human-rights activist praises—and
pointedly counsels—evangelicals.
by Michael Horowitz |
[09/19/2005 09:00 AM]
In almost 10 years of intimate association with Christians
engaged in human-rights causes, I've watched evangelicals as
both an outsider and a sympathetic ally.
I know pastors who have risked all to go into the forests of
China to feed and rescue North Korean refugees. I know of some
now being tortured in Chinese jails for their "underground
railroad" efforts. I know Christians throughout the world who
have been tormented, tortured, and martyred for their faith. I'm
fortunate beyond measure to count as friends such great figures
as Korean underground leaders Chun Ki-Won, Tim Peters, and Kim
Hang Soon; Shahbaz Bhatti of the All Pakistan Minorities
Alliance; Bob Fu of the China Aid Association; and comparably
heroic Christian leaders from Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia,
Sudan, and elsewhere throughout the world.
In the United States, I've seen Christian leaders asked to
uproot their lives and families in order to take up causes on
behalf of the vulnerable and persecuted. I've seen them
unashamedly drop to their knees in quiet prayer and then get up
to say that, as Christians, they have no alternative but to take
those risks. I've also regularly seen the faith-based courage
and determination of such leaders of the American evangelical
community as Chuck Colson, Richard Land, Ted Haggard, Rich Cizik,
and Barrett Duke, and seen the near-miracles wrought by such
grassroots Christian leaders as Debbie Fikes and her colleagues
of the Ministerial Alliance of Midland, Texas.
I've been awed in the presence of such faith; its example has
helped make me a better and more observant practitioner of my
own—for which I will forever be grateful.
Extraordinary Decade
The evangelical community has become an extraordinary force for
human rights during the last decade, a process that began with
the release of the January 1996 "Statement of Conscience
Concerning Worldwide Religious Persecution" by the National
Association of Evangelicals (NAE). The statement's concluding
sentence summarized its purpose:
Therefore, before God, and because we are our brother's keeper,
we solemnly pledge: to end our own silence in the face of the
suffering of all those persecuted for their religious faith
[and] to do what is within our power to the end that the
government of the United States will take appropriate action to
combat the intolerable religious persecution victimizing fellow
believers and those of other faiths.
That statement—and comparable declarations from such key groups
as Prison Fellowship and, then and increasingly, the Southern
Baptist Convention—sparked a movement that engaged groups of
every sort, from Tibetan Buddhists to Catholics, from Iranian
Baha'is to Reform Jews, that followed your leadership, lit
prairie fires of action across the country, and caused the
passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
Has the law solved all the problems of religious persecution? Of
course not; no act of legislation ever does. Has it made an
extraordinary difference to persecuted believers around the
world? It is beginning to—and then some—as America's national
commitment to fight against religious persecution has grown by
orders of magnitude. Today, the rights of believers has become
to the United States government, and to most Americans, a
central and basic entitlement whose protection is a core
American obligation.
Against the opposition of presidential administrations, against
all sorts of interest groups, with no money, with no teams of
lobbyists, with little but passion, leadership, and faith,
evangelicals have subsequently championed many other great
human-rights causes. Initiatives you have mounted on behalf of
trafficked women, abused prison inmates, North Korean refugees,
and other vulnerable victims had the further advantage of not
being discounted as "mere" parochial efforts to protect your
own. By such leadership, evangelicals have demonstrated how
deeply they are moved, and often driven, by deep compassion for
the vulnerable victims of injustice. By so doing, you've helped
shatter "us versus them" caricatures drawn by those opposed to
Christian witness in the public square. You have made it far
less possible for those who disagree with your views on given
issues to discredit their animating spirit or decency.
For example, you've played an essential role in advancing the
great slavery and women's issue of our time: sex trafficking.
The trafficking by international mafias and corrupt government
officials of at least 1 million girls and women per year into
sexual bondage and slavery had been the world's fastest growing
area of international crime, and the campaign to end this
epidemic scourge was made in the spirit of 19th-century
antislavery abolitionist evangelicals and the anti-trafficking
efforts of Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth.
It first began when former Salvation Army national commander Bob
Watson convened a major session of evangelicals, Jewish leaders,
and pro-abortion feminist groups to discuss the issue. The
meeting triggered broad coalition action that ultimately led to
passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This historic
legislation was fittingly sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback and
Congressman Chris Smith (rooted Christians for whom prayer and
faith are central elements of their lives), the late Paul
Wellstone (a good man, a secularist, and the most liberal
Democrat then in the Senate), and former Congressman Sam
Gejdenson (the son of Nazi Holocaust survivors).
Anti-trafficking efforts continue to be spurred by evangelicals
and feminists under the banner of the Josephine Butler Forum,
named after the great Victorian evangelical who led the
19th-century battle to end the abuse of women through
state-protected prostitution.
Working with both Ted Kennedy and the great congressional
human-rights leader Frank Wolf, a model of Christian decency,
evangelicals were prime supporters of the Prison Rape
Elimination Act of 2003—legislation now putting to an end a form
of widespread brutality that has destroyed 10 to 15 percent of
all American prisoners at the hands of previously uncontrolled
inmate gangs and predators.
Evangelicals also played the central role in ending the
genocidal north-south war in Sudan that had claimed more than 2
million lives and made refugees of at least 5 million more.
Guided by the NAE's second "Statement of Conscience" of May
2002, evangelicals are playing a key role in protecting the
tragic victims of mass starvation, concentration camps, gas
chambers, and ceaseless persecutions of the lunatic regime of
North Korea's Kim Jong Il—an effort that will require and, I am
supremely confident, will receive, the very best of your prayers
and labors.
They-you-are now working on legislation to protect the runaway
girls caught at American bus stations, and the hundreds of
thousands of girls and women trapped on the streets of America
into lives of prostitution, routinely savage beatings, aids, and
drug addiction. With your support, I know that the law of the
land will soon ensure that the men who patronize and abuse the
battered girls who walk our mean streets, and the pimps who
assault and enslave them, will become targets of a justice
system that now only focuses its attentions on arresting the
victims.
They-you-will play an instrumental role in the passage of a
broadly supported Advance Democracy Act that will make the
peaceful elimination of dictatorships and the promotion of
democracy a central strategic objective of American foreign
policy. This is as it should be, if only because the blessings
of democracy are a gift to mankind that our faiths have been
centrally instrumental in broadly spreading.
In fighting for human rights, you've shown your ability not to
overload the circuits and, critically, not to tilt at windmills.
You've picked targets that few cared about and seared the
consciences of your fellow Americans in order to offer hope and
protection to people who desperately needed it. As rightly
described by Allen Hertzke, the great scholar of your movement
and author of Freeing God's Children, you've become, beneath the
radar screens of the national press, America's most powerful
force for human-rights progress. And you've done it as
Christians whose biblical commands have made your silence
impossible in the face of slavery and genocide.
The New Scapegoats
Now a word about who you are and why Christianity is—secularists
gasp at the mention of this reality—the great force for
modernity in those parts of the world poised between freedom
and dark-age totalitarianism.
To tell this truth best, a word about my people is in order. A
hundred or so years ago, oppressive thugs who ruled countries
had ideal scapegoats whom they used to terrorize entire
populations in order to remain in power. In Europe, if you
wanted to know whether the people of a country were free, you
didn't need to conduct a fancy human-rights survey. All you
needed was to visit a few local synagogues. If the Jews who
worshiped there were free, others in the country were almost
certain to be free. On the other hand, if synagogue visits
revealed fear and persecution, it was a safe bet that few others
in the country were free.
Thugs need vulnerable scapegoats and find particular value in
scapegoats who share our faiths—this because Judaism and
Christianity send out the most powerful, radical political
message of all time: the equality of all in the eyes of God.
This message makes tyrants vulnerable—a fact they always
realize. As Jews and Christians, we don't always live up to our
teachings and obligations, but we do a better job at it than we
generally give ourselves credit for. Tyrants know—almost always
better than we do—that if they can silence the scapegoats whose
faith calls for "love unbought by price or fear" and whose
kingdom is "not of this earth," they can silence and tyrannize
all.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the world discovered, thanks in
part to evangelical efforts, that the seemingly powerful Soviet
regime couldn't even turn its back on a mere synagogue burning.
The "Free Soviet Jewry" movement, which culminated in the
Jackson-Vanik amendment that barred U.S. trade with the Soviet
Union unless Jews were free to migrate from its borders, not
only gave freedom to Soviet Jews. Just as importantly, it placed
large cracks in the hitherto solid walls the regime had built
around the Soviet Union and thus offered hope and, ultimately,
freedom to Pentecostals, artists, political dissidents, and all
others.
As the battle for the soul of the 21st century is fought, too
many of my people have been killed for us to be fully useful
scapegoats. Thus, my evangelical friends, you have become the
Jews of the 21st century. This is of course not true of
Christians blessed to live in America and other free countries.
It is, however, very much true of your brothers and sisters in
the developing world—in the Sudan, in China, in India, in Sri
Lanka, in Indonesia, in Saudi Arabia, in country after country
where dictatorships reign.
To America's evangelicals I therefore say: Take pride and
responsibility from the fact that religious and secular tyrants
realize that their very survival obliges them to persecute and
intimidate their Christian communities.
And when you do, please realize this: In protecting
persecuted Christians, you protect everyone else.
The most moving calls I've received while engaged in the battle
against international religious persecution have come from
moderate leaders of Muslim countries who, at risk of life, have
said to me, "You must keep up this fight against the radical
Muslims who are persecuting Christians." They then add: "I may
have to publicly denounce you as a Zionist agent, but here is
information about what these radicals are doing in my country.
Stop them, please, because if the West is silent when Christians
are persecuted, we're all going to have to start saluting the
radicals."
The battle over worldwide Christian persecution is a battle for
the freedom of all—all the more so because the explosive global
spread of Christianity has made the paradigmatic Christian a
poor and brown third-world female rather than the white
middle-class Western male that your patronizing detractors paint
you to be.
When the NAE was first getting started on the Christian
persecution issue, I spoke with one of its board members. He
asked, "You are a Jew. Why are you so involved?"
My response: "That's a good question. When I was a young boy
coming home from yeshiva (Jewish parochial school), I got beat
up by kids who said, 'You killed our Christ.' "
His response: "Oh, how I apologize. Oh, please forgive me." He
was just so bereft, contrite, ridden with guilt.
I listened and then said, "Okay, I accept your apology. Now may
I say something? If it weren't for the rooted Christian decency
of this country, I'd be a lampshade. I'd be a bar of soap."
Whatever sins may have been committed in the name of your faith,
please know that Rabbi Joshua Haberman got it right when he
called America's Bible Belt his safety belt. Evangelicals should
apologize for the sins of Christians as they must, but it is
right and important for you to glory in what your faith has
done—not only for your fellow believers but for others as well.
The lesson: You count for more than yourselves. You're better
than you often think you are. Your brothers and sisters around
the world are canaries in the coal mine whose well-being secures
the well-being of all.
Don't Overreach
As praiseworthy and effective as evangelicals have often been, I
believe you can be far more effective.
Lesson One: You can get more support than you may imagine
possible by avoiding utopian overreach; doing so can, without
sacrifice of principle, broaden the support you can achieve.
Take, for example, the hot-button issue of abortion. Many in the
Christian community denounced the wise and shrewd leaders who
conceived of the partial-birth abortion initiative. Its critics
demeaned the initiative as barely half a slice of the full-loaf
reform that was needed. They argued that the reform would have
the overall effect of legitimizing abortion even if it
succeeded.
Those critics were wrong. They did not understand that success
has ripple effects. They did not understand how much more could
be achieved by framing the issue to allow false caricatures of
evangelicals to be shattered. Americans' views of abortion have
shifted by more than 20 percent since the onset of the
partial-birth abortion debate and largely because of it. It has
put the pro-abortion community on the defensive. And it all
happened because wise Christian leaders picked a target that was
winnable, and framed an issue that revealed abortion's
underlying nature. Those leaders may have wanted to pass more
far-reaching anti-abortion legislation, but knew they couldn't
on both legal/constitutional and political grounds. They were
tough-minded. They didn't sacrifice principle. And, more than
perhaps even they expected, they began to reach others not
previously on their side as they began to change the terms of
the abortion debate.
The gay-marriage debate represents another, if more
controversial, example of an issue that would have been better
served by a principled but less utopian approach. Rather than
seeking to bar the federal government from authorizing gay
marriages, an effort to bar courts from imposing them would have
been more broadly supported and far more likely to pass. My
wife's views are instructive. She does not object to gay
marriage—to my mind a profoundly erroneous position—but she also
believes it wrong and undemocratic for unelected courts to
effectively bar voters from ever expressing their views on the
matter. An evangelical approach to gay marriage based on trust
of the American people to make the right decisions would have
put you on the side of democracy, made it impossible to levy
charges of antigay bigotry against you, divided the principled
from the let's-get-it-any-way-we-can gay-marriage supporters,
and stopped the gay-marriage movement in its tracks.
I have often come close to believing that many evangelical
leaders, acting for the most part unconsciously, have shaped
debates to ensure they don't win, that they do this because
being on the losing side enhances their sense of martyrdom and
their negative and superior views toward nonbelievers. It is
right for evangelicals to seek close bonds with fellow believers
and understandable when, by interacting with few others, they
try to avoid the seductions of a corrupting world. It is wrong,
tragically wrong, when evangelicals provoke the unnecessary
hostility of others or prefer the sound of one hand clapping.
Watch that Tone
Lesson Two: Building support for your initiatives requires a
shift in tone that reflects confidence in your capacity to
persuade others and shows the respect and civility that your
faith commands to be given to all.
My personal situation has helped me here. My wife believes that
abortions are tragic but that women should have the right to
have them whenever they so decide. Yet far from being morally
insensitive, she's a physician who stays up until 1 a.m. reading
The New England Journal of Medicine to better take care of her
patients, and she earns half of what she could in order to be a
better physician. She's an extraordinarily loving mother, deeply
rooted in family—indeed, she is the most morally rooted person I
know. Being blessed by having her as my spouse, and being a
conservative, I've learned that when I talk to her about
subjects like gay marriage, I must do it in ways that generate
respect if not agreement. And I know for sure that it's no more
accurate than it is decent to open a dialogue with her on the
subject of abortion by calling her a murderer and someone
indifferent to family values. Nor, based on all I have learned
from you over the years, do I believe it the Christian thing to
do.
When you're seeking my wife's soul, when you want her to accept
Christ (I wouldn't hold my breath here), do you begin by calling
her a heathen and a sinner and then give up on trying to reach
her when she understandably tunes you out? Of course you don't.
You communicate, you reach out. You find out what's in her and
search for common ground and common bonds. You don't do this in
a manipulative way, but in a loving, caring fashion. And you
gain souls in the process.
Why then, wrong as they think she may be, do some Christians
call my wife a murderer rather than trying to find ways to reach
her on the issue of abortion? By treating people like her
respectfully, you will reach many others more often than you may
now think you can.
Further, by showing your love for trafficked women, brutalized
prisoners, and enslaved North Korean gulag victims, you will
earn my wife's gratitude and trust. By following in the
footsteps of your 19th-century counterparts who successfully
reformed prisons, ended African chattel slavery, and protected
and empowered women, you will shatter caricatures of who you
are. By seeking common ground on issues of disagreement and by
leading battles on commonly shared issues where others have not
spoken, you will cause my wife, and others like her, to be more
open to who you are and to what you have to say, even when you
fail to persuade them.
As you enter the public arena in the name of your faith, please
be conscious of your power to lead and persuade, even though the
prevailing culture may appear daunting and hostile. Make it your
solemn responsibility to reject the "us versus them" counsel of
the pessimists and separatists among you. And, above all else,
remember that you are morally and, to the extent I understand
it, biblically obligated to demonstrate the love and decency
that animates your efforts to seek the rescue of vulnerable
victims and cultures.
What gives me most hope for the century in which my children and
grandchildren will live is that you have shown, in important and
growing ways, that you have the wisdom and ability to do so.
More and more, may this continue to be so.
Michael Horowitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.
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