Disagree with Christians? That’s fine. But do not silence them.

Tags

Canada, Christian persecution, human rights, office for religious freedom, religious freedom, religious minorities

Last week the Canadian Government announced the creation of a new Office for Religious Freedom, an entity devoted to highlighting the rights of those suffering religious persecution internationally. The online reaction to the office has, to put it mildly, been mostly negative. In so doing it highlights a growing Canadian intolerance for the religious and the belief that religion is something best confined inside believers’ homes—that one should not dare to bring it out in the open.

That concern lies behind my recent article for the National Post’s “Holy Post” blog. It’s entitled “Disagree with Christians? That’s fine. But do not silence them.”

Faith, it seems, is now to be understood as a concession made to backwards, backwoods yokels. If you must be religious, then for heaven’s sake do it in the privacy of your own home, where no one else has to see or hear you; religion has no place in the public sphere. Having government step forward to publicly defend religious freedom abroad, therefore, has critics gnashing their teeth.

Even those who have been cautiously optimistic about the office have betrayed a surprising indifference to the plight of persecuted religious minorities. Some pundits have warned against the office spending “too much” attention on Christian issues. To be sure, other groups facing religious persecution — Buddhists, Muslims, Bahai, Sufis, and, yes, atheists — must be just as vigorously defended. But what exactly is so verboten about speaking honestly about the severity of Christian persecution in the world and seeking to redress these wrongs?

I go on to discuss the current level of persecution facing Christians worldwide, before declaring my own faith and explaining that these beliefs “make me who I am” and “inform my decisions and actions in the world.” “Disagree with me?” I pose the question. “That’s fine. But do not silence me. Do not tell me my voice is not allowed in the public forum.” Especially when its raised in support of those who have no voice of their own—those suffering for their faith elsewhere in the world.

Read it all over at the National Post.

Note: There’s an error in the text as it currently stands over at The National Post. It says that Open Doors counts one hundred thousand Christians as suffering persecution. It should read one hundred million.

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Thanksgiving: On Being Thankful That I Am Not Like That Blogger Over There (I Post Twice a Week…)

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Book of Common Prayer, C.S. Lewis, Canada, God, Holiday, Israelites, mental illness, Pharisee, Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is not part of the liturgical calendar, but giving thanks is certainly part of Christianity, and so I think it is not unfitting to put up some thoughts concerning it here (Note for my American friends: it is Thanksgiving in Canada). There are any number of texts I could have chosen for this, whether Biblical or extra-Biblical; I have chosen two, one that helps me convey my discomfort with Thanksgiving as a holiday, and one that I find challenging lest I should let myself off too easily.

The first is a familiar enough passage from Luke 18, which I quote from  Douay-Rheims because I am a quirky medievalist and because I like underdog translations:

⁹ And to some who trusted in themselves as just, and despised others, he spoke also this parable: ¹⁰ Two men went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. ¹¹ The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. ¹² I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. ¹³ And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O god, be merciful to me a sinner.¹⁴ I say to you, this man went down into his house justified rather that the other: because every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted.

Only one of these men give thanks to God, and the reason I am often skeptical about the amount of thanks actually given at Thanksgiving is because much of what I hear sounds a lot like the thanks of the Pharisee here. We express our thanks, yes, but it is a mediocre comfortable middle-class kind of thanks, designed more to remind ourselves that we are not like those (insert pejorative word) over there. We are not radically thankful in the most literal sense, by which I mean thankful not only for the very root of our physical being but also for the root of Jesse that is the root of our salvation.

But giving hypocritical thanks is one thing, and grumbling is another, though it is equally serious. Over and over again, Christians conceive of themselves as the people of Israel, wandering through the desert and being faced with the temptation of hardening their hearts. We sing of this when we sing Psalm 95, the Venite, as part of our liturgical worship.  The book of Hebrews cautions us not to let our hearts grow hard as did those of God’s people in the desert. The tie-in to thankfulness here is that by and large what hardens the hearts of the Israelites in the desert is grumbling, against God, against God’s ordering of the world, and against the leaders he has chosen. From firsthand experience, I can say that those like me who are very uncomfortable with the “Pharisee’s prayer” kind of thanks often fall heedlessly into a state of grumbling which, as the aforementioned passages show, is a serious spiritual malady indeed.

But what can we do? How can we open our eyes to God’s miracles when we are the sort of people who, like C. S. Lewis’s Orual, insist on grumbling against a world we refuse to really see? The full answer is of course far more complex than I am going to deal with here, but I would like to share something that I think helps me as I practice it.

When praying liturgy, everyone has a particular phrase that catches in their throat – something that convicts them, something that seems unfair to them, or something that seems untrue – it is exactly what we might expect when sinners encounter the offense of the Gospel, and it is I imagine only Saints in their perfection who can pray thus without choking on a word or two; they no longer need such purgatorial effects in their liturgy. I suppose for many modern people the problem comes when sin is mentioned, or Christian exclusivity, or historical claims of the Gospels etc.  These I am fine with, but what always catches for me is the phrase in the Book of Common Prayer’s “General Thanksgiving”: “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.” It is hard to say this when one suffers from ongoing depression and OCD.  It is even harder to say this when one has watched all kinds of tragedies – from depression, to fatal car accidents, to suicide – ravage the people you love. And when I think that mine is the experienced pain of only one person out of many who now live and have lived, it becomes impossible to say this – or nearly impossible, but for one thing.

This one thing begins with another word of Thanksgiving. The scripture is read, and the reader concludes: “This is the word of the Lord” – we respond with, “Thanks be to God.” The thanks here is thanks for the word of God in which the Word of God, Christ, is hidden.  And in this word, we are taught to have faith in God and enact thanks even when we discover that our creation, preservation, and blessing might lead us and those we love to a cross. We can give thanks, not because the crosses we see are beautiful, but because the resurrection we expect afterward is good, even if we don’t always see it now. For some, faith the size of a mustard seed is sufficient to move mountains; thank God it is also sufficient to move the hardness of grumbling hearts.

Preston Manning on Christian engagement in the public sphere

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Canada, public, public sphere

Preston Manning

In a video posted to YouTube in January of this year, Preston Manning (former Leader of the Opposition in the federal government) addresses a crowd at Regent College (Vancouver, B.C.) on the topic of Christian witness in the public square. There are many comments and suggestions he makes that are well-worth considering, but perhaps the most important thing he has to say is this: “If there’s one guideline that would enhance the contributions of Christians believers to public discourse on any issue, it is not ‘Be vicious as snakes and stupid as pigeons.’ It is ‘Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.’”

Preceding that little quip, Manning demonstrates how Christ himself used gentleness joined with wisdom to turn aside questions intended to trip him up. When asked  a yes or no question whether it be lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he does not give a yes or no answer. He wisely realizes that answering the question in the way it has been posed will paint him as either a sympathizer with the Roman occupation or as in league with the zealots who want to overthrow Roman rule. And his eventual answer—to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s—not only frustrates the evil intent of his questioners, it also gently teaches listeners from both sides of the issue (collaborators with the Romans like Matthew and zealots like Simon) that God’s thoughts on such matters are much deeper than are their own. The public hears him and is “amazed” at his answer because he does not allow his opponents to define the terms of engagement.

So too, when the woman accused of adultery is brought before Jesus, he does not answer the crowd’s question in a way they expect. “Deny the Law and proclaim mercy,” they demand, “or affirm the Law and forgo mercy. There is no other way.” But Jesus, of course, finds another way. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”—again, a wise answer that prevents Christ from condemning the woman to death while nevertheless affirming the severity of the sin. None born of women can claim to be without sin, save Christ. And he—the only one with the authority to pronounce judgement—chooses, in mercy, to forgive instead. “Neither do I condemn you.” In gentleness Jesus meets this broken woman where she is and shows not anger but compassion; and this compassion then gives him the personal authority to speak into her life in a way the Law of Moses never had: “Now go and sin no more.” As Preston Manning says in this video, “Incarnation precedes proclamation.” It is in identifying with the lowly that Christ opens their heart to hear what he has to say. So too, if we would be heard in the public arena, then we must learn to speak as Christ did. Like Christ, we too are called to identify with the lowly (Philippians 4:5-8). We must not speak merely at people but instead with them.

If we as Christians could learn to speak in this way, with that deliberate commingling of gentleness and wisdom, perhaps then we would find our voice better received in the public arena. When we are asked leading questions, let us refuse to answer in the way we are expected. Let us be wise, like Christ, and avoid entrapment. But let us also, like Christ, use the opportunity to meet the broken and suffering in their lowliness, proclaiming mercy and forgiveness of sins. (As Manning says later answering a question later in the video, “If we don’t identify with the suffering, I don’t think we’re the right person to make the moral ennunication.”) For it is to such people that Christ came; as a doctor to the sick. And, indeed, we are all of us sick.

As a bit of clarification, I build a bit in the above paragraphs on some of the things Manning says in the video; so if you want to disentangle my thoughts from his (and see how some of this might work out in practice; for example, in the current debate on physician assisted suicide) you’ll just have to watch the video. And really, you should. It’s not even hard work. I was good enough to embed the video right here in this post. All you have to do is click. (A word of warning: there’s a few minor audio glitches in the first couple of minutes, but they clear up relatively quickly. And while the video looks lengthy, Preston Manning’s talk is actually just the first forty minutes. Mary Povak, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation in B.C., offers a response, and then the two take questions.)

God save the Queen!

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Canada, Christian, diamond jubilee, Elizabeth II, First Things, monarchy, queen, sixty

Okay, it’s admittedly pretty lame to make my first post on “A Christian Thing” be a non-post (read: “link to another website”). But then again, I’m fairly lame, so what can you do?

An article I’ve written for First Things’ “On the Square” went up today. It (as the title of this post might lead you to believe) is about Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. Put concisely, it makes a case for the continued relevancy of the monarchy from a Christian Canadian perspecive. So go ahead and check it out: “God Save the Queen: A Canadian Reflects on why the Monarchy Still Matters.”

Well then. Here’s hoping I manage to make my next contribution to “A Christian Thing” a bit more substantive.