Enough is enough

I should have said this before now. The International Olympic Committee’s choice of China should have been more controversial than it was from the start. We’re supposed to accept the largely fictional notion that the Olympic Games are not political, but it requires too much naiveté.

Shi Weihan, a Chinese Christian who has been arrested in the past for distributing Christian literature is in jail again at this writing. Seeing this story reminded me of how wrong this government is and how we tend to handle it as though it’s somehow different from other tyrannical states. This is a regime that curtails religious expression regularly, that has a barbaric and misogynistic notion of population control, and that has violently suppressed free speech throughout its reign. Shame on us for lending them the slightest opportunity to amend their image.

U.S. athletes no doubt are going to Beijing for the games. I’m not mad at them for doing that. It is too late for our nation to get a conscience about a China that has done nothing out of their ordinary in the last couple of years. If we weren’t already tired of this cruel giant, we won’t be, short of some overt military action against a Western ally. OK, I get that.

We shouldn’t show up, though. We shouldn’t go there and spend our money, or watch it on TV, or buy the commemorative junk. The cute pandas and round-the-clock coverage of the host country should instead be a time of shame and mourning for the civilized world.

Would we support Sudan in this way? How about Venezuela or North Korea? Think of this as the 1936 Olympics and the host country is a newly prosperous Germany. Jesse Owens’ bright moment aside, we shouldn’t have gone. China only appears different because of what we don’t yet know, and because we want it to be different. In principle, it’s the same mistake.

Any support we, as churches and individual Christians, give this year’s games requires we overlook so many ugly things, we’re compromising with evil. The money, the pageantry, the vague notion of some positive influence we might have while we’re there?it’s not enough to drown out the cries of the persecuted or the cynical laughter of the host government.