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This week Pastor Saeed Abedini celebrated his 33rd birthday from a prison cell deep in Iran, reportedly clinging to the promised hope from Romans 8 that persecution and death cannot separate a believer from God’s love.
Abedini, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen and Muslim-turned-Jesus follower, has been repeatedly beaten, tortured and just last month denied medical care, reportedly for internal injuries, for refusing to deny Christ. Arrested last September on one of his trips back to Iran, he’s faced death threats from authorities and recently from fellow prisoners, all while enduring separation from his wife and two sons in Idaho.
He’s not the first to suffer persecution of biblical proportions. According to the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, citing the International Journal of Missionary Research, 171,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2005 alone. How many do you know by name? I can’t name one.
Meanwhile, it seems persecution of the “soft” kind, as one website termed it, is on the rise domestically. Regularly, I get emails, fund-raising letters (often written in hyperbolic terms) and read news stories of a public school student or government employee denied his constitutional rights because some bumbling bureaucrat read a memo and got overzealous.
In most of these cases, someone forgot to tell them that the First Amendment also has something called the Free Exercise Clause.
We saw this type of politically correct overreaction in the Plano school district in the previous decade with confiscated candy cane pens and Christmas pencils, among other absurdities. There are a thousand other examples from coast to coast of such governmental clumsiness in the name of religious and ideological pluralism.
We are watching our own military to see what becomes of apparent tension over how “evangelism” is somehow distinguished from “proselytizing,” who can do either, when they can do it, how they can do it, etc.
When it comes to handling the religious aspects of the First Amendment, our government entities are the proverbial bull in the china closet, leaving a mess with the slightest provocation.
It’s maddening, head scratching. But is it persecution?
And if so, should I feel guilty for citing the candy cane pen case in the same breath as Pastor Saeed or the 171,000 aforementioned martyrs or the Sudanese Christians who were threatened of being “buried alive” by government interrogators?
Guilt is not needed here. Perspective is, though. Call it harassment. Call it pre-persecution or persecution light. It’s not always directed at Christians with malice, though it’s almost always Christians who are in the crosshairs.
Being perceived as the favored religion in a politically correct, hypersensitive climate has its drawbacks. More often than not, stupidity is the reason for First Amendment encroachments. But malice exists. And if history is an indicator, it could get more blatant.
A teacher asked to remove a Bible from her desk or a federal ruling that disallows religious symbolism at a war memorial is not exactly the same thing as what Saeed is going through.
On the other hand, the beneficiaries of American liberty live abroad as well. Human rights groups, missionary enterprises, and government diplomats exercise positive pressure around the world because human dignity and freedom of conscience are valued in America. We are still an exceptional influence, for now.
If we lose that distinctive, the world suffers. We are only a force for good abroad if we are a force for good at home also. This is the payoff when Christian lawyers go at it with government judges over constitutional encroachments of religious expression. The so-called first freedom undergirds all the others. Everyone, not just religious folks, benefits from this.
One definition of Christian persecution, from a missionary watchdog group called Release International, defines it as such: “A situation where Christians are repetitively, persistently and systematically inflicted with grave or serious suffering or harm and deprived of (or significantly threatened with deprival of) their basic human rights because of a difference that comes from being a Christian that the persecutor will not tolerate.”
Clearly, this definition has cases like Pastor Saeed’s in mind. And we’re not there just yet.
So let’s be measured in our talk about persecution, lest we find ourselves faced with public yawns when the fiery furnace really heats up. In the high-stakes contention for religious liberty, credibility is crucial.
