In Response to Persecution: Essays from the Under Caesar’s Sword Project

The year 1917, exactly one century ago, was a critical one in the history of the persecution of Christians. Two revolutions empowered regimes that brutally violated religious freedom. The Russian Revolution yielded the communist Soviet Union, which heavily purged the Russian Orthodox Church along with the Ukrainian Catholic Church and Protestant churches as well as Jews and Muslims. The Mexican Revolution brought to power an anticlerical regime that harshly repressed the Catholic Church and, in the mid 1920s, killed hundreds of priests and other Catholics. These revolutions created thousands of martyrs and inaugurated a century in which more Christians lost their lives to persecution than in all other centuries combined (Barrett and Johnson 2001).

Commemorating Christianity’s most dolorous century is the Church of San Bartolomeo on Tiber Island in Rome. Commissioned by John Paul II to be a shrine for contemporary martyrs just prior to the Jubilee Year, 2000, San Bartolomeo displays in its side chapels relics of Christians whose violent deaths are eerily recent. Here one finds the missal of El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero; the Bible of Pakistan’s Shahbaz Bhatti, a government minister who was assassinated by Muslim militants for his protection of religious minorities; and a letter written by Christian de Chergé, abbot of a monastery in Algeria whose members were killed amidst Algeria’ Civil War in 1996; and numerous other relics of Christians killed under Communism, Nazism, and episodes of violence and repression on numerous continents. On the high altar of the church is the large “Icon of the New Martyrs,” which depicts numerous scenes of Christians martyred in the 20^th century, all arrayed under a vision of heaven atop a scroll reading, “Through the Great Tribulation.” Scenes from the early years of both Communist Russia and anti-clerical Mexico appear in the icon.

Behind the relics and the icon, though, one discovers not merely scenes of violence but also remarkable stories of response to violence. There are the martyrs of Buta, Burundi—seminarians who were killed for refusing to separate themselves into Hutu and Tutsi. Christian De Cherge’s “Last Testament” offers forgiveness to the Muslim militants whom he expects to slay him. Romero predicted that were he to be killed, he would rise up again in the hearts of the people.

How Christians respond to persecution is the subject of the project, Under Caesar’s Sword, whose findings are showcased in the essays in this symposium. By now, the contemporary persecution of Christians has been documented through several books, the demographic work of David Barrett and Todd Johnson, the Church of San Bartolomeo, and monitoring groups like Aid to the Church in Need and Open Doors (Allen 2013; Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea 2013; Shortt 2012). This persecution has been studied, but it remains underreported by the mainstream media and human rights groups.

Far less well understood is how Christians respond when their religious freedom has been severely violated. Under Caesar’s Sword is the world’s first global investigation of these responses and is undertaken on the premise that a systematic understanding of them can help those who live in relative freedom practice stronger and more effective solidarity with persecuted Christians and can help the often-isolated victims of persecution understand better what responses they might undertake.

Launched in fall 2014 by a grant of $1.1 million from the Templeton Religion Trust, the project is carried out by a team of 15 scholars who have studied Christian responses in 25 countries as well as The West and Latin America. Their results were first presented at an international conference in Rome in December 2015, one of whose main events was a memorial prayer service at the Church of San Bartolomeo. Under the auspices of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture, Georgetown's Religious Freedom Research Project, and the Religious Freedom Institute, the project has produced a documentary film, while Forthcoming are an edited volume of scholarly essays, a public report, and curricula for schools and churches are soon to appear.¹

Christians are not the only people who suffer from egregious violations of their religious freedom, and they have inflicted their own share of persecution, especially in episodes between the 4th and 17th centuries. There is much evidence, though, that today it is Christians who suffer the largest share of religious persecution. Estimates vary considerably and unambiguous data is virtually impossible to come by, but even the most cautious figures place the proportion of religious persecution that Christians experience at 60 percent or above. The International Society for Human Rights, a secular NGO based in Frankfurt, estimated in 2009 that Christians experience 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world, a finding that separate human rights observatories corroborate. This, combined with the underreporting of Christian persecution, warrants this study.

We are pleased to present the scholarship of the Under Caesar’s Sword project through the essays in the present symposium. In the remainder of this introductory essay, we depict the contours and implications of the responses to persecution that the scholars have discovered.

Varieties of Religious Persecution

Despite an overwhelming focus in the media and the popular Christian imagination on violent Islamist persecution and severe totalitarian repression in countries such as China, the global persecution of Christians assumes a vast variety. The swords of many Caesars hang threateningly over Christian communities all over the world. The regimes in which persecution occurs are highly diverse. They comprise not merely brutal authoritarian regimes and failed states but also relatively stable and well-established electoral democracies such as India and Sri Lanka, whose very democratic structures incentivize groups to target Christian minorities in order to solidify the political support of non-Christian majorities. According to an analysis by Marshall (2016), Christian persecution in the world occurs mainly in five very different contexts: (1) Communist regimes (China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba); (2) authoritarian and national security states; (3) South Asian countries influenced by religious nationalism; (4) Muslim-majority countries; and (5) Western countries influenced by secularism (or what legal scholar Steve Smith calls “secular egalitarianism” (Smith 2014). While restrictions and hostilities in the West are milder than in the other types of regimes, they are growing and merit concern, as we discuss below. The distinction between these types, though, is not airtight. For example, Kathleen Collins observes that Central Asian states are no longer Communist but retain an infrastructure of religious repression that is in many respects a hold-over from their Soviet past. And the persecution of minority Christian groups in some authoritarian states, such as Russia, is motivated partly by religious nationalism.

Similarly, persecution assumes very different forms. In a number of contexts, the full machinery of state power brings down the iron fist of persecution in the form of direct and appalling violence: police and security services, often directed by bureaus of religious affairs, forcibly break up church services and Bible studies, and imprison and torture pastors, evangelists, and ordinary church members for engaging in ordinary religious activities. In some of the same contexts but in others as well, the iron fist wears a velvet glove. Alexis de Tocqueville limpidly observed that 19^th-century white Americans dispossessed and subjugated native peoples “with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, philanthropically,” adding that “[i]t is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity” (Tocqueville 1988 [1835], 339). It is striking how much state persecution of Christians throughout the world is conducted with similar legality, regularity, and bureaucratic propriety. As Roger Finke, Dane R. Mataic, and Jonathan Fox observe, a growing number of regimes impose—with manifest intentionality—a thicket of registration requirements so onerous that the otherwise simple business of instituting a Christian organization, buying property for Christian purposes, or building a Christian house of worship becomes effectively impossible (Finke, Mataic, and Fox 2016). On the other hand, much Christian persecution—whether visited by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or Islamist militias in Indonesia’s Maluku islands or Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka—arises from non-state actors, whether formal or informal. Persecution by such groups is often brutally violent. At the same time, as Brian Grim and Roger Finke have shown, there is often a correlation, and in many instances close causal interaction, between government restriction and social hostilities directed against Christians (Grim and Finke 2011). For example, it is clear that in many cases non-state persecution “from below” depends on the direct support (in financing or active encouragement) or indirect help (in providing an environment of impunity) of government institutions or state officials working “from above.”

The reasons such different actors inflict such different kinds of persecution on Christians also exhibit an immense variety. Perhaps the most common and widespread reason for Christian persecution—both in its severe and in its milder forms—is the characteristic Christian insistence on being different and independent from comprehensive political control or cultural hegemony. In trying to understand why the conduct and indeed existence of the early Christians appeared to Roman magistrates in such a “serious and criminal light,” historian Edward Gibbon—who could hardly be accused of excessive sympathy for the early church—concluded that what most provoked Roman persecution was Christianity’s “independent spirit, which boldly acknowledged an authority superior to that of the magistrate” (Gibbon 1776). Today, too, the simple refusal on the part of many Christians in so many contexts to “fit in” and buckle under, and their determination to construct their own “autonomous social spaces,” to quote the great sociologist David Martin (Martin 1990), goes a long way towards explaining Christian persecution in a wide range of contexts, including Communist China and Vietnam, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia, and an increasingly secular West. According to Paul Marshall, because Christianity denies that the powers that be are the ultimate arbiter of human life in any given context, it tends to resist attempts to impose a single supreme authority in state, society, or culture (though the kinds and means of resistance vary considerably, as we shall see). In Marshall’s analysis, therefore, one of the major factors in contemporary Christian persecution is Christianity’s virtually intrinsic association with pluralism and freedom (Marshall 2016).

Other factors vary across a wide range, some pertaining to genuine aspects of Christian theology and conduct, and others involving politicized perceptions of Christian communities and their intentions. In a wide range of contexts outside the West, governments and majority religious communities perceive minority Christian communities as a fifth column or Trojan Horse for the West. From northern Nigeria to China, from Iraq to north India to Indonesia, some groups and governments sincerely believe that Christians are agents of the West’s strategic, political, religious, or cultural interests; others exaggerate and propagate this idea to advance their political and religious agendas. In this narrative, Christian persecution becomes not an act of belligerence but a necessary means of political and cultural self-defense against Christian aggression. This narrative enjoys resonance and plausibility in many contexts—particularly South Asia and Southeast Asia—because of long and painful histories of Western exploitation and colonial domination, in which Christianity often played a role. Further reinforcing this narrative of dangerous Christian aggression is the fact that many Christian communities are engaging in assertive forms of evangelism that genuinely challenge the allegiance of indigenous individuals and communities to long dominant religious and cultural beliefs and norms. The Christian communities that most frequently engage in these assertive forms of evangelism are evangelical and Pentecostal churches that are growing rapidly in the Global South. Research by Chad Bauman and James Ponniah in South Asia, research by Kathleen Collins in Central Asia, and Todd Johnson’s global surveys of Christian persecution all suggest that evangelical and Pentecostal churches often bear the brunt of political and social persecution, due in small part to their more direct, intentional, and insistent strategies of evangelism.

In short, the overall upturn in the magnitude, direction, and geographic breadth of global Christian persecution is grim. Christian persecution takes place across a geographic band of enormous length and breadth—more or less co-extensive with what Eliza Griswold has described as the world’s “tenth parallel” of religious conflict (Griswold 2010)—that stretches from Libya, moves southward to northern Nigeria, moves eastward to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, expands north to Russia and south to Sri Lanka, and then proceeds eastward to China, Indonesia, and North Korea. Based on systematic demographic analysis, Todd Johnson estimates that some 500 million Christians—more than 20 percent of Christians on earth—live in countries where they are likely to face severe persecution, with virtually all of them in this geographic band. By 2020, Johnson predicts, this figure will rise to 600 million, or nearly a quarter (23.5 percent) of the world’s Christian population (Johnson 2016).

As we noted above, Christian persecution is large not only in absolute terms but also relative to other religious traditions. Clarifying and balancing the profile of Christian persecution, further, however, is the distribution of persecution within global Christianity. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly three-quarters of the world’s 7.2 billion people—that is, 74 percent of the global population—were living in countries with high or very high restrictions or hostilities in 2014 (Pew Research Center 2016). If the figures we quoted above are reasonably accurate, then a much smaller share of the world’s Christians lives in countries with severe persecution (about 20 percent) than the share of the world’s people that lives in countries with severe persecution (about 74 percent). About 80 percent, or the vast majority of the world’s Christians, lives in the countries of Western Europe, North America, and South America that do not witness the harsh repression characteristic of most of the rest of the world. Western Christians therefore have little direct experience of the intense religious repression that increasingly engulfs those of their fellow Christians who inhabit the world’s persecution-rich “tenth parallel.” If there is an attention deficit in the West with respect to the massive global challenge of religious persecution in general and Christian persecution in particular, a good part of the reason may lie in this experiential gap between Christians (and others) living in the West, on the one hand, and Christians as well as non-Christians living just about everywhere else.

Varieties of Christian Response to Persecution

One of the most important fruits of our research was a categorization of the vast array of Christian responses to persecution our scholars observed and analyzed across the world. Three broad categories of response emerged, arrayed on a continuum from reactive to proactive: (1) survival strategies; (2) association strategies; and (3) confrontation strategies. In pursuing strategies of survival, Christians focus on preserving their communities and, if possible, their basic institutions and practices. In association strategies, Christians reach beyond survival to focus on building relationships and networks with groups outside their immediate communities—other Christians, non-Christians, and international actors—to enhance resiliency and mount some broad-based though relatively non-confrontational resistance to persecution. In strategies of confrontation, persecuted Christian communities focus on mounting direct and overt forms of resistance and challenge to those government or societal actors engaged in persecution. Among the cases we analyzed, we found that survival-focused strategies are most common, association strategies are widespread but somewhat less common, and confrontation strategies are least prevalent.

Two words of caution are in order here. First, words such as “overt,” “minimal,” or “assertive” imply no moral judgment of Christian responses to excruciatingly difficult circumstances. Sometimes a survival-focused strategy that involves relatively minimal overt resistance to persecution and its perpetrators—such as a focus on continuing to worship and gather in community—involves deliberate effort, courage, and determination and can be heroic in some circumstances, for instance, the war and violent Islamist repression that characterize Syria and Iraq today. We offer our typology not to deliver normative judgments but to advance clarity and understanding about what Christians do—and what they might do—when they are under fire. Second, persecuted Christian communities can and do frequently undertake more than one strategy. For example, a number of unregistered house churches in China, such as the Shouwang Church in Beijing, have engaged in all three strategies in recent years, more or less simultaneously.

To clarify, what differentiates these strategies from each other are three main factors. One factor that differentiates them is the immediate object or goal of the strategy. Another is the kind of activity the strategy involves. And the third is the degree of direct, intentional engagement with systems and perpetrators of persecution.

In survival-oriented strategies, the response of Christians to persecution is to invest maximum energy and resources in activities that advance the simple goals of survival and subsistence—from one day to the next, at a minimum, or from one generation to the next, if possible. Under some conditions, a focus on survival will require flight. Under other conditions, it may be possible to remain in a context of persecution, though in a posture that is hunkered down and focused on putting down social roots in the form of underground networks and institutions. In this kind of strategy, persecuted Christians keep to an absolute minimum any direct engagement with and avoid any direct challenge to the perpetrators and structures of persecution.

In strategies of association, the response of Christians to persecution is to invest the preponderance of available energy and resources in activities that build formal and informal relationships and patterns of cooperation with those outside of their persecuted communities who may sympathize with their plight. These others may be within or outside their country’s borders. While strategies of association also seek to ensure survival, their main goal is to build longer-term resiliency and capacity to resist or mitigate persecution through robust relationships with other Christians as well as with sympathetic non-Christians. In this strategy, too, direct engagement with those responsible for persecution is kept to a minimum because the focus is not so much on opposing or resisting persecution as on building the capacity (sometimes through dialogue, sometimes through coalition-building) to resist persecution from a stronger and broader position.

Finally, in strategies of confrontation, the focus is on mounting activities that directly criticize, challenge, or de-legitimate the perpetrators of persecution, with the goal of weakening or even eliminating Christian persecution at its source. Here, of course, direct, overt, and often confrontational engagement with the perpetrators and structures of persecution is at a maximum.

Let us look at each form of response in greater detail.

Strategies of Survival

One of the starkest and simplest of strategies of survival is to flee, either elsewhere within a state or outside a state’s borders, as Christians often do in settings of war and rampant violence such as contemporary Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Northern Nigeria. While flight can help secure survival, it can also accelerate if not guarantee the demise of the Christian presence in the locations from which Christians migrate. As Bauman and Ponniah observe about anti-Christian riots in Orissa in 2007–2008, which permanently displaced tens of thousands of Christians from certain districts, “[i]f one of the goals of those who perpetrate anti-Christian harassment and violence is to Hinduize local geographies, then it is clear that the riots worked spectacularly.” Positively, on the other hand, flight often results in what might be called the scattering of Christian seed. “On [the day of Stephen’s murder] a great persecution arose against that church in Jerusalem,” it is recorded in the Book of Acts, “and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles” (8:1). In a dynamic that is perennial in Christian history, from the Book of Acts to Roman persecutions to the past century, persecution has often yielded an unintended expansionist consequence as Christians forced to flee persecution have come to exercise religious and political influence in the new lands to which they have fled. Some of the Christian communities that contributed to the cultural mosaics of Iraq and Syria in the 20^th century found themselves in these lands only because they were forced to flee the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Another set of responses is covert and subterranean. One of these, which is dangerous and precarious under regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Central Asia, and China, is to undertake characteristic Christian activities such as worship, educating children, and care for members of the community in secret. A recent precedent is the Ukrainian Catholic Church that became a “church of the catacombs” under Soviet rule after World War II but resurfaced in 1991 when Ukraine gained independence. As Kathleen Collins observes, the increasing state persecution of Christians in Central Asia leads most of them “to simply hide,” as one informant told her, leaving them virtually invisible in the public sphere.

In other cases, Christian communities will adopt creative forms of cultural and legal camouflage. Some pursue strategies of cultural adaptation such as speaking in a language acceptable to the regime, showing patriotism outside the walls of the church, or even hiding their faith through deception or feigning conversion to a non-Christian religion. Or, Christians adopt a strategy of “obfuscation,” which Chad Bauman and James Ponniah observed in Sri Lanka, whereby they mask the religious nature of some of their institutions by legally incorporating them as non-religious “companies,” “trusts,” or “societies.” Small Christian communities in Iran speak a different language outside their churches while Protestant churches in Russia regularly and loudly (and seemingly sincerely) display their patriotism and support for Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s quasi-Christian nationalism and defense of Christian moral commitments. In other cases, Christian communities forge tactical alliances with a dominant religious community, accommodate the authority of the state, or develop patterns of active cooperation with regimes and groups that engage in persecution.

Strategies of Association

Strategies of association, the second mode of response, are more proactive than strategies of survival. Their aim is to build associations, networks, institutions, and partnerships with other groups and institutions and to undertake practices that create resiliency against persecution. These ties may be with actors inside the country like other churches, other religious faiths, secular actors, or even the government itself, or with actors outside the country, including members of their own church, advocacy groups, or foreign governments.

While these strategies take place at every level of persecution, they are most common and most robust in “semi-open” environments that afford opportunities for political action and expression even while persecution takes place. Pakistan, India, Russia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya, and Indonesia are all examples. By contrast, strategies of association are far less common in violent or highly repressive environments like Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, China or other countries not covered in the present symposium like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

One of the central goals of Christian communities in undertaking strategies of association is to counteract isolation through forging ties with other Christian churches, other religions, political parties, activist NGOs, and allies outside the country including the United Nations, human rights organizations, other governments, and members of their own church. Isolating Christian communities—keeping them hidden, obscure, and unconnected with outsiders—is, after all, a common stratagem of persecuting regimes and militant groups. It is not accidental that North Korea, the country about whose Christians the rest of the world knows the least, is the one in which Christians are persecuted the worst (Open Doors 2016).

Common strategies of this sort are the building of ties with other churches and other religions. As Robert Dowd relates, Catholic and Protestant Christian communities in northern Nigeria have responded to the colossal violence inflicted by Boko Haram by forming ecumenical partnerships as well as ties with mainstream Islamic leaders in hopes of isolating Boko Haram. Jekatyerina Dunaleva and Karrie Koesel show how, in Russia, small non-Russian Orthodox Christian churches found success in circumventing the government’s denial of their freedom through administrative measures by forming an umbrella association that gave them power in numbers. Likewise, Robert Hefner argues in his piece on Indonesia that the most central strategy through which Christian churches have resisted Islamist violence and intolerance since the fall of Suharto in 1998 has been to strengthen their links with the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the large Muslim movements who uphold Indonesia’s pluralist vision of Pancasila.

A common associational strategy is the provision of social services—alleviating social ills through hospitals, rehabilitation programs for addictions, orphanages, homeless shelters, and the like. This may not at first seem like a strategy of response. Is it not simply the mission and message of the church? It is that, but in serving the poor, Christian communities also build ties outside their walls, perform a service that governments value, and accrue credibility, thus strengthening their freedom. Protestant churches in Russia, for instance, commonly conduct ministries to alcoholics, and in doing so, gain the favor of local governments.

Perhaps the most surprising among Christian strategies of association is forgiveness. This, too, may not at first seem like a strategy aimed at building relationships or institutions. Is it not mainly relinquishment of resentment and revenge? Forgiveness, though, can also be an invitation to conversion and reconciliation and thus a form of building ties. Consider, for instance, Pakistan’s Paul Bhatti, who was at first embittered towards Pakistan’s Muslims for an extremist group’s murder of his brother, Shahbaz Bhatti, who had worked behalf of religious minorities as Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs. When Paul Bhatti returned to Pakistan for his brother’s funeral, however, his warm reception there among Muslims led him to practice forgiveness and thus strengthen ties between Christian and Muslim communities in Pakistan.

Confrontation Strategies

On the most proactive end of the spectrum are strategies of confrontation, in which Christians openly oppose a persecuting regime or militant group. Christians undertake these strategies with the aim of bringing injustice to light, spurring others to confront injustice, and, above all, ending injustice and widening the enjoyment of religious freedom. Confrontation can be located at every level of repression, though its form varies with context. In democratic or semi-democratic systems, confrontation will take place through demonstrations, public criticism, the documenting of human rights abuses, and pursuing redress through the courts. Where repression is so heavy that it affords little open expression or where armed conflict rages, confrontation may take the form of armed resistance or the acceptance of martyrdom.

Most commonly, confrontation strategies involve criticism and exposure. Sometimes, Christians document human rights abuses in order to reveal them to parties who can advocate on their behalf—foreign governments, for instance. They might also pursue court cases where they believe they might receive favorable judgments. Articles in this symposium document these kinds of strategies in India and Indonesia, for instance. Christians also voice protest of regimes and societal groups through non-violent demonstrations and public criticism in newspapers, television, and the Internet. Again, the more open settings of India and Indonesia, as well as Nigeria and Kenya, afford opportunities for this exercise of voice.

Confrontation becomes harsher and more dangerous when it takes the form of armed resistance. Mindy Belz observes in her article that some Christians in Iraq and Syria chose not to flee but to take up arms against the Islamic State and other Muslim militants. Armed resistance is also documented in Nigeria and Kenya by Dowd and in Indonesia by Robert Hefner. In all of these cases, resistance was not against a regime but rather against militant groups whom the regime had failed to suppress.

All in all, armed resistance is rare—a significant finding of the project. Because Christian communities are tiny minorities in most places where they are persecuted, they might seem to be plausible candidates for taking up terrorism. When Christians do take up arms, though, they usually do so out of self-defense in milieus of open violence and are often flanked by other Christians who do not take up arms. Dowd documents how Christians in Northeastern Nigeria, faced with the attacks of Boko Haram, debate whether coercive force is morally permissible and strategically wise. Only a small number have taken up arms, while most have opted to establish ties with moderate Muslims. Hefner explores similar debates among Indonesian Christians amidst the violence that took place in Maluku between 1999 and 2003. In very rare cases, Christians have not only taken up arms but committed massacres or attacks on civilians. Hefner reports some cases in Maluku, and Bauman and Ponniah some cases in India, where Christians retaliated against Hindus who rioted in Kandhamal, India. Christians who had suffered violence at the hands of Muslims also committed massacres in Central Africa, a case that falls outside of Under Caesar’s Sword’s research.

Confrontation can also take the form of martyrdom and imprisonment, which can be seen as strategies (and not merely fate) when Christians express or practice their faith or advocate for justice in full knowledge or expectation of suffering. Pakistan’s Shahbaz Bhatti, for instance, undertook his work for religious minorities with near certainty that it would result in his death and accepted this prospect for the sake of Christian witness. Martyrdom is arguably the most proactive of strategies, for it involves the least acquiescence to the repression of the state and is the greatest expression of Christian freedom, testifying that even death cannot suppress faith. Martyrdom also confronts injustice by not only accepting death but also manifesting a call for religious freedom—a freedom in which people would not have to die for practicing their faith. “The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI aptly observed in 2005

and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one’s own faith—a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God’s grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. (Benedict XVI 2005)

Examples of martyrdom as responses to persecution can be found in the Chinese Catholic and Protestant leaders in China who accepted death or decades of life in prison as a consequence of refusing to accept the Communist government’s official church structures.

While martyrdom is an authentic, perhaps even the quintessential Christian, response to persecution, though, the Under Caesar’s Sword research finds that high-profile instances of it are rare. It is not rare, of course, for Christians to die for their faith; thousands do every year. However, the Christian whose martyrdom gains wide attention within or outside a country or results in pressure against a persecuting government is uncommon.

While these three main types of strategies exhaust most of the Christian responses to persecution today that our team of scholars has observed, certain Christian responses fall outside these main categories and are worth noting. To describe these and to situate them analytically, we turn to the great economist, Albert Hirschman, who developed a famous typology of patterns of response to economic and institutional dysfunction: exit, voice, and loyalty (Hirschman 1970).

In Hirschman’s terms, most of the responses to Christian persecution we have observed can be understood either as forms of exit or as forms of voice. We see many Christians choosing the most radical and literal form of exit—physical flight. But we also see Christians disengaging from the public and cultural life of their societies in ways that are almost as radical, withdrawing in what might be considered a form of emotional and psychological exit. They turn inward and downward, putting down deep though largely hidden social roots through the creation of underground churches, networks, and ministries of quiet service. We also see some Christians, though fewer, exercising different forms of voice. A few, like the members of the Shouwang unregistered church, who mounted a public protest against their repression in 2011, have raised their voices against persecution in loud and direct ways. Many others raise their voice in indirect ways by building relationships of mutual understanding and support with fellow Christians and with non-Christian fellow citizens. In some cases, persecuted Christians are able to build interfaith or ecumenical networks and institutions and can express their views through these collective or coalitional mechanisms.

Our continuum of strategies, however, de-emphasizes still other strategies that fall into the third category of Hirschman’s famous typology, loyalty. Hirschman presents loyalty as a central option for the disgruntled consumer or frustrated citizen because it opens the path of working within the system to bring about the incremental reform of the system. Hirschman’s insight is helpful in our context. In fact, more often than we might like to acknowledge, some persecuted Christians eschew the paths of exit or heroic voice for strategies of loyal accommodation and cooperation. As Fenggang Yang points out, for instance, some Christians responded to the onset of Communist rule in China with wholehearted allegiance and enthusiastic collaboration with the regime. In part, these Christians held a political theology that led them to applaud aspects of Communist rule, such as the emancipation of the poor and of workers. Other Christians believed that the best strategy for the church was not to oppose or withdraw from the system but to find a way to work within it—a strategy that was eventually realized and elaborately institutionalized in the form of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. While this strategy has become less favored by Chinese Christians in the course of the ensuing decades, it is hardly unknown to persecuted Christians today in other contexts. In today’s Egypt, for instance, the Coptic Orthodox Church has adopted a strongly loyalist posture vis-à-vis the authoritarian government of General Al-Sisi, despite this government’s increasingly harsh restrictions on civil society and its human rights violations. In choosing the loyalty approach, Christian communities do not merely respond to persecution; rather, to a significant extent, they join their pursuits to the structures and purposes of the repressive regime.

Conclusions

Do any generalizations emerge from this study of Christian responses to persecution? Each category of response—survival, association, and confrontation—contains exemplary responses as well as misfires and approaches whose effects are highly uncertain. Might any contours be spotted in the data, though?

We venture at least one observation, which began to emerge in the foregoing analysis. Surprisingly rare are the kinds of responses that have achieved fame through movies, documentaries, and international media stories: the high-profile martyrdom, the prophetic denunciation, the acclaimed prisoner of conscience, or the band of Christians taking up arms. Neither sexy nor scary, the bulk of responses rather takes the form of “creative pragmatism,” involving short-term efforts to ensure security; build capacity and strength through ties with other churches, religions, and secular actors; and sometimes oppose the government through protest or legal channels. To some observers, such a conclusion will seem pedestrian: is there not something more dramatic to be found?

The pragmatism of these efforts, though, should not obscure the creativity, courage, nimbleness, and theological conviction that often attend them. Christian communities take up strategies of survival and association to fortify themselves in the short term but often with the long-term conviction, grounded in their faith, that if they can hold out, a sunnier day will come—not only in the next life but in earthly time. On this day, one that members of these communities may not live to see, the persecuting regime will fall or the militant group will evanesce, and the church will then deepen its roots and expand its branches.

This very kind of hope motivated the church of the early centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Christianity was generally outlawed and Christians suffered persecution that was periodic and eventually swelled into the rampant, empire-wide crackdowns of the third and early fourth centuries. Yet, while the period certainly has its famous martyrs, it was common for Christian communities to seek accommodations with local officials that allowed them to survive, worship, conduct the affairs of their communities, and even expand their ranks. Over these centuries, Christian communities not only survived but also grew at remarkable rates. Finally, just after the close of the period’s most repressive purge, the Diocletian Persecution, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and declared freedom not only for Christians but also for all people through the so-called Edict of Milan of 313 (Digeser 2016; Wilken 2016). Thereafter, Christianity was poised to expand and to build a civilization. A similar long-term hope has motivated Christian churches in China, who survived and even expanded under the eradicationist policies of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1979) and who persist under the renewed repression of today. Such a hope can be found, too, in many other churches mentioned in the essays that follow.

This conclusion turns out to be far less pedestrian than it may seem to be at first sight and contains lessons for persecuted churches and for all those who would act in solidarity with them. Repeated persistently and sustained determinedly, short-term pragmatic responses can add up to a formidable long-term strategy. It is a strategy for which Christianity, built on a long-term hope, is uniquely suited.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Philpott

Daniel Philpott is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and Co-Director of Under Caesar’s Sword: Christian Responses to Persecution. His books include Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2012), and The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). He is also a Contributing Editor on The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

Timothy Samuel Shah

Timothy Samuel Shah is Research Professor of Government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, Director for international research at the Religious Freedom Research Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, and a Senior Advisor with the Religious Freedom Institute. Shah is author of Even if There is No God: Hugo Grotius and the Secular Foundations of Modern Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2017) and, with Monica Toft and Daniel Philpott, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton, 2011). He is also editor, with Allen Hertzke, of the two-volume study, Christianity and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Notes

1. The website of Under Caesar’s Sword contains detailed information about the project. See usc.nd.edu. For the film, see http://ucs.nd.edu/film/.