God the Vandal

By Alex Buchan on 01 March 2002

I once met a vicar on his deathbed who made a startling confession. He had led a famous cathedral church in a capital city.

"It was a church for the beautiful people," he said. "You took one look at them and said with the Psalmist: 'They have no struggles, they are not plagued by human ills, they are free from the burdens common to man.'"

But he confessed that quite regularly, at the dead of night, he would furtively creep into the church grounds and, after making sure no one was looking, hurl a heavy stone through one of the stained glass windows.

"Why on earth would you do such a thing?" I asked.

"To make them feel the draft," was his reply.

Does God also have a "ministry of vandalism" in order to make us feel the draft of the persecuted believer?

Billy Graham in China

I first began to think about this when Dr. Billy Graham went into China on his first visit in April 1988. Dr. Graham was gracious to a fault. He was courteous to his hosts and never uttered a critical word in public during his 17-day trip, though he was well briefed in private about the seamier side of religious freedom in China.

I remember thinking as the trip progressed, "I know it's probably not appropriate for him to talk about persecution, but the fact is that he has accentuated the positive so much that it is going to be hard to convince people there is still persecution here."

This was worsened by the fact that Dr. Graham was so famous. He had the loudest megaphone on the street. For the first time in years, the secular television stations were covering Christianity in China as they followed his trip. But Dr. Graham was doing all the speaking, and it was all positive.

Did God the vandal then step in?

Chinese evangelist Xu Yongze was arrested in broad daylight in a Beijing park on his way to see Dr. Graham at the Jianguo Hotel. Xu was ironically (though inaccurately) dubbed "the Billy Graham of China." Certainly his house church — the Born Again movement — numbered in the millions. His arrest and disappearance, and the subsequent stubborn refusal of Chinese authorities to discuss his case, created a huge furor because it coincided with Dr. Graham's trip.

While the West's most famous evangelist was moving from one luxury hotel suite to another, China's most famous evangelist was moving from one prison cell to another. Human hands could not have choreographed a more perfect, more dramatic, more revealing contrast.

At the press conference in Hong Kong following the trip, Dr. Graham read a positive message about the changes in China, the relaxation in religious laws and the warm welcome that he received from his hosts. But to the visible annoyance of some of Graham's entourage, when he invited the press to respond, virtually all the questions were about Xu Yongze.

I felt that justice was done. Dr. Graham had properly highlighted some positive changes in the religious situation. These changes were not cosmetic. China was relaxing. But that was by no means the whole story. And the event of Xu's arrest contradicted the unalloyed picture of progress that Graham presented, highlighting the darker colors that also belong on the canvas. As the negative and positive stories clashed, people got a more accurate grasp of the truth.

God threw a stone through the stained glass window, and we all felt the draft that day, sipping coffee in the plush pressroom of the Hong Kong Sheraton. We knew that Dr. Graham had been feted as a religious VIP by a government clearly beginning to court Western evangelicals. But we also saw Xu Yongze in a jail cell, experiencing police brutality, eating rice and sand.

Rice and Sand

Rice and sand. The two often go together in understanding persecuted communities. The mistake is to think the truth is purely one or the other. I am continually surprised how startlingly good news is often accompanied by spectacularly bad news, lest we tend to over-emphasize one too much.

In Vietnam last year, there was a remarkable positive breakthrough. For the first time since the communists took southern Vietnam, the government gave the largest and oldest Protestant denomination, the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (ECVN), legal recognition in April 2001. At last the way was clear for the ECVN to re-open a seminary, apply for new building permits, and generally exploit their new status to look after their growing membership.

But just before that, in February 2001, Vietnam's tribal Christians had been at the forefront in staging the first-ever, large scale demonstration against religious persecution and unscrupulous land grabbing. Shaken, the government launched one of the most brutal crackdowns against Christians in recent years.

The Central Highlands is a revival region, with over 500,000 tribal believers who belong to the ECVN. But it became clear that the legal rights extended to ECVN members from the government did not extend to the tribal Christians. Scores were jailed, and hundreds of leaders were forced to drink a potent rice-and-blood mixture to show they were returning to animism. At least 20 Christian leaders from the Hmong tribe alone currently languish in jail.

Rice and sand. More freedom and more persecution.

It's the same in Indonesia. When former president Suharto was ousted in May 1998, it was good news for the church. Throughout the 1990s, Suharto sought to strengthen his faltering grip on power by openly courting and promoting Muslim extremists to offset his loss of support from the military. These Muslim extremists made life hard for the Christians.

But with the fall of Suharto came a more relaxed policy towards Christians, even under the interim leader B.J. Habibie, ironically one of the Muslim extremists promoted by Suharto. After the terrible anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta in 1999, I remembered Indonesian church leader Dr. Iman Santoso saying, "It's never been easier to get permission to build a church in Indonesia today, especially on Java."

This improvement, however, was by no means the whole story. Sporadic church burnings continued. Then in January 1999, a foolish market-trading dispute in Ambon City, in eastern Indonesia's Maluku Islands, ignited a full-scale war between the Christian and Muslim communities, which to date has left around 8,000 dead and 200,000 displaced.

While Christians on Java enjoyed more freedom than ever, their brothers and sisters in Central Sulawesi and the Malukus found themselves in a state of virtual siege.

Dangerous Generalizations In these situations, it is always tempting to generalize the whole situation from the good or the bad news. This can be dangerous.

Father Franz Magnis Suseno, a Jakarta-based Jesuit philosopher and widely respected religious analyst, reckoned that the purely negative publicity about church burnings on Java in 1996-1997 created a propensity among the Maluku believers to crack down on the Muslims.

"They looked at the pictures of the charred churches," Suseno said, "and read the terrible accounts, and then assumed — because no one told them otherwise — that all Muslims were rising up to burn them out of their churches, and they had better fight back fast or they would perish."

He added, "They forgot one crucial truth — that the arsonists were extremists and not normal Muslims. But the one-sided nature of the publicity did not enable them to remember that."

So not only can there be Christians who are experiencing more freedom and more persecution, there can also be some who are perpetrating it. But the basic pattern remains.

Rice and sand. More freedom and more persecution!

This pattern continues perhaps more markedly in China. American televangelist Pat Robertson visited Beijing last November. Feted by political and religious leaders, he grandly announced that a relaxation in China's religious laws was imminent, and that China's house churches would soon have the option of independent registration. Although details have yet to be clearly announced following the major December Religious Affairs Bureau conference, this might well be the case.

In stark counterpoint to this upbeat assessment, who should appear from the wings but an unknown Hong Kong businessman called Li Guangqiang, whose trial for smuggling Bibles into China burst onto front pages in December. At first it was feared he might be given a death sentence, but he ended up receiving "only a two year sentence," according to the Chinese government. He had tried to take more than 33,000 copies of the Scriptures to a branch of the "Local Church" movement in China in April and May 2001.

This group is also known as the "Shouters" due to their penchant for bellowing the name of Jesus in public prayer. The government views them as a cult, and like many house church movements, they have been guilty of some eccentricity of doctrine. At any rate, Li's trial and uncertain fate suddenly highlighted that for some house church groups deep underground, conditions are getting worse.

Thus it might well be that in 2002 we shall see many house church movements registering with the government and experiencing some more freedom, while others are labeled cults and subjected to a Maoist-style crackdown.

Rice and sand. More freedom and more persecution!

Not that I would wish to make a doctrine out of it. I don't believe for a moment that God initiates persecution to make a publicity point. But there is surely more than coincidence to the awkward phenomenon that when over-positive pictures of a persecuted community are presented, some unlooked-for event of persecution rears up to burst the happy harmony, and balances the picture.

Maybe it is God's way of ensuring that we do not forget those who have no megaphones.

Be grateful for good news of religious liberty on the increase, but remember to feel the draft, or Someone may throw a brick through your stained glass window!

Last updated 12 January 2009