Defending the Faiths

Though the president is directed to act on all findings of persecution in the annual report, he may choose from a menu of options, which include a private demarche, the cancellation of a state visit, the withdrawal of non-humanitarian aid or even of trade subsidies. In instances of serious violations, he must choose from among more punitive measures such as sanctions. Although the president may waive sanctions for reasons of "important national interest", he must do so publicly. This provision is intended to promote clear presidential accountability, enabling the Commission or Congress to press for more vigorous action if they feel the White House has been too timid. What the law ensures, therefore, is regular exposure, priority consideration, protest and, at times, some form of weightier response to severe violations of religious freedom.

THE IDEA that the legislation champions is straightforward. Religious believers should enjoy the right to worship freely; express their beliefs publicly; educate their children according to these beliefs; build and run houses of worship, schools, universities and seminaries; enjoy freedom from discrimination in employment and political access; and retain the liberty to take up, abandon, proclaim or dissent from their religion. At least this is how the right is articulated by international legal documents, including Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Declaration on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and of discrimination based on religion or belief.

The recognition of religious freedom in international law, however, contrasts sharply with its gross violation in practice. Because of an unheralded demographic revolution--a tectonic shift of the globe's Christian population toward developing and non-democratic countries--Christians constitute the most numerous victims of persecution in the world today. While the proportion of Christians living in Asia, Latin America and Africa was roughly 25 percent in 1950, today it is approaching 60 percent. Paul Marshall estimates that at least two hundred million Christians live in countries where persecution is a regular occurrence, while many more live under "nontrivial restrictions on religious liberty." Reports published so far leave little question that millions of Christians in Asia, the Middle East and Africa live under the threat of murder, torture, arrest and abduction.

Behind the persecution lies one of the great surprises of the late twentieth century: a global resurgence of faith. Indeed, secularizing trends in Western Europe and among a thin, if influential, stratum of global intellectual elites now stand out as exceptions to more general trends. As Samuel Huntington has observed, persecution endures precisely because religion matters, and matters increasingly. When religion becomes important to people, dictatorial governments "will insist on controlling it, suppressing it, regulating it, prohibiting it, and manipulating it to their own advantage."' In China, for example, the communist regime has subjugated Tibetan Buddhists for over a generation and has initiated similar policies toward Muslims in Xinjiang. More generally, it restricts religious observance to state-run churches and has carried out a systematic campaign to eliminate worship by millions of unregistered Christians, in some cases imprisoning and torturing leaders of "house churches." The May 2000 report of the Commission asserts that the regime's violations of religious freedom have increased "markedly" over the past year.