THERE WAS a time when Andrew Young had no difficulty recognizing persecution. There was a time when he lifted his voice for victims and made no excuses for oppressors.
But the civil rights movement in which Young rose to prominence ended long ago. His mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., has been gone these 30 years. And the moral stature Young acquired in his youth he seems willing to squander as he approaches old age.
![]() Andrew Young is squandering the moral stature acquired in his youth as an aide to Martin Luther King Jr. |
Young recently traveled to China with a small delegation from the National Council of Churches, of which he is president-elect. China is in its fourth year of a brutal government crackdown on Christian religious activity; more than 140 underground church members have been arrested in just the last few weeks. Young might have been expected to speak out on their behalf and condemn the Communist regime for its cruelty. He might have been expected, for example, to demand justice for Cheng Meiying — an evangelist from Hunan Province who was arrested on Oct. 26 and taken to the prison in Wugang, where the police beat and whipped her so ferociously that she became brain-damaged.
What Young said, however, was: "We found no sign of religious repression."
And: "Did we find religious freedom in the US sense? No. But we found no . . . active persecution."
And: "There are a lot of nuts in Atlanta that we've put in jail for preaching on street corners and disrupting traffic. How can I . . . make judgments about a nation this large, with more than a billion people?"
To be sure, it is no crime to be a Christian in the People's Republic of China — so long as you worship in an officially registered "patriotic" church, with ministers who have been approved by the Communist Party and who renounce all ties to any overseas entity. Which means that it is a crime for a Chinese Catholic to proclaim the authority of the Pope. It is a crime to hold a prayer meeting in an unofficial "house church." It is a crime to travel the country and preach the Gospel. It is a crime to speak in tongues, to baptize children, to teach of a second coming, or to condemn abortion.
Has the National Council of Churches anything to say about this? It does. "Christians in China," declares the NCC's general secretary, Joan Brown Campbell, "are terribly offended at the tide of rumor that there's widespread, terrible persecution and asked us to advocate for a more accurate portrayal of their situation."
House churches, in which the vast majority of China's Christians worship, are under heavy pressure to register formally with the government Religious Affairs Bureau. According to Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, their leaders have been warned that they will be "eradicated" unless they give in. Stand fast, and they may be arrested, beaten — or worse. Submit, and they risk their souls.
Beijing makes no secret of its antireligious bigotry. Ye Xiaowen, head of the Religious Affairs Bureau, calls house churches "evil, illegal organizations that undermine social order." But Young and the NCC leadership, blind to the suffering of their fellow Christians, give their seal of approval to the world's largest dictatorship.
"The Chinese government," Young maintains, "has recognized the role of religion in stabilizing and encouraging people to live moral and responsible lives." Adds Sharon Maeda, the NCC's deputy general secretary: "It is clear that the government of the People's Republic of China welcomes the good citizenship and community leadership of Christians."
Walter Winchell remarked in 1938 that the reason Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to see Hitler was because "you can't lick a man's boots over the phone." It is not hard to figure out why Andrew Young flew to China.
The bootlicking of totalitarians is an old story with the NCC.
In 1978 it published "China: Search for Community," which described the Cultural Revolution — a time of heart-stopping savagery, when Mao's Red Guards imprisoned, tortured, or killed tens of thousands of victims — as an "outstanding campaign" for "moral renewal" that "emphasized community interest, anti-elitism, commitment to revolutionary social goals, dignity of manual labor, equality of women and men, and education for the common people."
A decade later an NCC official told Congress that North Koreans — then ruled by Kim Il Sung, a Stalinist tyrant — "are proud of their beautiful cities, schools, health facilities, apartments, immigration projects, dams, and locks."
A mission to the Soviet Union organized by the NCC in 1984 ended, The New York Times recorded, "with praise for the status of religion in the Soviet Union and condemnation of the US role in the arms race." NCC leaders complained "that the harmony of their visit had been marred when two demonstrators, demanding religious freedom, held up banners during a Baptist church service." The sign holders were promptly hustled off; one was later sent to the gulag. The NCC did not object. "In the United States," the mission leader said, "a situation like this would have been handled by the police."
So nothing has changed at the NCC, where the incoming president compares persecuted evangelicals in China to "nuts in Atlanta" who disrupt traffic.
This Christmas, millions of Chinese Christians will at great risk celebrate the birth of their savior. May God watch over them and shield them from harm. The National Council of Churches surely won't.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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