The State Department Isn’t in the Missionary Business

Several years ago, when my wife and I were visiting Acoma, N.M., supposedly North America’s longest-inhabited city, our tour guide, a young Native American, told a story of how residents of a nearby pueblo had stolen the cross from Acoma’s Catholic church and what had to be done to regain the lost treasure. I wasn’t impressed. I was sad at how little this young woman understood about her own history and how someone in the 1990s from a culture that dates back perhaps 30,000 years would be talking about a 2,000-year-old religion that had helped supplant her ancestors’ beliefs.

The Acoma tour guide came to mind when I read news accounts of the State Department’s assessment on the persecution of Christians throughout the world. Seventy-eight countries are covered in the report, but one that draws major interest is China. Once again, the U.S. government is castigating others for not behaving the way we do.

Mind you, I’m not against religious freedom. My German ancestors, a family genealogy states, headed from Switzerland for Brazil in the 1730s, probably as religious refugees, but settled in Philadelphia. Having lived on or visited three other continents, I am eternally grateful to be a citizen of the United States, a country that surpasses all when it comes to individual freedom.

And I don’t doubt that China, whose failure to understand external criticism I attribute to Middle Kingdom myopia, is less than the ideal place for anyone of any religious bent. When I taught there in 1994, my dean eventually made me discontinue the extra office hours I held for my students because of the fear that I was proselytizing. Just the opposite. When I was in China, I avoided discussing religion and politics, twin taboos I learned from my mother while growing up in an ethnically and religiously diverse coal town in eastern Pennsylvania. I felt that I was a guest in China, and while I may have disagreed with the government’s policies, discretion was called for. I wasn’t going to listen to someone extolling the virtues of socialism (no one tried) so why should I force my views on people who weren’t interested?

I don’t have to tell anyone about the countries that conquered and imposed their religious beliefs on the natives. If the military was the right arm of a conquest, the church was the left. Today, we don’t celebrate the obliteration of previous cultures, but do make modest efforts to help preserve them.

The Chinese government makes no secret of its stand on religion, so why is anyone surprised when unregistered religious groups are harassed? Given the unstable nature of China, I can see why the government seeks to control anything that might become an opposition group. By the same token, when I visited China last August, I revisited a Catholic church in Beijing, took photographs (in the courtyard) and watched as people worshiped. I saw no uniformed guards, which was not the case in 1994 when we visited a Buddhist lamasery in Beijing; there, several soldiers were prominent.

The State Department’s report reminds me of the noisy people in the evangelical Protestant church I grew up in: They were always more concerned about someone else’s soul than their own. What’s troubling about the report is that it will merely give the Chinese government more fuel for its nationalistic fire (as it did in Russia last month, when Boris Yeltsin vetoed a bill limiting religion, in part reacting to U.S. pressure). It will be viewed as one more example of demonizing China, and instead of the U.S. press getting the blame, it will be official government policy. It will appear as though we are meddling in the internal affairs of other countries in the name of Christianity.

The State Department seems to be running worldwide interference for Christians. This is something of a reversal of what happened in Acoma centuries ago, but the result could be the same. Our government needs to get out of the religious protection business because it also looks like the Christian promulgation business. And that’s not what the United States is about, as my Christian ancestors would attest.