U.S. State Department

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Pew Research Center report lifts the veil (as much as possible) on religion in China

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Pew Research Center report lifts the veil (as much as possible) on religion in China

Amid a flow of recent news stories on the economic problems that plague China and its disruptive impact on global affairs, the Pew Research Center on August 30 issued a landmark 160-page report with a wealth of information on another persistent issue -- the status of various religious groups in this nation of 1.4 billion after 74 years of unremitting effort by Communist rulers to suppress or eliminate faith.

Given North Americans’ long-running interest in both China and its religious situation, especially for Christians, this report is important news. Editors will want to summon their art departments for charts to complement coverage. The report’s depiction of data sources and the huge difficulties in obtaining reliable information from the mainland adds to this notable achievement.

The upshot, according to Pew demographer Conrad Hackett, is that by available measures, China is — on the surface — “the least religious country in the world.” Not surprising when media and public meetings are restricted and the regime forbids religious education while subjecting children to intensive atheistic propaganda at school. Only a tenth of the Chinese report religious affiliation, and 3% say religion is “very important” in their lives, compared with 98% in nearby Indonesia (or 37% in the United States).

Government barriers meant Pew could not conduct its own field surveys as in other nations. So the numbers come from government reports, research by Chinese universities (a risky academic specialty), one private polling firm and the Sweden-based World Values Survey. The report provides excellent guidance on interpreting limits and problems with the available data sources and confusion over definitions.

Note this striking example: The government lists 34,000 registered Buddhist temples, compared with 190,000 counted by Sun Yat-sen University experts.

Yet the people are permeated with spiritual beliefs and superstitions. These include gravesite visits to venerate or assist ancestors in the afterlife, rituals to seek personal benefits, incense-burning, fortune-telling, planning of activities around auspicious calendar dates and feng shui (placement of buildings and furnishings thought to manipulate energies). With or without formal affiliation, a third of Chinese believe in the Buddha or enlightened Buddhist beings, and 18% believe in Taoist deities.

Are some believers afraid to discuss faith ties, while living under China’s expanding social credit system of rewards and punishments?


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An old question that's back in the news: Why can’t non-Muslims visit Mecca and Medina?

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An old question that's back in the news: Why can’t non-Muslims visit Mecca and Medina?

THE QUESTION:

Why does Islam ban non-Muslims from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum is among the last people Saudi Arabians might want to listen to. Yet he penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month urging Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to end Islam’s long-standing ban against non-Muslims entering the faith’s two holiest locations, Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad issued the Quran and founded the religion 14 centuries ago, and Medina, where he led the first Muslim regime.

This prohibition hit the news when Gil Tamary, an American Jew and TV journalist in Israel, illicitly slipped into Mecca to record material and broadcast a much-hyped 10-minute travelogue. Muslims have enforced the ban so carefully, Pipes reports, that only 18 non-Muslims are known to have ever entered Mecca, including Tamary and two others in recent decades.

The violation of sacred space provoked an international furor among not only Muslims but Israelis and westerners who feared a rise in hostility. The regime has filed criminal charges against Tamary and his Saudi driver. Tamary apologized and said his intent was to “showcase the importance of Mecca and the beauty of the religion” and thereby foster religious tolerance. Guess again.

But cheerleader Pipes thinks Tamary “boldly challenged an archaic status quo that the world unthinkingly accepts. Bravo to him for breaking a taboo. . . . He deserves respect, not condemnation.” Pipes even wants unspecified international organizations to lobby for open access with the Saudis.

Pipes did not mention another exclusionary policy noted in the U.S. State Department’s 2022 religious freedom report. Saudi Arabia strictly forbids all non-Muslim houses of worship nationwide, though private or secret Christian gatherings are known to occur.


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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

Every now and then, your GetReligionistas receive emails from readers who are infuriated by the headline on a story, as opposed to the contents of the actual story. Why, they ask, do reporters write terrible headlines like that?

This provides another chance to let readers know a basic newsroom fact: Reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines that go over their stories. They are written by copy editors.

(It’s possible that this fact has changed in the digital age. Maybe, as economic woes shrink news teams, reporters are asked to submit headlines. Young journalists can drop me notes telling me to get a clue.)

All of this is a set-up to discuss a double-decker New York Times headline that recently caused me to do a near spit take while drinking my morning cold-caffeine beverage. See if you can spot the offending phrase:

A Boom, a Fire and a Stampede: Dozens Die at a Coptic Church in Egypt

A blaze that killed at least 41 at a church in greater Cairo caused anguish among a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed in Egypt

The key words, for this Orthodox believer, were these (with an added dose of italics — “a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed.”

Whoa. The Copts feel that they are oppressed? This is a matter of emotions or their own opinions of what is happening to them?

In short, are there any experts who study global religious-freedom issues who do not accept, as a reality — demonstrated for centuries — that Coptic believers are persecuted or at least “oppressed” in Egypt? If readers question that statement, I would suggest a quick scan through this U.S. State Department report — “2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: Egypt.”

Now, the good news is that the actual Times report eventually offers quite a bit of information about the plight of Coptic believers. But first, here is the overture that helps set up the implied question in this tragedy: When is a church fire more than a simple church fire?


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Reality on bloody ground: That Pentecost massacre in Nigeria wasn't all that unusual

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Reality on bloody ground: That Pentecost massacre in Nigeria wasn't all that unusual

The massacre occurred during a Sunday Mass, but it wasn't an ordinary Sunday -- this was the great feast of Pentecost, which marks the end of the Easter season.

What's more, the gunmen didn't strike in tense northern Nigeria, where Christian communities are isolated in a majority-Muslim region. This 30-minute attack was inside St. Francis Catholic Church, located in the safer southwestern state of Ondo.

While 40 worshippers were confirmed dead, including five children, the number was almost certainly higher since many families buried their dead privately. Another 100 were wounded.

The scope of this attack was "unique," especially in southern Nigeria, but "this violence … was not unique in its occurrence," stressed Stephen Rasche, senior fellow at the independent Religious Freedom Institute in Washington, D.C. "These types of murders are taking place weekly, almost daily, in Nigeria -- murders of innocent Christians, being gunned down, slaughtered indiscriminately, throughout the north and, increasingly, into the central part of Nigeria and into the south."

Human-rights activists are trying to document the bloodshed. According to the nondenominational watchdog group Open Doors, the 4,650 Christians killed in Nigeria during 2021 accounted for 80% of such deaths worldwide -- nearly 13 per day. Nigeria's Christian death toll has topped 60,000 over the past two decades.

Nevertheless, this year's International Religious Freedom Report from the U.S. State Department said the "Secretary of State determined that Nigeria did not meet the criteria to be designated as a Country of Particular Concern for engaging in or tolerating particularly severe violations of religious freedom or as a Special Watch List country for engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom."

It's understandable that news reports about Nigeria have faded, in part because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and pressing global economic issues, said Rasche, who visited Nigerian churches during this Holy Week and Easter.

Also, many Western leaders view atrocities in Nigeria as clashes between Christian farmers and Muslim cattle herders, with climate-change issues erasing safety zones between these groups.


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What's news? Attacks on Christians in Nigeria provide an important case study

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What's news? Attacks on Christians in Nigeria provide an important case study

As an undergrad, The Religion Guy took a valuable course titled “Evaluation and Display of News,” an elemental skill for journalists who cope with difficult choices.

Take the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trash-a-thon. Please. Just as car crashes produce rubbernecking, “human interest” justified vast voyeurism that fed the market and stole print space and air time from more substantive stories.

Editors’ tendentious coverage decisions continually erode public trust in the media. Liberal outlets give scant play to the assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh, harassment of other Supreme Court justices and their families and related attacks on a couple dozen pro-life agencies. Meanwhile, conservatives downplay the near-miss danger to Vice President Mike Pence and other high officials amid the January 6 attempt to block the Constitution’s election process.

The Guy could list other examples from both sides, and so could you.

Let’s leap across the Atlantic to assess neglectful news judgment regarding the important plight facing Christians in Nigeria. Their continual conflict with Muslim jihadi factions has left an estimated 37,500 dead since 2011, says the latest annual report (.pdf here) from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (www.uscirf.gov; contact media@uscirf.gov or 202–523–3240).

The nondenominational watchdog group Open Doors USA says that in 2021“more Christians were murdered for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country,” making up nearly 80% of Christian deaths worldwide. Nigeria is the “most dangerous place to be a Christian” in the world, says the Intersociety for Civil Liberty and Rule of Law, a Nigerian human rights monitor. Christian observers speak openly of “genocide.”

In addition to the deaths, it’s all but impossible to count up the maimed victims who’ve survived, the kidnapped schoolchildren and clergy, forced child marriages and forced conversions or the widespread destruction of Christians' churches, homes, shops and even whole villages.

Sounds like compelling news from here.


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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

The whole idea of Axios, as a news publication, is to take massive, complex stories and — using a combination of bullet lists and URLs to additional information — allow readers to quickly scan through the news of the previous day. The Axios team calls this “smart brevity.”

More often than not, this turns out to be a crunched summary of the big ideas in mainstream coverage. Thus, it’s logical to look at this online newsletter’s take — “1 big thing: System failure” — on the horrific scenes that unfolded yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The big question: What did American diplomats, intellectuals and politicos miss in the big picture?

* The United States was literally run out of town after 20 years, $1 trillion and 2,448 service members' lives lost.

* Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Taliban's political office, told Al Jazeera today: "Thanks to God, the war is over in the country."

Why it matters: A friend who spent more than a decade as a U.S. official in Afghanistan and Iraq texted me that the collapse "shows we missed something fundamental — something systemic in our intel, military and diplomatic service over the decades — deeper than a single (horrible) decision."

* As the BBC's Jon Sopel put it: "America's attempt to export liberal democracy to Afghanistan is well and truly over. …”

What were the key tasks in this “export of liberal democracy”? Here is my two-point summary.

First, the United States and its allies had to build an Afghan military that could protect this project. #FAIL

Second, the Western nation builders had to sell a vision of an Islamic culture that, somehow, embraced American values on a host of different issues — from free elections to freedom for women, from Western-style education to respect for the Sexual Revolution in all its forms. This Georgetown University faculty lounge vision of Islam needed to be more compelling than the one offered by the Taliban. #FAIL

Looking at this from a journalism perspective, I think it is more than symbolic that most of the elite media coverage of the fall of this new, alternative Afghanistan have almost nothing to say about Islam and, in particular, the divisions inside that stunningly complex world religion. Was this, in any way, a “religion story”? Apparently not. #FAIL

There is way too much coverage to look at, of course. However, it does help to look at The New York Times, since that is the straw that stirs the drink in American media. My goal was to find material that contrasted the Taliban’s vision of Islam with the vision offered by the U.S. State Department.


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Ponder this news question: What happens to Afghan religious minorities post-USA?

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Ponder this news question: What happens to Afghan religious minorities post-USA?

First things first. There is no question that, if and when U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the biggest security issue will be protecting women who have taken modest steps to move into public life in recent decades.

Thus, it is totally appropriate that information about women’s rights received the lion’s share of attention in the recent New York Times report on the sobering behind-the-scenes realities in that troubled land. You can see that right in the headline: “Afghans Wonder ‘What About Us?’ as U.S. Troops Prepare to Withdraw,” with its subhead mentioning fears that the “country will be unable to preserve its modest gains toward democracy and women’s rights.”

Again, this news hook is totally valid. However, I think that this story needed some information — at least a paragraph of two — acknowledging the serious concerns of members of minority religious groups in Afghanistan. These range from Islamic minorities (and more moderate forms of that faith) as well as small, but historic, communities of Baha’is, Sikhs, Jews and Christians. And then there are the reports about growing underground networks of secret Christian converts.

This is, literally, a life-and-death situation for thousands of people. Might this human-rights issue be worth a sentence or two?

Hold that thought. First, here is the overture in this otherwise fine feature:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A female high school student in Kabul, Afghanistan’s war-scarred capital, is worried that she won’t be allowed to graduate. A pomegranate farmer in Kandahar wonders if his orchards will ever be clear of Taliban land mines. A government soldier in Ghazni fears he will never stop fighting.

Three Afghans from disparate walks of life, now each asking the same question: What will become of me when the Americans leave?

President Biden on Wednesday vowed to withdraw all American troops by Sept. 11, 20 years after the first Americans arrived to drive out Al Qaeda following the 2001 terrorist attacks. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said, speaking from the White House.

The American withdrawal would end the longest war in United States history, but it is also likely to be the start of another difficult chapter for Afghanistan’s people.


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Israel issue complicates anti-Semitism definition. This could haunt Biden’s Middle East work

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Israel issue complicates anti-Semitism definition. This could haunt Biden’s Middle East work

A tired Jewish cliche states, “two Jews, three opinions.” As a member of the tribe for, well, my entire life, I have to agree that it has a clear ring of truth.

However, I’m inclined to say that it’s not just Jews who seem to disagree about almost everything, certainly these days, and perhaps never. To quote the Talking Heads (one of my favorite post-punk rock bands, “same as it ever was, same as it ever was…”

So, President Joseph R. Biden, unity will not be had just for the asking. But I digress.

Among the latest Jewish communal verbal slugfests is one an outsider might reasonably think Jews would likely agree upon — which is, how do you define anti-Semitism?

But we don’t, because nothing is simple in life (allow me to refer you back to the “two Jews, three opinions” cliche above) no matter what we’d like to think.

This is particularly so when you add Israel to the equation. Or, to be more precise, the question of what constitutes fair political criticism of Israel and what is unfair — or biased — criticism of Israel that bleeds into hateful anti-Semitism?

The top of this JTA (the international Jewish news agency) story from mid-January lays out the issue.

(JTA) — When is it anti-Semitic to criticize Israel?

Anti-Semitism signifies hatred of Jews and the ways that hatred is perpetuated through age-old conspiracy theories and their modern variants. But what about when that hatred is expressed through rhetoric about the Jewish state? Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?

Those questions have divided American Jews in recent years — and are doing so again.


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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

The American media, and Muslim groups, remain vigilant in championing the safety and religious liberty of Islamic believers around the world.

But what about the large population of Muslims in China, where atheistic Communists are currently inflicting what’s probably the biggest program of religious persecution anywhere? Reports on the relentless campaign to suppress or “Sinicize” Islam say that a million or more Muslims of Uighur ethnicity have been shipped to re-education camps, amid reports of e.g. forcible pork-eating or renunciation of the faith.

Mainstream journalists have performed quite well on this, despite shrinking resources for foreign coverage and China’s efforts to bar reporters from Muslim regions. But what are Muslims and Muslim nations doing? GetReligion’s Ira Rifkin wrote a Feb. 12 post noting that China’s Muslims have “been largely abandoned by their powerful global co-religionists” due to “blatantly self-serving political considerations.”

Wall Street Journal Asia columnist Sadanand Dhume aims that same complaint (behind paywall) specifically at Pakistan. Prime Minister Imran Khan is quick to denounce “Islamopobia” in the West, he wrote October 4, but “China’s wholesale assault on Islam itself elicits only silence.” He explained, “Hardly any Muslim country wants to risk angering China’s touchy rulers by criticizing their policies.”

Journalists should be quizzing Muslim spokesmen, organizations, scholars and diplomats about this noteworthy anomaly. Such calculated silence, so much in contrast with Christian and Jewish activism on religious freedom, stands out because most Muslim nations fuse religion with state interests.


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