Kremlin Behind Moscow Patriarchate's Crackdown On Dissident Churchmen And Movement - OpEd

Paul Goble
Eurasia Review
February 6, 2022

The Kremlin is behind the Moscow Patriarchate’s crackdown on dissidents among the clergy and among Orthodox social movements, Aleksey Makarkin says; but the Russian church in some cases has gone ever further than the state because it fears that the state will begin to use its organs against the church and undermine popular support for the faith.

The Russian church was enthusiastic about the state’s intervention against Jehovah’s Witnesses and other groups, the leader of the Moscow Center for Political Technologies says; and it welcomes the state’s help against Orthodox clergy and activists who step out of line but also fears where that could lead (ng.ru/ng_religii/2021-12-14/9_521_exile.html).

What this has meant, Makarkin says, is that now “church structures try to be careful even on those issues where earlier they displayed great activity.” They are uncertain just where the red lines for church behavior are as far as the Kremlin is concerned; and the most subservient are simply avoiding doing anything that might cause a problem for them.

“The government starts from the proposition that the church must control itself and not allow declarations which contradict the policies of the powers,” he continues. “If these things arise, then the church itself is required to address them. And when that doesn’t happen, then the state is forced to intervene and advance demands on the church leadership.”

One aspect of the situation is becoming especially fraught, Makarkin says. That concerns the role of elders to whom “many people from the government and force structures go,” a behavior the powers had accepted but are now seeing as a threat given the increasing outspokenness of these prominent features of the Orthodox landscape.

“Elders have become persons whom it is difficult for anyone to control,” he continues. “They aspire to the role of the highest spiritual authority.” If siloviki listen to them, that could be a problem; and so the government is moving against them and forcing the Patriarchate to provide assistance.

Given how important elders are in the religious life of the Orthodox, that sets the stage for a new wave of court cases almost certain to reduce the authority of the church and also spark more controversy between the traditionally subservient Patriarchate and the increasingly assertive Kremlin, the Moscow analyst suggests.

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .

https://www.eurasiareview.com/06022022-kremlin-behind-moscow-patriarchates-crackdown-on-dissident-churchmen-and-movement-oped/

Christianism: The Elephant in the Extremism Room

Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)

MATTHEWFELDMAN
JULY 5, 2021

Religious extremism in not unfamiliar to other faiths but has yet to be named as such among mainstream Christian confessions.

I contend that my subject matter is something of an elephant in our global room, but I should warn that it is equally a thoroughly unhappy one: religiously-inspired, revolutionary political violence. For nearly 20 years now, scarcely a day has gone by without reportage on Islamism. This type of extremism remains present in our global room, and no one can claim it is unseen.

That is of course with good reason: On 9/11, nearly 3,000 people were brutally murdered by violent jihadi Islamists in the worst sub-state terrorist attack in history. But there is something that has long vexed me, in keeping with the New Testament injunction to take the “log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” I have referred to this phenomenon for more than a dozen years but have never had the opportunity to properly delineate what I think is again becoming an urgent subject matter, namely Christianism.

Perversion of Christianity

As I have written earlier, “Whereas religious politics, in a banal sense at least, may be observed wherever clerics become directly involved in politics, the term ‘Christianism’ is intended to denote a more radical, revolutionary approach to secular politics.” Christianism may have Christian connotations and indeed draw upon Christian language but, like Islamism, it is essentially appropriative. It allows an entirely secular Anders Behring Breivik (now known as Fjotolf Hansen) who murdered 77 in Norway on July 22, 2011, to term himself a “cultural Christian” — not on account of any metaphysical belief, but because he believed it was a useful framework with which to attack Muslims and Europe and, using an anti-Semitic dog whistle, “cultural Marxists.”

Christianism, therefore, is a secular doctrine that is different from, alternatively, evangelicalism, political Christianity and fundamentalism. Joas Wagemakers makes a similar claim about the distinction of Islamism from types of religious fundamentalism such as Salafism. This is a political ideology appropriating religion, not the other way around. But I would go further than Wagemakers does in describing Islamism as “a political application of Islam.” Instead, I would suggest that both violent and non-violent forms of Islamism, in their very nature, reject pluralism and advance a doctrine of supremacy that is the hallmark of extremism — whether ethnic, national or religious.Make Sense of the WorldUnique insights from 2000+ contributors in 80+ countriesI agree to receive emails and other content from Fair Observer. I understand that I may repeal my consent at any time. You can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for further information.

Moreover, it is precisely the political violence exemplified by the horrors unleashed by Breivik that Christianism is intended to denote. In short, this is a distinct, ideological perversion of Christianity that is, at the same time, distinct from older and more familiar forms of Christian nationalism and even from the theologically-based exclusion or persecution that has marred Christianity no less than other monotheistic faiths. One need not be a Christian to be a Christianist, nor is Christianism driven by the same impulse as the regrettably all too familiar instances of tribalism in Christian history.

It scarcely should need saying, but Islamism is an extremist perversion of one of our world’s leading faiths. As a revolutionary ideology born of the 20th century, it can be directly traced from the interwar Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan al-Banna, for example, and the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb in postwar Egypt to the quasi-state terrorism of the Islamist death cult, Daesh. For all of its supposed medievalism, then, Islamism is a product, and not merely a rejection, of modernity.

A similar perspective can be taken on Christianism. So, first, a banal point: Believers have politics, just as do non-believers. For this reason, I am wary of constructions like “political Christianity” or “political Islam” for the same reason I’m only marginally less wary of constructions like “apolitical Christianity” or “apolitical Islam,” though I accept, of course, that different forms of hermeticism stretch across most faith traditions.

Thus, Christianism doesn’t refer to a form of Christian nationalism that is evident in the contemporary US (although not only there). One might observe the heart-breaking scenes in early April of Protestant loyalists rioting in Belfast with the frightening implications for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, or indeed the conflict acting as the midwife for the long struggle over the six counties, the Great War. Throughout that conflict, scholars have clearly shown that both Protestant and Catholic confessions anointed or, better, armed their nations with justifications of a holy war. Christian churches’ injunctions to fight for God and nation is but one example of Christian nationalism, and there are countless others like it in the Christian tradition as there are in other faith traditions. It is far from new.

Sacrazlied Politics

This particular sense of Christian nationalism, likewise, has been extensively studied in the American context, with particular focus on white evangelicalism. In the compelling empirical account, “Taking America Back for God,” Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry conclude that “those who embrace Christian nationalism insist that the Christian God formed, favors and sustains the United States over and above the other nations in the world.” It is in this sense that Rogers Brubaker refers to adherents of Christianism in a 2017 article, whereby “Christianity is increasingly seen as their civilizational matrix, and as the matrix of a whole series of more specific ideas, attitudes, and practices, including human rights, tolerance, gender equality, and support for gay rights.”

Yet here too we may be seeing a case of old wine in new bottles, whereby reactionary and even tribal expressions of a faith — in this case Christianity — which seem to belong to a tradition that, in American terms, stretches from John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” to the televangelists of our day. Even cast in such civilizational terms, these forms of Christian tribalism are of a different stamp than the tradition I’d like to indicate. It is first and foremost ideological and emerged between the two world wars to afflict all three principal confessions in Europe: Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

To take but one example of from each of these confessions, consider first the Romanian Orthodox ideologue, Ion Moţa, a key leader of militant fascist mystics, the Legion of Archangel Michael. Just before he was killed by Republicans in what he understood as a holy war in Civil War Spain, Moţa declared: “No force, no love exists which is higher than that of the race (and can only be realized in the race), except for the force of Christ and love of him. We are defending Christianity in a foreign land, we are defending a force which wells up from the force of our people, and, spurred on by our love for the Cross, we are obeying here in Spain our love for the Romanian people.”

Underscoring that his views were scarcely marginal, a mortuary train carried Moţa’s body from the Spanish battlefield across Europe in winter 1937 into Bucharest, where he was received by hundreds of thousands of devotees, helping to nearly triple the mystical fascist party — the Romanian Iron Guard — membership to 272,000 by the end of that year. No doubt many of these supporters later took part in the earliest massacres during the wartime Holocaust, murdering more than 100,000 Jews in pogroms across Romania in 1940.

This form of sacralized politics was not limited either to the laity or to Orthodox fascists. In Nazi Germany, the regime initially supported the mistitled German Christians as an expression of what was termed “Positive Christianity” in the NSDAP program. Under Reichsbishop Heinrich Müller, the German Christians promoted the Führerprinzip in the country’s Protestant churches, aiming for complete coordination between a totalitarian state and a totalitarian church.

A picture of what this looked like can be glimpsed from these selections of Muller’s 1934 rendering of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”. Thus, “Blessed are the meek” becomes “Benevolence to him who bears his suffering manfully,” while “Blessed are the peacemakers” is mongered into “Benevolence to those who maintain peace with the members of the Volk.” Most sacrilegiously, the categorical “turning the other cheek” is turned to the following: “I say to you: it is better, so to live with other members of your Volk that you get along with each other. Volk community is a high and sacred trust for which you must make sacrifice. Therefore come out to meet your opponent as far as you can before you completely fall out with him. If in his excitement your comrade hits you in the face, it is not always correct to hit him back.”

So far did this heresy go that the German Christians even sought the “liberation from the Old Testament with its cheap Jewish morality” by attempting to simply expunge it from the Bible. The genocidal analogue of this attempted erasure was the Holocaust, which was powered by what Saul Friedlander has aptly called “redemptive antisemitism.”

Clerical Fascism

Yet fighting a holy war against socialists in Spain or advocating genocide from the pulpit was not Christianist enough for the Independent State of Croatia, the Catholic wartime ally of Nazi Germany under the rule of the Ustasa, rightly described as “the most brutal and most sanguinary satellite regime in the Axis sphere of influence.” The Ustasa methods of killing were so sadistic that even the Nazi plenipotentiary based in Croatia recoiled. For instance, consider the words of Dionizije Juričev, the head of State Direction for Renewal, from October 22, 1941:

“In this country only Croats may live from now on, because it is a Croatian country. We know precisely what we will do with the people who do not convert. I have purged the whole surrounding area, from babies to seniors. If it is necessary, I will do that here, too, because today it is not a sin to kill even a seven-year-old child, if it is standing in the way of our Ustaša movement … Do not believe that I could not take a machine gun in hand just because I wear priest’s vestments. If it is necessary, I will eradicate everyone who is against the Ustaša.”

These words were targeted not only at the demonized victims of Nazism such as Jews, Roma and Sinti Travelers, but also at the Orthodox Serbs who were the largest victims of the Ustasa “policy of thirds” — kill one-third, expel one-third and forcibly convert one-third of their enemies. This sacrilege culminated in the only extermination center not directly run by the Nazi SS — the Jasenvocac camp, less than 100 miles from the Croatian capital Zagreb.

Jasenovac, where some 100,000 ethnic or religious victims were brutally murdered, was commanded by Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a serving priest. Though he was later defrocked and ultimately hanged in 1946, both his wartime actions and the escape of so many of his allies on the Catholic “ratline” to South America, including the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic — who spent more than a dozen years hidden in Argentina after the war — suggests that, in much the same way that fascism could appeal to seduced conservatives, Christianism could also appeal to Christian tribalists.

The case of such priests during the fascist era led to the useful term “clerical fascism,” characterized as a hybrid between the Christian faith and fascism. Yet in a manner inverse to Christian nationalism, which can be entirely secular, clerical fascism suggests a phenomenon from, and within, Christian churches. With respect to Christianism in our (arguably) secularizing world, this would exclude self-described “cultural Christians” like Anders Breivik, whose 775,000-word manifesto is clear on his secular appropriation of Christianity for the purposes of attacking cultural Marxism.

So too with the civilizational frame adopted by conspiracist proponents of the “great replacement,” which alleges a Muslim plot to destroy Christian civilizations from within. The convicted terrorist Brenton Tarrant, the murderer of 51 Muslim worshippers at Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, was aimed at countering this so-called “white genocide,” itself a neo-Nazi term coined by the convicted race murderer David Lane (also notorious for popularizing the “14 words”: “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). Like Breivik, Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” specifically addresses itself to Christians:

“Let the fire of our repentance raise up the Holy War and the love of our brethren lead us into combat. Let our lives be stronger than death to fight against the enemies of the Christian people.

ASK YOURSELF, WHAT WOULD POPE URBAN II DO?”

Pope Urban declared the First Crusade in 1095, opening one of the darkest chapters in Christian history.

Although modern and revolutionary, Christianism need not be defined as a theological stance. One can be agnostic on the issue of faith and still be a Christianist. More important is the Durkheimian religious behavior toward the sacred and the profane, which closely links clerical fascists with cultural Christians of Tarrant and Breivik’s stripe. This leads to the definition of Christianism as a modern, ideological appropriation of Christianity based upon a secular vision of redemption through political violence against perceived enemies.
Relevant Again

While it might be tempting to think that the era of fascism has left Christianism in our bloody past, this construction feels relevant again in the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection earlier this year in Washington, DC. True, Identity Christians, the Army of God and many similar groups emerged after 1945, but these were tiny and fringe extremist movements. By contrast, what makes Christianism today the elephant in the room is precisely how widespread it appears to be developing in a new guise — and radicalizing.

In the US, for instance, according to recent polling reported by The New York Times, nearly “15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters.” That equates to some 50 million Americans. That this ideological crusade is “infecting” Christian churches, indeed conquering them, is borne out by a similar Axios report indicating that this virus stretches across confessions: “Hispanic Protestants (26%) and white evangelical Protestants (25%) were more likely to agree with the QAnon philosophies than other groups. (Black Protestants were 15%, white Catholics were 11% and white mainline Protestants were 10%.)

We should not delude ourselves that this is, or will always be, a non-violent movement. Already, nearly 80 “conspiracy-motivated crimes” can be laid at the QAnon Christianists’ door — and that’s before ascribing to them a key role in the January 6 insurrection, also partly fomented by then-President Donald Trump. The fusion of QAnon with Christianity — an exemplary case of Christianism — is chillingly evidenced by a professionally shot video released this New Year’s Day, just days before the attempted coup in Washington. Even if this ideological call to battle ends with the canonical Lord’s Prayer familiar to Christians, salvation is emphatically this-worldly and focused on a “reborn” US in a manner quite familiar to scholars of fascism.

It is for this reason that Christianism is very much the elephant in the room. As such, it needs to be confronted and rejected both politically and theologically — first and foremost by Christians themselves. This repudiation would not simply be for the sake of the self-preservation of the faith in the face of its heretic form and not just for the protection of life that will be an increasing concern in the months and years to come. It is necessary because this is a syndrome not unfamiliar to other faiths but has yet to be named as such among mainstream Christian confessions.

We must not look away from this. Let us not go back to the genocidal years of clerical fascism in Europe, spawned by ideology and bloodlust, and let us stand tall against what is so obviously sacrilege. Both faith and civic duty command it. That is because, put in more familiar terms in William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Professor Matthew Feldman is the Director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. His specialist research areas include fascist ideology and practice since 1918, the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, neo-Nazi and ‘lone wolf’ terrorism, radical right movements and ideologues. See his full profile here.


https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2021/07/05/christianism-the-elephant-in-the-extremism-room/

An American Kingdom

A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP


Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post
July 11, 2021

FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.

Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.

It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”

Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.

“Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ”

***

The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.

This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.

None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.

What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting.

It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a “spiritual father” of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was “spiritual authority,” he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas.

Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born.

“Mercy” for undeserved grace.

“Culture” for the world they wanted to create.


***

That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services.

In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs.

In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs.

On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through — two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: “When we start, I want you to wait to build it — then I want you to do those drum rolls as we’re building it.” He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer.

The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit — not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it — a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it — golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.

That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black “MC,” in through an entrance where the words “Fear Go” were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee.

“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the “sexual confusion” of being gay, queer or transgender. They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon “Mercy” sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary.

Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs.

What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing.

A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new.

“The Holy Spirit is in this room,” he said.

Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. Another video began playing — this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation:

America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the “seductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control God’s people.” Beware of “freedom that is actually just rebellion against God.” Beware of confusion. Beware of “rogue leaders.” Beware of a world that “preaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,” and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation.

“Just say, ‘Holy Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,’ ” he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday.

People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the church’s website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet.

When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags.

“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said again.



***



By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin.

One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was “raising up an army of influential leaders” across Fort Worth.

Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine “operations” around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worth’s sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was “the demonic battle of our lifetime” and told those gathered that “you are the warriors in that battle.”

Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers.

A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries.

A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, “Please, just bless my life.”

A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: “Jesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,” she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord.

“God wants to tell you that you’re so beautiful,” she said into one window.

“I feel God is saying that you’ve done a good job for your family,” she said into another.

“I feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,” she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. “When God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,” she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. “I feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?” she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. “And I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my shame.’ Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my regret,’ ” the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. “ ‘You know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,’ ” the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, “Welcome to the family.”

Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Women’s Night.

“I feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,” a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun.

“Every time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,” her friend said.

“Yeah, that happens to me all the time, too,” said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to “prophesy over the land” in anticipation of a revival.

“I don’t understand it; I just know it’s God,” Autumn said.

“So many miracles,” said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding.

They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastor’s wife, during which she referred to the women as “vessels” and described “the Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.”

Another day — Election Day in Fort Worth — hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding.

“Supernatural,” said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers who’d knocked on thousands of doors around the city.

A candidate for the 2022 governor’s race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that “this is the beginning of a righteous movement.”

“We are not just going after the mayorship — we’re going after every seat,” he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray.

“Jesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,” his campaign adviser said. “We stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. God, this is only the beginning.”

Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, “God, I’ll go anywhere; God, I’ll do anything,” hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love.

“Everyone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, ‘By this we know love,’ ” he said. “Jesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.”

He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, “Jesus, Jesus,” trancelike, until the blond man said, “It’s about that time.”

He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth.


***


One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before.

Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed.

Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door.

It wasn’t the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable.

“Maybe someone is struggling with their identity,” Ryan said.

He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void.

“I never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,” he said. “We all take care of each other, right, Tom?”

“Oh, yeah,” said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called “misfits” into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken.

“It’s all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,” Tom said. “That’s what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that it’s all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. That’s my testimony.”

That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces.

“The sheep will know the shepherd’s voice,” he repeated to himself to calm his nerves.

“Hey, Jesus loves y’all,” he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by.

“He does, he does,” the woman said, and he pressed on.

“Is anything bothering you?” he said to a man holding a shopping bag.

“No, I’m good,” the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk.

It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by.

He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest.

“Do you talk to God?” Nick asked him.

“Every day — I died twice,” the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident.


“What happened when you died?” Nick asked.


“Didn’t see any white lights,” the man said. “Nothing.”

“Well, Jesus loves you,” Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red.

“Hi, I’m Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?”

“Kind of you to ask,” the man said. “My uncle killed himself yesterday.”

“Oh,” said Nick, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesn’t feel like it all the time.”

He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time.

“The singer said if you’re struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, ‘Okay, God, I guess I give it to you,’ and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, ‘I have you.’ I heard God say, ‘I love you. I made you for a purpose.’ When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.”


The man with red eyes listened.

“Thanks for saying that,” he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test.


“If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,” said Nick. “John the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? I’m ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off — it doesn’t matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.”

***

Ready for what, though, is the lingering question.

Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus.

To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, “There’s a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. It’s just loving the city. Being engaged. Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who don’t align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.”

Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: “Can you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.”

That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come.

The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in.

“Submission,” he said.

“We’ve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,” he continued.

“God makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,” he continued.

“When you submit, God fights for you,” he concluded.

He cued the band. The drums began to pound again, and he told people to “breathe in the presence of God,” and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them.

“I declare beautiful, supernatural submission,” they said.

Stephanie McCrummen is a national enterprise reporter covering an array of subjects for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the paper's East Africa bureau chief based in Nairobi. She has also reported from Egypt, Iraq and Mexico, among other places. She joined The Post as a Metro reporter in 2004.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/11/mercy-culture-church/

Russia Carries Out Mass Raids on Jehovah's Witnesses, Makes Arrests

U.S. News & World Report
Nov. 24, 2020

MOSCOW (REUTERS) - LAW enforcement authorities carried out mass raids on the Jehovah's Witnesses across Russia on Tuesday and made a number of arrests as part of a new criminal case against the group, the Investigative Committee said.

The law enforcement agency said it had opened an investigation as it suspected the Christian denomination, which Russia has labelled "extremist" and outlawed, was organising the activity of its national centre in Russia and local affiliates.
Russia's Supreme Court ordered the Jehovah's Witnesses to disband in 2017 and some of its adherents have been jailed or hit with criminal charges in an ensuing crackdown.

The Investigative Committee said in a statement it had identified a number of the group's organisers and followers in more than 20 regions and had taken them into custody as part of its investigation.

Some adherents have met privately in a flat in northwest Moscow from June 2019 to discuss and study religious literature relating to their faith, and have converted some Moscow residents, it said.

The Jehovah's Witnesses have been under pressure for years in Russia where the Orthodox Church championed by President Vladimir Putin is dominant.

Putin said in 2018 that he did not understand why authorities were pursuing the group and called for the matter to be analysed.

The Kremlin declined to comment on Tuesday. Jehovah's Witnesses representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Jehovah's Witnesses are a Christian denomination known for door-to-door preaching, close Bible study, and rejection of military service and blood transfusions.

(Reporting by Maxim Rodionov and Alexander Marrow; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-11-24/russian-investigators-open-new-criminal-case-into-jehovahs-witnesses-searches-under-way

The New Godless Religions: An Interview with Tara Isabella Burton

Religion & Politics
Kenneth E. Frantz

September 22, 2020

The United States has seen an increase in the so-called “nones”—people who don’t identify with any religious tradition. Some scholars have viewed this growing group as a sign that Americans are becoming more secular. Tara Isabella Burton argues in her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, that this notion is misguided. Burton takes a closer look at the lives of ostensibly non-religious people and finds that, even if they don’t identify with a religious tradition, there can still be a strong spiritual undercurrent to their lives. Her book takes readers through a number of spiritual subcultures, including among the followers of SoulCycle, Jordan Peterson, and witchcraft.

Burton writes a column for Religion News Service called “Religion Remixed.” She is a contributing editor at The American Interest and a former religion reporter at Vox. She is also the author of the novel, Social Creature. Kenneth E. Frantz spoke to Burton about her new book by phone. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Religion & Politics: In your book, you talk about the religiously remixed. Who are they and why did you consider them important to write about?

Tara Isabella Burton: I think that traditional conceptions of secularization in America have looked at the religiously unaffiliated as an indicator that America is getting less religious. That is actually not the case. About 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say they believe in some sort of higher power. About 17 percent say they believe in the Judeo-Christian god. In addition, you have people who affiliate with religious tradition—i.e. self-identified Christians—whose belief systems, structures, practices, and rituals are a little bit more eclectic. Almost 30 percent of self-identified Christians, for example, say they believe in reincarnation, which traditionally would not be something you would associate with orthodox Christian doctrine.

In talking about remixing, what I wanted to capture was this phenomenon I see as much more salient than so-called secularization, which is the way in which spirituality, meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are all divorced both from traditional religious observance and from one another. You might get your sense of meaning from one place and purpose from one place and community from a different place and so on and so forth. This kind of mix-and-match mentality, this anti-institutionalism, and desire to remake one’s own religious life in a more individualized way—all of these things I call together the phenomenon of remixing.

R&P: In your book you mentioned three categories of remixers. Could you get into those?

TIB: These categories aren’t mutually exclusive. They come from different forms of polling and data. You have your faithful “nones”—your people who say they are religiously unaffiliated but also say they believe in a higher power. You have your people who self-identify as spiritual but not religious. What’s interesting about that group is there are people who say that they’re spiritual but not religious but will also say “but I’m Christian” or “but I’m Jewish.” They might be affiliated with a religion, but they don’t call themselves religious, which itself opens up a field of questions. What does it mean to be religious? What does it mean to belong to a religion? What does it mean to identify as part of a religion and then also say you’re not religious? So that’s another can of worms.

The final can of worms is what I call the religious hybrids. These are people who do identify strongly with a religious tradition but who—as in the case of the Christians and reincarnation— have a personal theological outlook that is more eclectic than traditional orthodox theology. We don’t have good enough data to tell the overlap between these people because these are different polling systems. But, when we take it all together, what we can see is that a huge proportion of religious and not explicitly religious Americans fall into these categories. They are people whose approach to spirituality, whose approach to their religious life, is informed by this sense of individualization, by this sense of intuitionalism and anti-institutionalism. To put it very bluntly and reductionistically, they’re making their own religion in some sense.

R&P: How did the internet and our consumerist mentality bring about modern religious remixing?

TIB: There are three major elements that I would point to in looking at the way internet culture led to our modern religiously remixed culture. The first is the development of a kind of tribalization that transcended geographic limitations. The idea that you could seek out people who were like you, who thought like you, and share your desires and your goals, without those things being based in your geographic community. That fostered a different way of thinking about gathering and tribe based on affinity interest rather than on, perhaps one might say, a fixed point. Secondly, I think there’s the idea rooted in consumer capitalism that our choices define us. What we buy and what we consume can be indicative in how we build our personality. The internet has made this all the more possible, especially as various algorithms determine what news we see and what movies are suggested to us. The narrower an affinity base becomes, so too our approach to spirituality becomes something that should work for us and work for our choices, or so the prevailing cultural ethos goes. Thirdly and finally, I think the internet culture of user-generated content, where we are not just passive consumers but active creators—whether it’s making memes or posting on Twitter—has lent itself to a more participatory and polyphonic understanding of spiritual life. Again, there’s a hunger for ownership; we don’t want to passively consume a text but rather kind of write our own.

A phenomenon that I think is sort of an early canary in the coal mine for all of these tendencies is the rise of internet fandom. I’ll just give you the example of the Harry Potter fandom which is the one I focus on my book. Between 1997 and 2000, which is when the first through fourth books of the Harry Potter series came out, internet household usage went from 19 million Americans to a 100 million. A huge increase. Around that time, Harry Potter became the forefront not just of a phenomenon but a phenomenon that took on an internet form: the development of fan groups, of fanfiction. J.K. Rowling was among the first writers to publicly embrace fanfiction, which in turn kind of made Harry Potter fanfic its own thing. And again, fanfiction was not new; fan culture was not new. Among Star Trek fans, for example, it had been going on since the 70s. But online, the cost of entry was lower. It was easier to find it and get involved. The idea that if you didn’t like something that the author did, you could create your own story. You could make Harry Potter end up with Hermione Grainger if that’s what you wanted. This sense of creative ownership and freedom over ideas—rather than the idea that you were just receiving passively from on high the text and the story as it really was—was I think hugely formative.

R&P: In the book, you talk about how people are saying J.K. Rowling no longer owns the Harry Potter world.

TIB: More recently, as J.K. Rowling has alienated a lot of her fans through her transphobic views, the response has not been, “Let’s not read Harry Potter.” Some people have said that, but the predominant response has been, “She doesn’t own Hogwarts. These characters are ours. We can still write stories set in Hogwarts. Maybe don’t give this woman any more money. Don’t buy tickets to ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,’ but these characters, this world, belongs to us, and it’s J.K. Rowling whom we want to exile from Hogwarts rather than boycott.”

What’s to stop us from taking a similar approach of ownership of reimagining to sacred texts, to sacred stories? What does it mean to reimagine religious traditions in the same way? And that is the move that gets us from fan culture more broadly to its relevance for spirituality more specifically.

R&P: There’s this distrust of institutional religion and drawing guidance more from your gut. You call this “intuitional religion” in your book. Would you mind talking about the history of how that came about?

TIB: I’d say it’s more of a pendulum than a linear progression. This is very distinctive to American religious life. There are a variety of reasons. You could cite the separation of church and state. You can cite the sort of inherent inwardness of the Protestant tradition. You could cite the kind of cultural sense of freedom in America geographically and its novelty. There are many reasons for this, but in American religious history, there have always been waves of a kind of calcification of tradition and the development of civic institutions around religion. Your church as a center of civic as well as religious life—and backlash movements against that.

The rhetoric throughout many centuries has been very similar. It’s been something along the lines of: Those people going to church on Sunday and sitting in their pews are just going along with the motions. They don’t really believe it. There’s no real inward intensity to it. What we need is to restore a kind of emotional connection to the divine. You find that rhetoric in both Christian and non-Christian or Christian-adjacent versions of this. You find this certainly in the Great Awakenings with your tent revivals and your Methodist circuit riders. You find it too in the philosophy of the transcendentalists like Emerson or Thoreau with their focus on the individual spiritual experience over and against that of society. You find it in pop culture crazes of the nineteenth century like New Thought and Spiritualism. And you find it in the rise of contemporary evangelical American culture as well as in our modern kind of internet-based great awakening. In each case, the pendulum swings from religion as a cohesive social force, one that is about community and structure to religion as a kind of inward source of personal connection with the divine. Those things have always existed in tension, I would argue, in American culture up to and including today—with the difference today being that late capitalism and the internet have kind of kicked this phenomenon into overdrive.

R&P: You write about many different groups, including Harry Potter fans, wellness gurus, witches, and Jordan Peterson fans. What do these groups have in common and why did you choose to write about these groups in particular?

TIB: I will say there are so many groups I left out and that the difficulty with a book like this is I didn’t even get to QAnon or other conspiracy theories or anti-vaxxers. There’s so much I could have written about and I just didn’t have the space to. That said, what I wanted to capture in selecting these groups was to look at […] the most prevalent examples of new religions that people may have heard of, or encountered, and not really thought of in a religious way. So, looking at the things that have most permeated American cultural fabric and then analyze their religious character rather than talk about perhaps more intense but smaller groups with less media presence.

What all of these groups have in common is they are groups that have been galvanized by the internet. They are groups that want to rewrite the scripts or rewrite the rules of being. There’s a focus on internal desire. What do you want? What do you hunger for? There’s a sense that the establishment of society at large is dangerous insofar as it stops you from achieving your truest self or being your most authentic self. All of these qualities, which I think are embedded in contemporary American culture, I felt I could explore in the most nuanced way possible through turning a more specific lens to these groups.

Kenneth E. Frantz is a freelance writer based in Oklahoma. His work has been published on Sojourners and Real Clear Religion.



https://religionandpolitics.org/2020/09/22/the-new-godless-religions-an-interview-with-tara-isabella-burton/

China isn't the real threat to liberal democracy - 'we are', say academics

Rahul Bhattarai 
Asia Pacific Report
October 4, 2018

The Chinese government is accused of illegally harvesting the organs of Falun Gong members. However, a leading academic says that China isn’t the real threat – Western countries are themselves, reports Rahul Bhattarai of Asia Pacific Journalism.

Leading academics warn that the “problem” with China is not the Chinese Communist Party but that Western self-censorship is “killing” its liberal democracy.

“China is not the real threat there, we are, we are the biggest threat to liberal democracy in New Zealand,” says Dr Stephen Noakes, senior lecturer in politics and international relations and Asian studies at the University of Auckland.

“Every time we self-censor, when we choose not to speak out, when we chose to keep quiet for fear of not getting a visa, or not getting a trade deal … But since we, through our obsequiousness towards China are a potential threat, we can also be the cure,” he told a public seminar last week.

Lawyers and political scientists gathered at University of Auckland (UOA) last week to discuss the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies about fundamental human rights and freedoms, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Organ harvesting

China has been under fire globally for its alleged unauthorised organ transplants from members of the Falun Gong community.

Though the initial position of the Chinese government was that all the organs were donated, “this was at a time when they [China] didn’t even have donation systems… and they did not have an organs distribution system,” said Professor David Matas, lawyer, author and professor of immigration and refugee law at the University of Manitoba.

While all organs were being found locally and the transplant volume was small, after the prosecution of Falun Gong began, the transplant volume “shot way up,” he said.

China became the leading producer of transplantation in the world, second only to the United States.

Research conducted in 2006 by Professor Matas and his colleagues concluded that “the organs were coming from the practitioners of Falun Gong”, he said.

As a result of his report, the Chinese government quickly shifted its stance and said that “everything that was coming from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, before their execution they decided to donate their organ as an atonement for their crimes,” said Professor Matas.

Foreign lobbying

In New Zealand strong lobbying from the Chinese Embassy prevented an exhibition of the Chinese spiritual organisation Falun Gong to be set up in Auckland City.

Lawyer Barry Wilson, president of Auckland Council for Civil Liberties, said he had spent an enormous amount of time at the Auckland City Council trying to persuade them to allow the Falun Gong stand and the demonstrations for the protection of Falun Gong to remain.

“We were up against very strong lobbying from a Chinese Consulate and the Chinese Embassy which did not want that exhibition there,” he said.

The Chinese constitution of 1982 contained the civil liberties that are observed in democratic countries – “freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom from arbitrary arrest,” he said.

When Xi Jinping became president, he also brought his “clearly expressed opposition for liberal values”.

“In his speeches he has spoken of the dangers of the liberal ideas like civil liberties, constitution rights, the dangers they pose for Communist Party rule,” he said.

In China, there is no separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature – “courts and judges are subject to political direction,” he said.

Ruling by law

“What China needs is lawyers as cogs in its economic development machine, but it needs lawyers to rule by law, not keep the rulers in check through the rule of law,” he said.

Wilson said: “They [Falun Gong] are always interesting… its organisation and its events well deserve support.”

China has also been using various means to infiltrate foreign countries to exercise its soft power on them – the Confucius Institute (CI) is one such organisation, says director Doris Lui in her documentary movie, In The Name of Confucius.

The documentary claimed CI was an “infiltration organisation”.

The Chinese government founded the institute in 2004 to teach foreigners the language and culture of China.

The documentary has been a strong critic of the CCP over its alleged violations of human rights, particularly against the Falun Gong community.

In August, the free screening of the movie was set to air in University of Auckland, but the airing was withdrawn at the last minute.

The University of Auckland, University of Canterbury and University of Wellington in New Zealand have ties with CI.

The CI, which is controlled by the Office of Chinese Language Council Internationl (Hanban) prevents its teachers from teaching Cantonese or Hokkien.
https://asiapacificreport.nz/2018/10/04/china-isnt-the-real-threat-to-liberal-democracy-we-are-say-academics/

Bitter Winter

Bitter Winter

A magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China

"In 2018, China was due to appear before the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in Geneva for the Universal Periodic Review, an assessment of the human rights situation all UN member states should submit to every five year. In the same year 2018, XI Jinping moved to consolidate his position as potential president for life in China, and new and more restrictive laws on religion came into force. 2018 is also the year when Bitter Winter starts being published as an online magazine devoted to religious liberty and human rights in China."

"Bitter Winter plans to report on how religions are allowed, or not allowed, to operate in China and how some are severely persecuted after they are labeled as “xie jiao,” or heterodox teachings. We plan to publish news difficult to find elsewhere, analyses, and debates."

"Placed under the editorship of Massimo Introvigne, one of the most well-known scholars of religion internationally, “Bitter Winter” is a cooperative enterprise by scholars, human rights activists, and members of religious organizations persecuted in China (some of them have elected, for obvious reasons, to remain anonymous). It is independent from any religious or political organization, serving an international audience, although gladly welcoming the cooperation of many, and the fruit of volunteer work by those who work on it , although donations are gladly accepted."

https://bitterwinter.org/

Some Worry About Judicial Nominee's Ties to a Religious Group

LAURIE GOODSTEIN
New York Times
SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

One of President Trump’s judicial nominees became something of a hero to religious conservatives after she was grilled at a Senate hearing this month over whether her Roman Catholic faith would influence her decisions on the bench.

The nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor up for an appeals court seat, had raised the issue herself in articles and speeches over the years. The Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee zeroed in on her writings, and in the process prompted accusations that they were engaged in religious bigotry.

“The dogma lives loudly within you,” declared Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, in what has become an infamous phrase. Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, accused his colleagues of employing an unconstitutional “religious test” for office.

Ms. Barrett told the senators that she was a faithful Catholic, and that her religious beliefs would not affect her decisions as an appellate judge. But her membership in a small, tightly knit Christian group called People of Praise never came up at the hearing, and might have led to even more intense questioning.

Some of the group’s practices would surprise many faithful Catholics. Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a “head” for men and a “handmaid” for women. The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.

Current and former members say that the heads and handmaids give direction on important decisions, including whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home, and how to raise children.

Legal scholars said that such loyalty oaths could raise legitimate questions about a judicial nominee’s independence and impartiality. The scholars said in interviews that while there certainly was no religious test for office, it would have been relevant for the senators to examine what it means for a judicial nominee to make an oath to a group that could wield significant authority over its members’ lives.

“These groups can become so absorbing that it’s difficult for a person to retain individual judgment,” said Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of constitutional law and history at the University of Pennsylvania. “I don’t think it’s discriminatory or hostile to religion to want to learn more” about her relationship with the group.

Ms. Barrett, through a spokesman at the Notre Dame Law School, where she is on the faculty, declined several requests to be interviewed for this article.

A leader of the People of Praise, Craig S. Lent, said that the group was not “nefarious or controversial,” but that its policy was not to confirm whether Ms. Barrett or anyone else was a member. Mr. Lent, whose title is overall coordinator and who has belonged to the group for nearly 40 years, said in interviews that the group was about building community and long-term friendships, and that members have a “wide spectrum” of political views.

“We don’t try to control people,” said Mr. Lent, who is also a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Notre Dame. “And there’s never any guarantee that the leader is always right. You have to discern and act in the Lord.”

He later added, “If and when members hold political offices, or judicial offices, or administrative offices, we would certainly not tell them how to discharge their responsibilities.”

By all accounts, Ms. Barrett appears headed for confirmation to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, a post one rung below the Supreme Court. She is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the high court, especially if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were to retire.

Ms. Barrett, 45, has never served in the judiciary but has won praise for her legal credentials. A law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, she was hired at 30 at Notre Dame Law School.

She is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, a conduit for judicial nominees to the Trump White House. More than 70 law professors across the country signed a glowing letter of endorsement. A separate letter of endorsement was signed by all of her fellow faculty members.

The sight of Democratic senators grilling Ms. Barrett only elevated her profile. A conservative judicial group began running digital ads targeting Senator Feinstein. Cheeky T-shirts and coffee mugs soon appeared for sale emblazoned with Senator Feinstein’s remark about dogma.

Ms. Barrett was questioned in particular about a 1998 scholarly article in which she and her co-author argued that sometimes Catholic trial judges should recuse themselves from the sentencing phase of death penalty cases. At the hearing, Ms. Barrett backed away from that position, saying she could not think of any class of cases in which she would recuse herself because of her faith.

Current and former members of People of Praise said that Ms. Barrett and her husband, who have seven children, both belong to the group, and that their fathers have served as leaders. The community, founded in 1971, claims about 1,800 adult members in 22 locations in North America and the Caribbean.

The group believes in prophecy, speaking in tongues and divine healings, staples of Pentecostal churches that some Catholics have also adopted in a movement called charismatic renewal. The People of Praise was an early leader in the flowering of that movement in North America. It is ecumenical, but about 90 percent of its members are Catholic.

To fulfill the group’s communitarian vision, unmarried members are sometimes placed to live in homes with married couples and their children, and members often look to buy or rent homes near other members.

Some former members criticize the group for deviating from Catholic doctrine, which does not teach “male headship,” in contrast to some evangelical churches. The personal advisers can be too controlling, the critics say; they may betray confidences, and too often they supplant the role of priest.

Mr. Lent said the group’s system of heads and handmaids promotes “brotherhood,” not male dominance. He said the group recently dropped the term “handmaid” in favor of “woman leader.”

“We follow the New Testament pattern of asking men to take on some spiritual responsibility for their families,” he said.

Adrian J. Reimers, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, was one of the founding members of the People of Praise, but he was ejected 13 years later after he said he increasingly questioned the leaders’ authority over members’ lives and deviation from Catholic doctrine. He later wrote a critical manuscript, “Not Reliable Guides.”

Mr. Reimers said in an interview that the breaking point came after he objected to instructions a handmaid had given to his wife. When he took his concerns to his head, he said he was told that his wife was “trying to undermine God’s plan for her life” and that the couple should follow the handmaid’s guidance.

There are some indications that both Ms. Barrett and the People of Praise may have tried to obscure Ms. Barrett’s membership in the group.

Links to issues of the group’s magazine, Vine & Branches, that mentioned her have disappeared from its website, some of them very recently. One included an announcement that Ms. Barrett and her husband had adopted a child; another had a photograph of Ms. Barrett attending a women’s gathering.

A spokesman for People of Praise, Sean Connolly, said the group was sometimes asked by members to remove links to articles about them, but he would not say whether that had happened in this case. Mr. Lent said he was unaware of any such request concerning Ms. Barrett.

Every nominee for the federal bench is required to fill out a detailed questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ms. Barrett did not list any religious affiliations on her questionnaire, though many nominees have in the past.

Administration officials said on Thursday that the White House has been advising all its judicial nominees that they need not list religious affiliations on their Senate questionnaires.

Ms. Barrett did, however, list that she was a trustee of Trinity School from 2015 to 2017, giving no further detail. Many schools have that name, but this one was founded and run by People of Praise, and trustees must be members. Mr. Lent confirmed that Ms. Barrett was indeed a Trinity trustee until very recently.

The Senate questionnaire also asks nominees to list their public speeches, and to supply the committee with recordings or texts. Ms. Barrett listed a Trinity School commencement address she gave on June 11, 2011, but according to a committee aide, she did not submit a copy of that speech.

“I’m concerned that this was not sufficiently transparent,” said M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor at Boston College Law School who studies the relationship between law, religion and morality. “We have to disclose everything from the Elks Club to the alumni associations we belong to — why didn’t she disclose this?”

A version of this article appears in print on September 29, 2017, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Links to Religious Group Raise Issues for Nominee

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/us/amy-coney-barrett-nominee-religion.html

International Religious Freedom Report for 2016

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
Switzerland

Download PDF: http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm?year=2016&dlid=268874

Executive Summary

The constitution guarantees freedom of faith and conscience, and it and the penal code prohibit discrimination against any religion or religious adherents. The constitution delegates regulation of the relationship between government and religious groups to the 26 cantons. The canton of Ticino’s ban on face coverings in public places entered into force on July 1. On the same day police in the canton detained a woman for wearing a niqab and a man for protesting the ban. Two localities established Islamic gravesites or authorized their separate allocation in municipal cemeteries. A court upheld a decision to deny permission to establish a private Islamic nursery school in Zurich. The city of Basel denied citizenship to two Muslim girls because of their refusal to participate in swimming classes for religious reasons. The high school council in Basel-Land Canton rejected a complaint by the family of two Muslim brothers whom a school penalized for refusing to shake their female teacher’s hand for religious reasons, and the city of Basel suspended the family’s citizenship application. A court in St. Gallen Canton fined a Muslim man for forbidding his daughters, for religious reasons, from participating in swimming lessons at school. The Swiss Federal Council stated it would ban neither local mosques nor imams from accepting foreign financing.

Islamic organizations reported an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, which they attributed to the rise of ISIS and terror attacks in Brussels and Nice. Media surveys also exposed growing social unease towards Islam. According to the Coordinated Islamic Organizations of Switzerland (KIOS), one of the principal Muslim groups in the country, Muslim women wearing headscarves felt increasingly isolated and excluded from society, non-Muslim children shunned Muslim classmates in school, and Muslims frequently felt discrimination when seeking employment. A court ruled a private company’s 2015 dismissal of a Muslim woman for wearing a headscarf to work was illegal. A Sikh representative said Sikh children who did not cut their hair for religious reasons had trouble being accepted at school or in vocational traineeships, and that Sikh youth experienced difficulties finding apprenticeships. Jewish groups reported fewer anti-Semitic statements and acts in 2015, but said the number of incidents remained high.

The U.S. embassy discussed religious freedom with the government, focusing on access to religious education and religious services. The Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues met with government officials to discuss Nazi-looted art and the country’s 2017 chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Embassy officials met with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society officials, and religious leaders from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities as well as representatives of other religious minorities, eliciting their views on the extent of religious discrimination. The embassy hosted an interfaith Passover dinner, an iftar, and an interfaith Rosh Hashanah dinner, all of which included discussions on religious tolerance and religious diversity.

Section I. Religious Demography

The U.S. government estimates the total population at 8.2 million (July 2016 estimate). According to the Federal Statistics Office, as of 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, 38 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, 26.2 percent Reformed Evangelical, 5.7 percent other Christian groups, 5 percent Muslim, and 0.2 percent Jewish. Among the other Christian groups, 2.2 percent of the population is Orthodox Christian or Old-Oriental Christian, 2.2 percent belongs to other Protestant groups, including evangelicals, Pentecostals, and charismatic Christians; the remaining 1.3 percent includes Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Christian Catholics (also known as Old Catholics). Religious groups together constituting 1.3 percent of the population include Buddhists, Hindus, Bahais, and Sikhs. Persons identifying with no religious group constitute 22.2 percent, and the religious affiliation of 1.3 percent of the population is unknown.

Approximately 95 percent of Muslims are of foreign origin, with over 30 countries represented. Media reports state most come from countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many Muslims also come from Albania, Turkey, North Africa, and Somalia. According to the 2014 Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, 80 percent of the Muslim community is Sunni; the minority includes 9.5 percent Shia, 7 percent Alevis, and 3.5 percent Ahmadis and others. More than 50 percent of the Muslim population lives in the cities of Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Bern, Aarau, and St. Gallen; the highest Muslim population density is in the cantons Basel City, Glarus, St. Gallen, Thurgau, and Schaffhausen. More than 75 percent of Jewish households are located in Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, and Bern.

Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom

Legal/Framework

In its preamble, the constitution states it is adopted in the name of “Almighty God.” It guarantees freedom of faith and conscience, states each person has the right to choose his or her religion, and prohibits religious discrimination. It states the confederation and cantons may, within the scope of their powers, act to preserve peace between members of different religious communities. The federal penal code prohibits any form of “debasement,” which is not specifically defined, or discrimination against any religion or religious adherents.

Inciting hatred or discrimination, including by electronic means and on the basis of religion, is punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment or a fine. The law also penalizes anyone who refuses to provide a service because of someone’s religion, organizes, promotes, or participates in propaganda aimed at degrading and defaming adherents of a religion, or “denies, justifies, or plays down genocide or other crimes against humanity.”

The constitution delegates regulation of relations between the government and religious groups to the 26 cantons, including the issuance of licenses and property permits. The cantons offer legal recognition as public entities to religious communities that fulfill a number of prerequisites and whose applications for recognition are approved in a popular referendum. The necessary prerequisites include a statement acknowledging the right of religious freedom; the democratic organization of the religious community; respect for the cantonal and federal constitutions and rule of law; and financial transparency.

The cantons of Basel, Zurich, and Vaud also offer religious communities legal recognition as private entities. This gives them the right to teach their religions in public schools. Procedures for obtaining private legal recognition vary; for example, in Basel the approval of the canton’s Grand Council is required.

There is no law requiring the registration of a religious group in the cantonal commercial registry. New regulations, which entered into force on January 1, require religious foundations, characterized as institutions with a religious purpose that receive financial donations and maintain connections to a religious community, to be registered in the commercial registry. To register as a religious foundation in the commercial registry, the foundation must submit an official letter of application to the respective authorities and include the organization’s name, purpose, board members, and head office location as well as a memorandum of association based on local law, a trademark certification, and a copy of the organization’s statutes. The granting of tax-exempt status to a religious group varies from canton to canton. Most cantons automatically grant tax-exempt status to those religious communities that receive cantonal financial support, while all other religious communities must generally establish they are organized as non-profit associations and submit an application for tax-exempt status to the cantonal government.

All of the cantons, with the exception of Geneva, Neuchatel, Ticino, and Vaud, financially support at least one of four religious communities that the cantons have recognized as public entities – Roman Catholic, Christian Catholic, Reformed Evangelical, or Jewish – with funds collected through a mandatory church tax for registered church members and, in some cantons, businesses. Only religious groups recognized as public entities are eligible to receive funds collected through the church tax, and no canton has recognized any other religious groups as public entities. The church tax is voluntary in the cantons of Ticino, Neuchatel, and Geneva, while in all others an individual who chooses not to pay the church tax may have to leave the religious institution formally. The canton of Vaud is the only canton that does not collect a church tax; however, the Reformed Evangelical and Roman Catholic denominations are subsidized directly through the cantonal budget.

The construction of minarets is banned in accord with a national referendum. The ban does not apply to the four existing mosques with minarets. New mosques may be built without minarets.

The constitution sets education policy at the cantonal level, but municipal school authorities have some discretion in implementing cantonal guidelines. Most public cantonal schools offer religious education, with the exception of schools in Geneva and Neuchatel. Public schools normally offer classes in Catholic and/or Protestant doctrines with the precise details varying from canton to canton and sometimes from school to school; a few schools provide instruction on other religions. The municipality of Ebikon in the Canton of Lucerne offers religious classes in Islamic doctrine, as does the municipality of Kreuzlingen in the Canton of Thurgau. In some cantons, religious classes are voluntary, while in others, such as in Zurich and Fribourg, they form part of the mandatory curriculum at the secondary school level; however, waivers are routinely granted for children whose parents request them. Children from minority religious groups may attend classes for their own faith during the religious class period; these classes must be organized and financed by the minority religious groups and are held outside of the public schools. Parents may also send their children to private religious schools at their expense or homeschool their children.

Most cantons complement traditional classes in Christian doctrines with more general classes about religion and culture. There are no national guidelines for waivers on religious grounds from classes other than religious instruction, and practices vary.

A federal animal welfare law prevents ritual slaughter of animals without prior anesthetization. The ban applies to kosher and halal slaughter practices. Importation of traditionally slaughtered kosher and halal meat is legal and such products are available.

Religious groups of foreign origin are free to proselytize, but foreign missionaries from countries not members of the European Union or the European Free Trade Association must obtain a religious worker visa to work in the country. Visa requirements include proof the foreigner does not displace a citizen from a job; that he/she has completed formal theological training; and that he/she will be financially supported by the host organization. Non-recognized religious groups must also demonstrate to cantonal governments that the number of its foreign religious workers is not out of proportion to the size of the community when compared to the relative number of religious workers of cantonally-recognized religious communities.

Foreign missionaries must also have sufficient knowledge of, respect for, and understanding of national customs and culture; be conversant in at least one of the three main national languages; and hold a degree in theology. The law requires immigrant clerics with insufficient language skills and knowledge of local culture and customs, regardless of religious affiliation, to attend mandatory language courses as well as related specialist training to facilitate their integration into society.

In some instances, the cantons may approve an applicant lacking this proficiency by devising an “integration agreement” that contains certain goals the applicant must try to meet. The host organization must also “recognize the country’s legal norms” and pledge it will not tolerate abuse of the law by its members. If an applicant is unable to meet these requirements, the government may deny the residency and work permits.

The law also allows the government to refuse residency and work permits if a background check reveals an individual has ties to religious groups deemed “radicalized” or has engaged in “hate preaching,” defined as publicly inciting hatred against a religious group, disseminating ideologies intended to defame members of a religious group, organizing defamatory propaganda campaigns, public discrimination, denying or trivializing genocide and other crimes against humanity, or refusing to provide service based on religion. The law authorizes immigration authorities to refuse residency permits to clerics considered “fundamentalists” by the government if the authorities deem internal security or public order is at risk.

The country is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.


Government Practices

The canton of Ticino’s ban on facial coverings in public places entered into force on July 1, and on the same day authorities detained a woman for violating the ban and a man for protesting it. A municipality in Lausanne established 250 Muslim gravesites, and a city in St. Gallen Canton revised its regulations to allow the separate allocation of Islamic gravesites in municipal burial grounds. The country’s highest court upheld a decision to deny a permit for a private Islamic nursery school in Zurich. Basel denied citizenship to two Muslim schoolgirls because they refused to take part in required swimming classes, and a court in St. Gallen Canton fined a father for forbidding his Muslim daughters from taking mandatory swimming classes. The city of Basel suspended a Muslim family’s citizenship application after two members of the family, students at a high school, refused to shake a teacher’s hand for religious reasons. The school punished the students and rejected an appeal of the decision by the family. A regional court in Bern Canton ruled a private company’s dismissal of a Muslim woman for wearing a headscarf to work was illegal.

According to local media reports, the Department of Defense and Civil Protection founded a working group for devising adequate protection measures for Jewish institutions, due to the concerns of Jewish communities about an increased terror threat against Jews. On November 1, the Ministry of Interior’s Service for the Fight against Racism issued a report titled “Measures taken by the federal state to combat anti-Semitism in Switzerland.” According to the report, while the state was required to protect Jews if they were at risk of attacks, it had no responsibility to provide security for Jewish institutions. The report suggested Jewish organizations could create a foundation to finance the costs of providing security to Jewish institutions. Herbert Winter, the president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG), wrote in a statement, “This type of proposal is unacceptable to us,” because protection “is the state’s duty.”

On July 1, the canton of Ticino’s ban on burqas, niqabs, and other face coverings in public, approved in a 2013 referendum and approved by parliament in 2015, entered into force. The law banned facial coverings for religious reasons, or facial coverings aimed at maintaining anonymity while perpetrating violent acts in public places, including in shops, restaurants, or public buildings. Penalties for violations entailed fines of up to 10,000 Swiss francs ($9,812). On July 1, police in Locarno, Ticino Canton, detained a Swiss Muslim woman for wearing a niqab and a French-Algerian man accompanying her for inciting violation of the ban. According to press reports, the man was immediately fined 230 Swiss francs ($226), including court costs, and was potentially subject to additional fines. The woman had not been fined by year’s end.

In June voters of the city of Adliswil in the canton of Zurich approved revisions to the city’s personnel regulations that allow the cantonal government to ban public officials, in the context of enforcing neutral behavior, from wearing or expressing political, ideological, or religious views and symbols, including headscarves and crucifixes, at work.

According to unconfirmed reports from an individual working at an NGO involved with interreligious dialogue and migrant integration, authorities in Basel, Lucerne, and Bern denied recognition applications by Hindu communities on the grounds that the Hindu community had not been established in the country for a sufficiently long time. Authorities reportedly told the Bosnian communities in Basel and Aargau they should not submit an application as they would stand no chance of winning approval in a popular vote. In Lucerne, authorities reportedly told the Muslim community they were not processing recognition applications.

The city of Wil in the canton of St. Gallen revised its cemetery and burial regulations to allow the separate allocation of Islamic gravesites in municipal burial grounds. In February the canton of Bern called on municipalities to designate a special section in their cemeteries as Islamic burial grounds. In April the municipality of Bois-de-Vaux in Lausanne established 250 Muslim gravesites at its cemetery. Muslim representatives continued to report to local media the need for more Islamic burial grounds in municipalities to reduce the financial costs of expatriating deceased family members to their country of origin. The representatives added that second-generation migrant Muslims increasingly wanted to be buried in the country.

In November the Federal Court, the country’s highest court, dismissed the al Huda Islamic Association’s complaint regarding the Zurich educational authority’s 2015 rejection of the association’s application to establish a private Islamic nursery school to educate children in Arabic and on the Quran. The Federal Court ruled the intended school’s operational concept failed to comply with the legal requirements of a religiously-oriented private school. According to the Federal Court, al Huda’s concept lacked the separation of religious and secular content and overemphasized the association’s viewpoint of religion forming the basis of all acquired knowledge, thereby exceeding the extent to which a faith-based school was allowed to give weight to religion in its teachings.

In March SIG stated increasing exemption requests by Muslims resulted in public schools granting fewer allowances regarding religious attire and dispensations from classes for religious reasons. SIG added stricter school policies not only constrained Muslim students’ religious practices, but also had the potential to increasingly restrict Jewish students’ religious expressions, such as wearing the Jewish skullcap (kippah).

In June the city of Basel denied Swiss citizenship to two Muslim sisters aged 12 and 14 years, due to the girls’ refusal to participate in mandatory school swimming classes and school camps for religious reasons. Basel’s naturalization committee based its decision on a 2013 Federal Court ruling that declared school swimming lessons part of compulsory education. The committee said citizenship applicants must fulfill all the requirements of compulsory education to qualify for naturalization. There was no legal mechanism for appealing the decision.

In June the district court of Rheintal in St. Gallen Canton sentenced a Muslim father to a suspended fine of 3,000 Swiss francs ($2,944) and an additional, unsuspended fine of 1,000 Swiss francs ($981) for neglecting his welfare and educational duties towards his children, as well as for breaching the cantonal education law and failing to respect official orders after he forbade his daughters, for religious reasons, from participating in compulsory school swimming lessons and a school camp. The judge stated the man’s behavior was hindering the integration of his children.

In April Basel’s migration office suspended the citizenship application of a Muslim family, according to media reports. The suspension followed a refusal, for religious reasons, by two brothers, aged 14 and 16, who were members of the family and students at a high school in Therwil, Basel-Land Canton, to shake a teacher’s hand in October 2015. The brothers said their behavior was intended to “protect a woman’s dignity.” The school penalized the brothers with community service duties. In September the high school council in Therwil rejected the family’s complaint about the punishment. The high school had initially granted the brothers an exemption from shaking hands with their teacher, but following a legal assessment by the cantonal education authorities, the school reversed its decision and obligated the brothers to greet their teacher by shaking hands. The family’s appeal against the school’s community service penalty imposed on their sons remained pending with the cantonal government. The case generated widespread local and international media attention.

Reportedly in reaction to this incident, the Basel education directorate informed schools in the Basel region they could fine parents up to 5,000 Swiss francs ($4,907) if their children repeatedly refused to adhere to a school’s code of conduct, which may include an obligation to shake hands with teachers. In June members of the Jewish community spoke out against the ruling.

In March Freiburg Canton declared a proposed referendum by the anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which collected signatures for a cantonal vote against the establishment of an Islamic Center in the University of Fribourg, was invalid. The cantonal parliament said the referendum would have violated the federal constitution’s prohibition against religious discrimination.

In April the city of Bern rejected the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland’s (ICCS) application for hosting a public event aimed at promoting peace and the denunciation of ISIS after police authorities said they could not guarantee the safety of the demonstrators because of the “international political situation of recent months.”

On June 30, the Federal Council, the federal government’s cabinet, stated it would ban neither local mosques nor imams from accepting foreign financing nor require imams to hold sermons in one of the country’s national languages. The government’s statement came after a parliamentary motion was submitted by a lower house of parliament representative, who raised concerns over foreign funds potentially propagating radical Islam. The Federal Council said any ban on foreign financial flows for Islamic institutions would discriminate against the Muslim community, and that existing laws were sufficient to mitigate the risks of radical preachers.

In July the public prosecutor’s office of Valais Canton initiated criminal proceedings against a lower house parliamentarian from the SVP for violating the antiracism law after the man publicly condoned the killing of a Muslim man by another Muslim in a St. Gallen mosque in 2015 with a tweet that read “We want more!” The case was pending at year’s end.

In January the Young Socialists Switzerland (JUSO), the youth branch of the Social Democratic Party, posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on its Facebook page depicting President Johann Schneider-Ammann feeding a Jewish man, while declining to feed the child next to him, and saying “… and a spoon for... the international financial lobby.” JUSO removed the cartoon and published an apology, stating it had not had any anti-Semitic intentions.

The government granted visas primarily to religious workers who intended to replace individuals serving in similar functions in the same religious community. Applicants were required to prove they had sufficient financial means to support their stay in the country during their assignment. Although there was no fixed number of residence permits allocated to Turkish imams, Turkish nationals applying for short- and long-term religious worker visas needed to show they were associated with the Turkish Central Authority for Religious Affairs. In 2015, the latest year for which figures were available, the government granted residence permits to 19 imams, 17 of whom were from Turkey and two from Macedonia.

According to the courts, missionaries of certain denominations, such as Mormons, were ineligible for religious visas because they did not possess a theology degree. Mormon missionaries from Schengen Area countries were allowed to work, however, because they did not require visas to enter the country.

The Federal Service for Combating Racism provided 36,000 Swiss francs ($35,329) to fund three projects focusing on religious freedom, including religious discrimination and prejudice, and the Holocaust. The first project was an international conference that examined “Islamophobia;” the second project was a seminar on how to reduce societal prejudices towards people of different cultures and religions; and the third project was on the remaining Swiss Holocaust survivors.

Although not a requirement, schools continued to include Holocaust education as part of their curriculum and to participate in the Holocaust Day of Remembrance on January 27.

The government is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and will assume the chair in 2017.

Section III. Status of Societal Respect for Religious Freedom

In June the Consulting Network for Racism Victims, a collaboration between the NGO humanrights.ch and the Federal Commission Against Racism, consisting of a network providing consulting and counseling services related to racism, released its report for 2015, documenting an increase in anti-Islamic incidents. The report cited migration, the crisis in Syria, and terror attacks by Islamic extremists as driving society’s negative sentiments towards Muslims. According to the report, anti-Islamic incidents were predominantly verbal and occurred mainly at work and in neighborhoods.

The SIG recorded fewer anti-Semitic statements and acts in 2015, the latest year for which data were available, which it attributed to the de-escalation of the Gaza conflict and greater social awareness from the widespread media coverage of the many anti-Semitic incidents and subsequent criminal investigations that occurred in 2014. SIG also noted less anti-Semitic activity online in 2015. The 2015 Anti-Semitism Report, produced jointly by SIG and the NGO Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism, cited 16 anti-Semitic incidents (excluding anti-Semitic hate speech online) in the German-speaking part of the country in 2015, compared to 66 incidents in 2014. The report documented two incidents of physical assaults against Jews, one of which involved several men attacking an Orthodox Jew in Zurich. The Geneva-based Intercommunity Center for Coordination against Anti-Semitism and Defamation (CICAD) reported 164 anti-Semitic incidents in the French-speaking region of the country in 2015, the latest year for which data were available, 11 of which it deemed serious, characterized by “violent anti-Semitic insults in public places, including anti-Semitic letters, verbal abuse, and graffiti. Although CICAD also recorded a decrease in anti-Semitic incidents (down from 270 incidents in 2014), the report stressed the number of documented incidents in 2015 was among the highest during its 12-year existence. The report also noted most anti-Semitic incidents occurred during January and February, following the terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen.

On December 19, a gunman opened fire on worshippers at an Islamic center in Zurich, injuring three. The gunman fled the center and killed himself near the scene, according to police. The motive behind the shooting was still unknown by year’s end.

In October the regional court of Bern-Mittelland in Bern Canton ruled a private company’s 2015 dismissal of a Serbian Muslim woman for wearing a headscarf to work was illegal and ordered the business to award her financial compensation. The court said the company’s actions violated the right to religious freedom under the federal constitution.

A Sikh representative, Jowawar Singh, told local media that Sikh children who did not cut their hair for religious reasons had trouble being accepted at school or in vocational traineeships, and that numerous Sikh youth experienced difficulties finding apprenticeships.

Authorities expressed concern that police were not able to provide participants at ICCS rallies and public events with adequate protection because of the increasing public hostility towards the ICCS, after the ICCS publicly defended two Muslim boys for refusing to shake their teacher’s hand.

A representative of the Reformed Evangelical Church in Zurich reported asylum seekers wanting to convert from Islam to Christianity were at risk of being intimidated and threatened by fellow Muslim asylum seekers for changing their faith. Ahmadi leaders reported many Muslim groups refused to recognize Ahmadi Muslims as followers of Islam and attempted to exclude them from opportunities to engage in joint dialogue with the government.

Islamic organizations, such as the Coordinated Islamic Organizations of Switzerland (KIOS), reported an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, which they attributed to the rise of political Islamism, ISIS, and the attacks in Brussels and Nice. According to KIOS, Muslim women wearing headscarves felt increasingly isolated and excluded from society and non-Muslim children shunned Muslim classmates in school.

Muslims told local media that anti-Muslim sentiment had noticeably increased since the rise and growing media presence of ISIS and the terror attacks in Brussels and Nice. Many Muslims said they felt pressured to defend Islam and their religious practices, and that Muslims were frequently discriminated against when seeking employment. While Muslim representatives stated societal discrimination against Muslims was a reflection of broader intolerance toward foreigners, many Muslims continued to say they suffered discrimination to a greater degree due to their religion.

In November SIG launched a police complaint against a neo-Nazi group, “Murder Command” (Mordkommando) for song lyrics calling for the death of Jews. The group had also issued death threats against leading Jews, including SIG President Herbert Winter, targeted politicians, and other public personalities.

The Consulting Network for Racism cited several instances of verbal abuse directed against Muslims. In one incident a man yelled “Dirty Arab!” to a woman wearing a headscarf and told her to return to her own country. In another incident, students harassed a Muslim teacher, telling her to “Put on the burqa, so that we don’t have to see your ugly face!” The students also taunted the teacher about her husband having a second wife. The report did not indicate whether the school punished the students or provide details on the incidents.

A survey by a national newspaper, 20 Minuten, reported 41 percent of respondents viewed conservative Muslims more negatively following terrorist attacks in Europe and 73 percent of respondents were bothered by Muslim women wearing veils. Another subsequent survey by the same newspaper revealed only 38 percent of respondents believed Islam was consistent with national culture and identity, and 39 percent were against recognizing Islam as one of the country’s official religions.

According to media and NGO reports, during the year the main groups responsible for engaging in anti-Semitic rhetoric were Geneva Noncompliant, European Action, the League of the Ticino People, the Party of Nationally Oriented Swiss (PNOS), and the Swiss Nationalist Party, the French-speaking branch of PNOS. In October the Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism filed a complaint against Swiss neo-Nazi band Amok and German neo-Nazi bands Stahlgewitter, Confident of Victory, Excess, and Frontalkraft for breaching the anti-racism law after they performed what they said were racist and anti-Semitic songs at what was widely described as a right-wing extremist concert attended by 6,000 people in the canton of St. Gallen earlier in October. In late October the PNOS celebrated the establishment of five new PNOS regional sections with a concert attended by 100 people in the canton of St. Gallen.

Many NGOs and representatives of the religious community coordinated interfaith events to promote tolerance locally and nationwide. The Week of Religions in November featured more than 100 interfaith events nationwide, including exhibitions, music and dance concerts, film screenings, roundtables, panel discussions, and communal dinners. The SIG, the Institute of Dialogue and Intercultural Cooperation, and other NGOs continued to support a project to address and eliminate misconceptions between Muslims and Jews. The Dialogue Institute also organized interfaith events ranging from lunches and dinners to movie nights, panel discussions, student exchanges, educational seminars, and lectures.

Section IV. U.S. Government Policy

U.S. embassy officers discussed with the government’s Office for Racism Prevention, which is responsible for matters related to religious discrimination, issues of access to non-Christian religious education in the cantons. In June the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues met with government officials to discuss Nazi-looted art, the importance of transparency with respect to art provenance, and the country’s 2017 chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Embassy officers met with NGOs including Katharina Werk, the Dialog Institute, and the House of Religions, representatives from civil society, and leaders from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities as well as representatives of other religious minorities, including the Bahai, Alevi Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Mormon communities, to discuss discrimination against religious groups as well as availability of religious education for religious minorities.

U.S. embassy staff participated in events promoting religious tolerance, such as an iftar, an Interreligious Women’s Parliament hosted at Bern’s House of Religions, and an interfaith prayer organized by the canton of St. Gallen’s Interreligious Roundtable. The Ambassador spoke about the importance of religious freedom and tolerance at these events. U.S. embassy staff organized an interfaith Passover dinner, an iftar, and an interfaith Rosh Hashanah dinner to discuss religious tolerance and diversity with representatives of the Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Bahai, Alevi, and Buddhist communities.

https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm?year=2016&dlid=268874#wrapper