The news and images coming out of Egypt seem to get bleaker every time the news comes in. The revolution that began in Tahrir Square two years ago with such promise and hope for positives has devolved into a civil war pitting the more secular Egyptian military against the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. In the middle are caught the Egyptians who genuinely desire peace and Egypt’s minority Christian population. The question with which leaders of our nation are wrestling is this: Who do we root for?
Jonathan Waits
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This is a question which seems to grow more and more difficult by the day, but the answer for Christians may not be the same that our national leaders choose. There was no question that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s former president, was a dictatorial tyrant. His human rights record was pretty miserable. The United States was right to lend at least some support to the initial figures of the revolution who brought him down and seemed to be genuinely advocating for positive, secular, democratic changes. But, as was the case in every other anti-incumbency movement that swept over the Middle East in what has become known as the Arab Spring, under the surface of the ostensibly pro-democracy movements was an undercurrent of Islamic radicalism which turned something potentially positive and made it decidedly negative.
When Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was democratically elected last year it quickly became clear — although it should have been so all along — that democracy is just as swift a road to tyranny as is totalitarianism. Morsi immediately set about realizing the national and social goals of the Brotherhood, which were decidedly pro-Sharia and anti-everything except their preferred vision of Islam. This was bad news for U.S. relations with the strategic nation. It was especially bad news for the Christians of the nation. Egyptians Christians experienced rapidly increasing levels of intolerance and violent persecution from the earliest days of the revolution, even before Mubarak was out of office. This fact was unfortunately barely acknowledged by the current administration and certainly did not seem to be a major blip on its Egyptian diplomatic radar.
Since those early days the persecution of Christians has increased even more. Scores of churches have been burned. Believers have been harassed in a number of different ways. All of this happened with the implicit, sometimes explicit, approval of the Morsi administration. Eventually the broader populace of Egypt recognized that they had traded a secular dictator for a religious one and one who was economically incompetent as well. Indeed, Islamic social and economic policies have never proved all that beneficial for more than a select few national leaders. In any event, after what was described as the largest human protest ever, the Egyptian military stepped in and executed a coup against the Morsi administration that proved bloodless for only a short while. In the days since the coup the body count in Egypt has quickly been increasing and the situation threatens to spiral out of control much as it has done in Syria. Fortunately, not even our national media with its generally anti-Christian bias has been able to totally ignore the fact that amid the violence the greatest losers have again been the Christians who many members of the Muslim Brotherhood seem even more resolved to destroy than their foes in the military.
All of this brings us back to the question with which we began: Who should we support in all of this? There are several options, none of them good. Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood forces should be a non-starter. Their moderate façade has finally fallen and we should work to oppose their radical agenda every chance we get. If nothing else their unmitigated persecution of Christians should harden our resolve against them.
How about the forces in the military? This is more complicated. At a national level, it is difficult for us to support a military regime that comes into power via a coup against a democratically-elected administration. But the military is the best hope that Christians in Egypt have right now for things to return to where they were under Mubarak which, even though not great, were a far cry better than how they have been under Morsi. Indeed, this is the challenge of Middle Eastern dictatorial regimes for Christians and our national leaders: While we cannot support their human rights abuses, when they are secular, they tend to honor the notion of religious freedom better than more religious regimes. Indeed, orthodox Islam’s notion of religious freedom is separated from ours by a vast, uncrossable chasm. In Syria, for example, the attacks which have threatened to wipe out one of the oldest Christian populations in the world have come from the very rebels whom some among our national leadership have sought to support. As fellow Jesus followers we cannot support this.
So where does this leave us? Unfortunately not much further down the road than we started. It simply serves to show that easy solutions to such challenges as these are not likely to be forthcoming and we should not accept the notion that they are. As Christians we will do best to be clarions in our support for our brothers and sisters around the world, particularly those in places where persecution is common. After all, they share with us our first loyalty. Blindly supporting democratic movements which spring from solidly Islamic ideology simply because they are “democratic” is often unwise. We should advocate loudly in this charge for our national leaders to make absolute religious freedom — an offensively foreign idea in much of the Middle East — a nonnegotiable starting point in any diplomatic discussions.
In the end, we should seek to show tentative support for the parties which honor religious freedom most truly. From there we can begin to advocate for more.
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.