Do you understand why?

Commenting on a recent interview given by Pope Francis, Steve Jalsevac, editor of LifeSiteNews, writes in "Pope Francis certainly has a way of stirring things up" (19 September 2013):

The pro-life and pro-family movements have been formed mostly in response to the giant vacuum of leadership from religious and other leaders. It has been a near impossible job for the relatively very few dedicated to the task.

Think of the numbers: hundreds of millions of unborn babies murdered worldwide since the 1960s. 300 million in China alone. And many millions more to come. A large percentage of these abortions have left millions of women damaged emotionally, physically and spiritually. The deliberate destruction of the natural family is now being attempted on a worldwide and intensified scale by de-populationists and secular extremists.

Children are being abused by the millions by explicit, vile sex-education programs beginning now even in kindergarten. A giant tidal wave of euthanasia seems imminent because of the demographic imbalance caused by abortion and decades of contraceptive use. The list goes on and is becoming a great, worldwide nightmare.

Francis says that what the Church believes on these issues is "clear" and therefore there is no need for him to go on about them. But my experience, and that of probably most pro-life, pro-family leaders that I know is just the opposite.

Yes, most people know that the Church opposes contraception, abortion and homosexuality, as well as pornography, prostitution and much more. BUT, very, very few, including the vast majority of Catholics, do not understand WHY Christianity opposes these things. They have not been taught this. Usually very little or nothing is said about them in Catholic institutions.

They do not know that these are all teachings of a loving Father to protect us all rather than restrictions to prevent enjoyment and freedom. They do not know that Catholic moral teachings are about charity and deep concern for the good of every person and are based on millennia of human experience and reason, as well as on the the teachings of Christ.

They believe many lies fed to them about how harmless and wonderful it is to engage in immoral actions. No one tells them about the many, very real dangers and consequences and the alternatives that are available to them.

Although Jalsevac is writing in a Catholic context, the matters raised here are relevant to all Christians everywhere.

Many Singaporeans, Christian or non-Christian, probably know that Christians have certain views on issues such as marriage, homosexuality, abortion, casinos, and so on.

But do you understand why?

Do you think these are meant to protect us, or meant to restrict enjoyment and freedom?

Have we forgotten our brothers- and sisters-in-Christ who suffer persecution?

There is a global war on Christians. 

John L. Allen Jr. writes in an article on The Spectator, "The war on Christians" (5 October 2013):

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion?

Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

In recent days, people around the world have been appalled by images of attacks on churches in Pakistan, where 85 people died when two suicide bombers rushed the Anglican All Saints Church in Peshawar, and in Kenya, where an assault on a Catholic church in Wajir left one dead and two injured.

Those atrocities are indeed appalling, but they cannot truly be understood without being seen as small pieces of a much larger narrative. Consider three points about the landscape of anti-Christian persecution today, as shocking as they are generally unknown. According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular observatory based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

According to the Pew Forum, between 2006 and 2010 Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the centre calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.

In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well.

To put flesh and blood on those statistics, all one has to do is look around. In Baghdad, Islamic militants stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on 31 October 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of 58 people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented; of the 65 Christian churches in Baghdad, 40 have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 US-led invasion.

The effect of this campaign of violence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and realistically many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed.

India’s northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured and at least 50,000 left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more.

An estimated 5,000 Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report, and declined to arrest her attackers.

In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country’s Christians are concentrated.

A Burmese Air Force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas ‘black zones’, where military personnel were authorised to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive.

In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement ‘Boko Haram’ is held responsible for almost 3,000 deaths since 2009, including 800 fatalities last year alone. The movement has made a speciality out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians out altogether from parts of the country.

In December 2011, local Boko Haram spokesmen announced that all Christians in the northern Yobe and Borno states had three days to get out, and followed up with a spate of church bombings on 5 and 6 January 2012, which left at least 26 Christians dead, as well as two separate shooting sprees in which eight more Christians died. In the aftermath, hundreds of Christians fled the area, and many are still displaced. Over Christmas last year, at least 15 Christians are believed to have had their throats cut by Boko Haram assailants.

North Korea is widely considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, where roughly a quarter of the country’s 200,000 to 400,000 Christians are believed to be living in forced labour camps for their refusal to join the national cult around founder Kim Il Sung. The anti-Christian animus is so strong that people with Christian grandparents are frozen out of the most important jobs — even though Kim Il Sung’s mother was a Presbyterian deaconess. Since the armistice in 1953 that stabilised the division of the peninsula, some 300,000 Christians in North Korea have disappeared and are presumed dead.

As these examples illustrate, anti-Christian violence is hardly limited to a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam. In truth, Christians face a bewildering variety of threats, with no single enemy and no single strategy best adapted to curb the violence.

Though fellow believers in the West may have special reason for feeling concern, the reality is that no confessional convictions at all are required to justify alarm over this rising tide of anti-Christian animus.

Because the bulk of the globe’s 2.3 billion Christians today are impoverished and live in the developing world, and because they are often members of ethnic, cultural and linguistic minorities, experts regard their treatment as a reliable indicator of a society’s broader record on human rights and dignity. Just as one didn’t have to be Jewish in the 1970s to care about dissident Jews in the Soviet Union, nor black in the 1980s to be outraged by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, one doesn’t have to be Christian today to see the defence of persecuted Christians as a towering priority.

Why are the dimensions of this global war so often overlooked? Aside from the root fact that the victims are largely non-white and poor, and thus not considered ‘newsmakers’ in the classic sense, and that they tend to live and die well off the radar screen of western attention, the global war also runs up against the outdated stereotype of Christianity as the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Say ‘religious persecution’ to most makers of cultured secular opinion, and they will think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, Bruno and Galileo, the Wars of Religion and the Salem witch trials. Today, however, we do not live on the pages of a Dan Brown potboiler, in which Christians are dispatching mad assassins to settle historical scores. Instead, they’re the ones fleeing assassins others have dispatched.

Moreover, public discussion of religious freedom issues often suffers from two sets of blinders. First, it’s generally phrased in terms of western church/state tensions, such as the recent tug-of-war between religious leaders in the United States and the Obama White House over contraception mandates as part of health care reform, or tensions in the United Kingdom over the 2010 Equality Act and its implications for church-affiliated adoption agencies vis-à-vis same-sex couples. The truth is that in the West, a threat to religious freedom means someone might get sued; in many other parts of the world, it means someone might get shot, and surely the latter is the more dramatic scenario.

Secondly, discussion is sometimes limited by an overly narrow conception of what constitutes ‘religious violence’. If a female catechist is killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, because she’s persuading young people to stay out of militias and criminal gangs, one might say that’s a tragedy but not martyrdom, because her assailants weren’t driven by hatred of the Christian faith. Yet the crucial point isn’t just what was in the mind of her killers, but what was in the heart of that catechist, who knowingly put her life on the line to serve the gospel. To make her attackers’ motives the only test, rather than her own, is to distort reality.

Whatever the motives for the silence, it’s well past time for it to end. Pope Francis recognised this in remarks during a General Audience last month.

‘When I hear that so many Christians in the world are suffering, am I indifferent, or is it as if a member of my own family is suffering?’ the Pope asked his following. ‘Am I open to that brother or that sister in my family who’s giving his or her life for Jesus Christ?’

In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, who leads a church with more than its fair share of new martyrs, phrased the same questions more plaintively during a conference in London. He bluntly asked: ‘Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?’

There may be no question about the destiny of Christianity in the early 21st century more deserving of a compelling answer.

 

In 1 Corinthians 12:25-26, Paul reminds us that in Christ Jesus we are all part of one body and should have "equal concern for each other". If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.

Have we forgotten our brothers- and sisters-in-Christ who suffer persecution?

Assimilated or Alienated?

In science, my faith is judged obscurantist; in ethics, mere animus; in practicality, irrelevant; in love, archaic. In the square, I am silenced; at school, mocked; in business, fined; at entertainment, derided; in the home, patronized; at work, muffled. My leaders are disrespected; my founder blasphemed by the new culture, new religion, and new philosophy which, to paraphrase Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address,” suffers from an aversion to the fullness of questions, insisting that questions are meaningful only when limited to a scope much narrower than my catholic range of wonder.

-   R. J. Snell, "I Am Lonely"
First Things (14 October 2013)

Pope Emeritus Benedict once said that "Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith".

Christianity remains one of the world's largest religions. However, Christianity is increasingly moving to the global South, or what was once referred to as the "Third World" or developing countries. A growing number of Christians live in places such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East even as Christianity continues to decline in America and Europe, widely referred to as the "West".

In the post-Christian developed world, Christians are widely perceived as intolerant, bigoted and judgmental because of opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. In the developing world, Christians live as religious minorities, persecuted by intolerant militant extremist groups.

Aliens and strangers in this world
Yet the Bible teaches that Christians are aliens and strangers in this world. Peter wrote:

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us. (1 Peter 2:11-12)

The Christian must always be conscious of the fact that he or she is in, but not of, this world. Jesus said:

I have given them Your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that You take them out of the world but that You protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth. As You sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. (John 17:14-19)

No one can be a better example of this than Jesus Christ Himself. Despite being in very nature God, Jesus came down to as an ordinary man. He was insulted, mocked, ridiculed and ultimately crucified for standing for Truth.

Jesus warned His disciples that "[if] they persecuted me, they will persecute you also" (John 15:20). And they did. James was put to death by the sword (Acts 12:2). According to tradition, Peter was crucified upside down. Early Christians suffered intensely for their faith. We read in the Book of Hebrews:

Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated — the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and in holes in the ground. (Hebrews 11:35b-38)

Assimilated or Alienated?
In Singapore, the government jealously guards religious harmony in order to ensure that all religious groups may live in peace with one another. Christians, and all other religious groups, are protected from persecution, ridicule and discrimination.

But have we treasured our peace and freedom? Do we exercise our God-given talents faithfully?

Are you like that city built on a hill that cannot be hidden (Matthew 5:14)?

When others look at you, do they see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16)? Or are you following the ways of the world instead of following Christ?

Are you assimilated or alienated?

Who Bears Primary Responsibility in Children's Education?

In a busy and well-connected country like Singapore, there is a constant temptation for parents to be caught up with work and other activities, while leaving children in the care of schools, tuition centres or even domestic helpers. Some parents choose to occupy their children with television or video games.

Is this correct? Who bears primary responsibility in children's education?

Biblical principles on parental responsibility

Most Christians should be familiar with the principles of spiritual multiplication found in the Great Commission, where Jesus commanded:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Matthew 28:19-20)

However, physical multiplication is God-ordained too. It is both a blessing and a command, given at the very beginning when God blessed the man and woman in the Garden of Eden, "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28).

Parents therefore have both physical and spiritual roles to fulfil in the lives of their children. Parents should be actively involved in providing for the physical and spiritual needs of children. This is why the Bible places such great emphasis on the role of parents in children's education.

When Moses addressed the Israelites as they were about to enter the Promised Land, he instructed them:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

Likewise, various passages in Proverbs highlight that the duty to instruct children rests on both fathers and mothers:

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
(Proverbs 1:8)

My son, keep your father’s commands
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
(Proverbs 6:20)

The same can be found in the New Testament, where Paul instructed:

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

While there may be some debate about whether Paul's exhortation meant both fathers and mothers, or fathers only, it is clear from the passages above that parents bear primary responsibility in their children's education. That responsibility does not rest on the government or society. Nevertheless, parents can delegate that responsibility if they choose to do so, just as they can withdraw that responsibility where necessary.

Application of principles to sexuality education

How do these Biblical principles apply in practice?

Here, we shall see how it applies in the context of sexuality education.

Parents bear primary responsibility in their children's education. This includes sensitive topics such as sexuality. Therefore, the Ministry of Education was in line with Biblical principles when it declared in a statement in 2009 that it sought to complement parents, who have the ultimate responsibility:

Parents are ultimately responsible for inculcating values in their children. MOE’s sexuality education programme aims to complement parents’ role in helping students make informed, responsible and values-based decisions regarding sexuality.

Since parents, as primary care-givers, are responsible for the health and moral values of their children, parents have have the right to opt their children out of a school's sexuality education programme, talks and workshops if they disagree with the values being taught.

Likewise, Focus on the Family wrote in a letter to the TODAY paper, "Abstinence education can work" (21 August 2013):

Parents should always be the primary communicators with their children about sexuality, imparting values and the family’s religious positions. No effective programme can operate without the support of parents.

Schools should want parental involvement and do everything in their power to cooperate with parents in sexuality education.

Contrast the views of the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) in a letter to TODAY titled, "Young minds and bodies: Is ignorance bliss?" (13 August 2013), which criticises the alleged "delegation" of sex education to parents:

The Education Ministry places an onus on parents to educate their children about sex, but it was reported last year that a Health Promotion Board poll, covering 1,169 Singapore households, found that less than half of parents had broached such topics with their teenage children. 

To delegate sex education to parents would thus be inadequate.

This is a view which deprives parents of their primary responsibility in educating their children about sex. As rightly pointed out by the writer of I on Singapore in "AWARE's Sexual Indoctrination Agenda: Misrepresentations, inversions and logical non-sequitur":

AWARE's philosophy represents an inversion of the original loci of rights and responsibilities. AWARE presupposes a state-centric idea which places primary responsibility for education of children on the State rather than on parents, by assuming that the government is the one which bears the original "onus" to teach children about sex, and which "delegates" that responsibility to parents...

The State exists for the individual, family, community and society; not the other way around. The role of the State is to support mediating institutions like the family, community and society, rather than to usurp them... The State has no right to impose ideas on children which fundamentally contradict those held by their family, community or society as a whole.

Conclusion
The Bible teaches that parents bear primary responsibility in their children's education, not the government, and not society. God has ordained us to multiply both physically and spiritually, and therefore parents have both physical and spiritual roles to fulfil in the lives of their children.

Parents should always strive to be actively involved in their children's lives. Initiatives in Singapore like Dads for Life and events like Date with Dad, organised by Focus on the Family, are good initiatives to encourage parents to connect with their children. We should give such initiatives our fullest support.