I am a Christian

‘I am a Christian, and I will remain a Christian.’ With these brave words, Meriam Ibrahim responded to the Sudanese court which had given her three days to embrace Islam and thereby save her life.

The recent case raised international outrage. Meriam’s absent father is a Muslim, but she was brought up as a Christian by her mother, and married another Christian, Daniel Wani. Nevertheless, under the Sharia law in force in Sudan, she was deemed as the child of a Muslim man to be Muslim, and as such her marriage to a Christian was not recognised. She was therefore sentenced to public flogging for adultery, and execution for apostasy – deferred for 2 years until her new baby, born in prison while Meriam was still shackled has been weaned.

Pressure from around the world has led to her release, and as I write it’s hoped that the family will be allowed to emigrate to the USA where Daniel Wani has citizenship.

The details of this story capture our imagination because of the poignant details, but it’s just one of many stories from countries in north Africa, and the Middle and Far East of Christians facing fear and abominable treatment for no other reason than the faith they hold.

Meriam was invited to save herself by surrendering her Christian faith. It’s nothing new for people to be faced with such a choice. When I was young, the stories I heard were prompted not by a radical Islamic legal system, but by Communism: Christians in the Soviet bloc could be imprisoned or marginalised because of their refusal to renounce God.

In both cases, a particular ideology – radicalised religion or an atheistic world-view tells you how you should be, and threatens consequences if you refuse to conform.

We are grateful for our freedom in Scotland to be Christian. Yet it seems to me that this country also has a pervading ideology in which the majority of folk who express views in public are rooted. It’s the view that belief in God is an eccentricity, a minority quirk, the last vestige of an outmoded way of being, to be tolerated in people’s personal lives, but largely excluded from public life.

It’s a view of Scotland which is utterly false: 54% of us claim to be Christians, to say nothing of the adherents of other faiths. We too face a challenge – not from secret police or radical clerics, but from the deceptively reasonable voice of those who tell us it’s better to stay quiet.

I wonder what the difference is between ideology and religion? I think religion becomes ideology when it seeks to control people, to deny them their God-given freedom, to demonise opponents, to silence awkward questions; when it becomes a belief system where love is trumped by rules, where there is only black and white, no grey.

I remember as a teenager, unsure whether I believed or not, imagining myself at a church service when the secret police storm the building, gather the frightened congregation together, and invite anyone who is not a Christian to leave before the rest are shot. Melodramatically, I saw myself, despite my lack of faith, remaining with the others as the steel barrels were raised in our faces simply because I couldn’t imagine any existence apart from the secure community of believers.

At that age, I think I  mistakenly saw Christianity not as the liberating faith it is, but as an ideology, giving rules for living, a deep suspicion of those not ‘one of us’, an uncompromising sense of moral absolutes. My journey has been one from Christianity as an ideology to Christianity as something real and living, with colour and joy and humble celebration, where lots of things are much less clear than they were, but where God whispers often.

Meriam did not compromise: ‘I am a Christian.’ It’s possible, of course, to outwardly conform, while nurturing the flame of faith within you, and we must not judge those who take this course. But it is hard to nurture faith when our lives are marching to an alien drumbeat. Faith thrives when it speaks out in integrity through all our living.

We need Meriam-like courage to say in grace and love when challenged ‘I am a Christian,’ taking our stand alongside those who suffer, feeling their pain, agonising, campaigning, praying, encouraging our Muslim friends who abhor the violence not to be silent, seeing both the bigness of evil, and the power of the living, creative Jesus.

The same Jesus who grieved to see in the temple religion used as a route to self-enrichment grieves in us to see religion in the precious house of God’s world made a weapon of control rather than a flowering of love, robust freedom and righteousness.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 3rd July 2014)