Volodymyr Zelensky and The Campaigners Against Slavery Teach Us About The Place Of Faith And Belief In Public Life
It’s a great pleasure to join you for your Festival of Faith. I particularly warm to the challenge set by the Dean to talk about how faith can make a difference in our daily living – in the jobs we do, in the challenges we face – in my case, at the interface of politics and faith.
Although I have experienced moments where faith and politics have clashed it is minor stuff in comparison with the 250 million Christians who face downright persecution worldwide – or for that matter the Uyghur and Rohingya Muslims subjected to genocide – or the Jews who still bear the scars of a tortured history. But, like it or not, religion and politics do march hand in hand.
Yes, there are also examples of religion being used for dark purposes – think of the Taliban or ISIS or Boko Haram – but recall too that the mass murderers of the twentieth century, from Hitler to Stalin, Mao Ze Dong to Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung were all driven by a hateful atheism where they reserved special places in their man-made hells for anyone who put God first.
So let me share some examples of where faith has inspired and animated the struggle for the common good.
You won’t be surprised that I want to begin in Ukraine.
The grandfather of its courageous President, Volodymyr Zelensky saw his three brothers executed by the Nazis as the depraved Holocaust sought to eliminate Judaism and Jewish people.
Recently, I was fortunate to be present in Westminster to hear President Zelensky address both Houses of Parliament. It was over an internet connection from Kyiv while assassins were literally trying to find him and murder him.
Inevitably, Ukraine – and those other countries which suffered so grievously under Soviet Communism – have been greatly on my mind as I prepared these remarks. In 1989 the Berlin Wall didn’t collapse of its own volition.
And I want to dwell for a while on what part faith played when, as at Jericho, the walls came tumbling down. And, by the time I have finished these remarks, what I would like fair minded people to conclude is that people with religious faith have, down the ages, and in different places, made a rich contribution to promoting the common good and to the development of just societies.
Communist tyranny across central and Eastern Europe was opposed and ended by brave and courageous men and women – many of them deeply influenced by their religious faith – who took the decision to be guided in their actions by their beliefs.
In Poland they were inspired by Karol Wojtyla, – Pope John Paul – and they created the Solidarity movement. Lech Walesa, the electrician who climbed over the fence in Gdansk to encourage the workers in the shipyard to defy the Kremlin’s Polish puppets – and became the leader of 10 million members of Solidarity was sustained throughout by his faith. Ultimately, he became the first democratically elected President of Poland since 1926.
In East German, for several years every Monday in the run up to the events of 1989, Pastor Christoph Wonneberger led “peace prayers” at the Protestant Nikolaikirche – St Nicholas Church, which became a safe space for political dissidents.
The Lutheran church was in the vanguard in supporting resistance to Soviet rule, to the cruel secret police, the Stasi and to Communist ideology. I will never forget how, in Leipzig, East Germany’s second city, a candle-lit mass protest became the turning point: a crowd of 70,000 thronged the city centre.
In Hungary, the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship – a small Methodist offshoot played a heroic part in the anti-communist struggles of the 1970s and 80s while, in Romania, men like the imprisoned Richard Wurmbrand, like the Orthodox priest and dissident, Fr. Georgie Calciu – whose hands were broken by the Communists so that he could not make the sign of the cross – and Pastor Lazlo Tokes – who faced down Ceausescu’s Communists in Timisoara – became the catalyst for change.
In 1989 I was in Warsaw on the day on which, 50 years earlier, Chamberlainhad declared War on Germany after its invasion of Poland. It was the event which led to my dad and his four brothers signing up to fight the Nazis – one lost his life.
In 1989, a recorded message was broadcast on giant screen in Warsaw’s Old City Square.
Against all that city and country had seen, from the Warsaw Ghetto to the massive destruction of homes and communities, the thousands who had gathered in the square heard the Polish Pope urging the people not to “be afraid” in contradicting totalitarianism. Yet, in reality, recalling the brutal quashing, of freedom, in 1956, in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and in 1981 in Poland. there was plenty to be afraid of.
But, as George Orwell foresaw in “Animal Farm”, the jackboot and iron fist can only be applied for so long – and faith sustained those people through the long and dark years of Nazism and Communism.
And today, it’s not God raining down lethal missiles on civilian populations, destroying maternity hospitals and orphanages, threatening the use of nuclear weapons, it’s men with a blood lust seeking to extend their power. What we do about that comes down to us.
During that visit to Warsaw, in 1989,, I had a private meeting with a group on exiles from Ukraine. It was in a small flat on the southern side of the city.
Painstakingly they told me their story, including the suppression of their political and religious beliefs including the driving of their church underground. They described how illegal pastors had to lead double lives –workers by day and clergy by night; how two of their bishops had died in prison and others in labour camps. Churches had been used as factories, warehouses, museums, one turned into a “Cathedral of Atheism.”
They asked if I would visit Ukraine.
Later that month, with two friends – one from Lancashire – I did.
Throughout these recent tortured weeks of Putin’s War, I have thought about the people I met and the interplay between their faith and the brave actions which they had been taking to secure political freedom and sovereignty for their nation – and which were bought at a high price.
I will never forget the 250,000 people who had gathered in Lvov for an illegal open-air Mass followed by speeches calling for democracy and human rights, and to hear readings of Ukrainian poetry.
Two of the leaders were Ivan Gel and Bishop Pavlo Vasylk – with whom I had met the night before at Gel’s flat.
Both had spent the best part of two decades as inmates of the notorious “death camp”, the Soviet prison at Perm – part of the gulag system in which an estimated 1.7 million “enemies of the State” died over a period of forty years.
We met a young man (a boiler stoker by day, a priest by night) who had been sent to Chernobyl to clear radioactive waste as a punishment for being caught celebrating the liturgies.
Even while we met at Gel’s flat the KGB came to check out the company he was keeping. Shaped by those terrible experiences their dignity and fearlessness was a sharp rebuke to those who had tried to unsuccessfully to break them and to destroy their faith.
We visited a church which forty years earlier Stalin’s “false Synod” had closed when he claimed that the Greek Catholic Church had “liquidated itself.”
I wrote a piece for The Independent about “Flowers in the Ukraine” – having observed people laying flowers in front of the doors of that closed building. They had done so every day for the intervening forty years and, every day, the Soviet police came to remove the both the flowers and the crown of thorns nailed to the railings. And every day that followed the flowers and crown of thorns would be placed there again.
I was given a secret Communist Party document which bitterly complained that despite all of their attempts they had been unable to eradicate the Church and, even worse, “a large proportion of the youth” were taking part in its illegal activities.
Defiance, hunger strikes, and demonstrations had become regular occurrences. Imprisonment and torture were routine.
Putin, who is said to greatly admire Stalin, should take note that it proved impossible, even for that monster, to destroy the human spirit or the faith which animated the leaders of the movement for Ukrainian independence and democracy.
Despite their best-efforts Ukraine has subsequently tasted more than thirty years of freedom which Putin will never be able to erase from the collective memory.
Moreover, Volodymyr Zelensky, the descendent of a family which was itself a victim of the anti-religious Holocaust of the Nazis has become the emblem – a living icon – waking up the world to the barbarians at that gate.
Zelensky’s was not a rare experience.
Ukrainians I met in 1989 had never forgotten what happened in the previous generation, to their families, when loved ones starved to death in Stalin’s Holodomor, the man-made famine that convulsed Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 and had led to millions of deaths.
Holodomor is a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death.
If he did it to destroy belief and faith Stalin’s actions – like Putin’s – had precisely the opposite effect.
Ukrainians know precisely who the man is, who is author of their suffering, and they know it is not God.
In 1989, as 250,000 people gathered for the protests in Lvov bright yellow and blue flags – the traditional colours of the Ukrainian State – fluttered everywhere.
But other flags appeared too.
The flags of Estonia, Lithuania – where I will be on Wednesday -, Latvia, Georgia, and Moldova were carried through the crowds and the people applauded because the Ukrainians knew that the struggle of these other oppressed peoples was also theirs.
And now again, in 2022, they know that what Putin has done to Ukraine could be their fate, the fate of millions of other people too.
Such human solidarity and resistance are born out of suffering made endurable by deep religious faith – and it will prove to be Putin’s undoing and our best defence as he unites political forces and nations against him.
As we left Lvov in 1989 the people were making ready to place candles in their windows and to switch off their lights for thirty minutes. This was to mourn the loss of their national identity, the loss of free speech, the loss of religious freedom.
Within two years, because of their bravery, Ukraine began to replace pain with hope and in 1991 it formally declared its independence – with an overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approving the Declaration of Independence made by the Verhovna Rada on August 24th, 1991.
Thirty years later we express shock and indignation at the cruel asphyxiation of Ukraine’s freedoms – but we should also be deeply concerned for the future of other free people at risk from tyrants, not least the 23 million people who live in Taiwan and who are threatened daily by the Chinese Communist Party.
Since the enormities of the CCP’s Cultural Revolution – the deaths over 70 years of 50 million Chinese people – and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, we have seen outrages in Tibet and Hong Kong and the intimidation of Taiwan. And in all those situations we have seen the same interplay between personal faith and public actions.
Take the example of Joshua Wong, a young student leader in Hong Kong – whom I know personally and have hosted in Parliament –is now languishing in jail because of his role in the pro-democracy movement.
Joshua is a Lutheran who studied at the United Christian college in Kowloon, developing organisational and speaking skills through involvement in church groups.
One of his heroes – and an inspiration to him in the relay race of life – is the barrister, Martin Lee QC – called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn – and often called the father of democracy in Hong Kong. Martin, now aged 83, and a man of deep faith, is on a suspended prison sentence for taking part in a candlelight vigil to mark the killings in Tiananmen Square.
Another is Margaret Ng, another barrister from a Catholic background, and a leading figure in the pro-democracy movement – also now on a suspended prison sentence. Jimmy Lai, publisher of the now banned Apple Daily, is in jail, probably for the rest of his life, but his example has led others, inside prison, to embrace Jimmy’s faith. Don’t underestimate the effect that such witnessing can have on others – especially when it is the sub text of a person’s actions.
I have personally seen remarkable courage in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Western China, and Tibet. The atrocities perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party are appalling and their attempts to intimidate all those who dare to speak out against them extends across the globe even to our own shores, with attempts to subvert Parliament our universities and great institutions.
All of this is aimed at intimidating or silencing opposition. They have a special loathing and fear of religious faith
We need to develop a much keener awareness of what is happening to so many Chinese men and women. These include the millions who have suffered in its programmes of forced sterilisations and forced abortions; those who have seen their churches destroyed; their bishops and pastors, such as Wang Yi, incarcerated – and whose story – and all of these others – are told on my web site.
It includes lawyers, dissenters, journalists – such as the young Christian woman Zhang Zhan tortured and jailed for 4 years for shining a light into the origins of the Covid pandemic in Wuhan – which a new study by The Lancet , published this week, claims has claimed 18 million lives worldwide.
Concerned for Zhang Zhen’s deteriorating health, the UN has called for her release. Consider writing a letter to the Chinese president, care of the Ambassador in london, calling for her release.
Their other targets include Falun Gong practitioners whom Sir Geoffrey Nice QC’s investigative Tribunal says have been subjected to forced organ harvesting.
As for the 1 million Uyghur Muslims in re-education camps -concentration camps – the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken says “The forcing of men, women and children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide.‘” Liz Truss and the House of Commons have also named it as a genocide – but the British Government has declined to do so. You might ask your MPs why not.
China’s neighbour in North Korea – which I have visited – has the same playbook – seeking to crush all dissent and to eradicate religious belief.
A UN Inquiry has described Kim Jong Un’s North Korea as “a State without parallel” and says its leaders should be arraigned before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
There are around 250,000 people in closed off villages, detention centres, prisons, and labour camps in North Korea. And of those, 50,000-70,000 are Christians.
During my visits to North Korea, I asked to see the four token, hollow and, largely fake, Potemkin-style official churches – the only ones in the country. I saw the attempts to fool visitors into believing that the regime permits belief in something other than its own dynastic ideology. In the book I published about North Korea I record some of the testimonies of some of the believers who have been able to escape from that benighted country.
One North Korean who escaped, Jean Young-Ok, told the parliamentary committee which I chair, that “They tortured the Christians the most. They were denied food and sleep. They were forced to stick out their tongues and iron was pushed into them”
Another escapee, a woman called Hae Woo, told me “The guards told us that we are not human beings, we are just prisoners…the dignity of human life counted for nothing.”
A United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded: “There is almost a complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; Severe punishments are inflicted on people caught practising Christianity; “The State considers the spread of Christianity a particularly serious threat.”
In so many places – from North Korea to Burma, from Nigeria and Northern Iraq – which I visited in 2019 – people with religious faith are paying a terrible price and we who have political freedom and can freely practice our faith, need to take a stand.
Too often we turn a blind eye and through fear of causing offence. We remain silent about the way in which religion can be turned into an ideology, inflicting phenomenal suffering.
Where was our indignation, where was the international outrage when over Christmas in 2020, Islamic State Beheaded 11 Nigerian Christians; or in 2015 when they beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians murdered on the seashore in Libya.
Rebecca Sharibu travelled from Nigeria to the UK last year and came to see me at Westminster.
Rebecca is the mother of Leah Sharibu who was just 14 when she was kidnapped from a boarding school in Dapchi in Yobe State in 2018 – raped, impregnated and attempts made to forcibly convert her. Why is she still incarcerated and held in captivity – with little action taken by the Buhari Government on her behalf or that of the Christian community?
When did any of us last write to the Nigerian High Commissioner to demand her release? Or stand in protest outside the Nigerian High Commission?
Why have we still failed to bring to justice those who butchered and stole the homes and possessions of the Christians of Mosul and Nineveh Plain in Northern Iraq and whose homes were daubed in red with the letter N for Nazarene and who like the Yazidis and Kurds have suffered grievously?.
Or what of Pakistan, a Commonwealth country – where Maria Shahbaz remains in hiding. Aged 14 this Christian girl managed to escape after being kidnapped and forced to marry her abductor – one of around 1000 Christian and Hindu girls abducted every year.
Having received repeated death threats Maria’s family have gone into hiding. I raised her plight with the Governor of the Punjab during his visit to the UK and gave him a report which I helped write on abductions. I gave him details of the deaths of two Christians working in sewers without protective clothing who were poisoned by gas and who the rescue services refused to rescue – because they were Cjhristians.
During a visit to Pakistan, I saw the primitive conditions in which Christians are forced to live – in so called colonies: I saw families living in hovels with dirt floors, in shacks without running water or electricity; little education or health provision; squalid and primitive conditions – all completely off the world’s radar.
Thousands upon thousands of people condemned to lives of destitution and misery. They believe that their faith is worth living for – even dying for.
When the Christian Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, called for reforms, he and his friend, Salman Taseer, the Muslim Governor of the Punjab, were both murdered.
Bhatti’s assassins have never been brought to justice.
If you can’t bring to justice the murderer of the man who murdered your Minister for Minorities what hope is there for anyone else?
Where is the justice for the two Christian children forced to watch a lynch mob of 1,200 burn alive their parents or justice for the children from minorities working in brick kilns, workshops, factories, or as domestic servants; or justice for Iqbal Masih, an incredibly brave 12-year-old Christian boy, shot dead for rebelling against enslavement; or justice for the girls from minorities being sold in faith-led trafficking to Chinese gangs? Mere words are worthless to minorities who are ghettoised into squalid colonies and forced to clean latrines and sweep streets.
This Baedeker’s Guide – stretching from the Ukraine to Pakistan – reminds me what price people pay in living out their faith bin their daily lives in so many places for the things which we so often take for granted. It is exemplary, it is inspiring, it is instructive.
But now I want to return home and give an example of a group of people who in former times were animated by their faith – by the belief that you should pray as if the entire outcome depends upon God and work as if the entire outcome depends upon you.
If you believe, as they did and I do, that every human being is made in God’s image and likeness – and that God doesn’t make mistakes – that every person, regardless of their abilities, colour, class, creed, gender or orientation is uniquely valued by God – then we have a duty from the moment that each human being is conceived until the moment that they naturally die to uphold their human rights and their human dignity.
Our human rights are all predicated by the right to life – without which all other rights are meaningless. And Christians and people of religious faith, in the public square, have been central to the creation of such rights and duties.
The first recognizably modern human rights campaign had its origins in a printing shop and bookstore at 2 George Yard in the City of London. The year was 1787.
The abomination of the slave trade had drawn together a small group of like-minded people. But beyond that immediate cause, they also puzzled over what it means to be human and on the duty to act, which falls on those privileged citizens who enjoy the freedoms denied to vast swathes of the human race.
Of the dozen men who met in May 1787, nine were Quakers and one of the others, Thomas Clarkson, a Christian, was a Cambridge University student who, after a religious experience, abandoned his studies and vowed to give his life to organizing opposition to the slave trade.
Although motivated by religious sentiment, these doughty advocates knew that they had to be worldly – learn how to campaign, lobby, and create a broad-based coalition way beyond their small circle of friends. So, they created the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The group set itself the task of changing hearts, minds, and laws. To spearhead their legislative battles, it recruited a young member of Parliament, William Wilberforce. Notwithstanding fierce vested interest and opposition, by 1807 they had persuaded Parliament to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and, by 1833, to pass the Slavery Abolition Act.
A group of like-minded and highly motivated people set out to change the world – and did just that.
A flurry of antislavery books, posters, pamphlets, and prints were accompanied by huge public meetings
There were petitions and boycotts of plantation sugar. Clarkson’s 1788 “Essay on the impolity of the African slave trade” was followed by meetings at which he displayed the manacles and chains used to immobilize human cargo.
There were medallions and hair braids worn by thousands. They bore the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” – a phrase that provided the answer to the central question over which the group had puzzled at 2 George Yard: what does it mean to be human?
Today, we would call it the campaign’s slogan. The items on which they were engraved became fashionable, much like contemporary wristbands and T-shirts that everyone wants to wear.
Public pressure began to manifest itself in Parliament and barely a year passed without yet another bill being introduced (and initially defeated, year after year) as an unanswerable case was gradually mounted.
I have personally stood at Zomai, in Benin, where, 200 years earlier, from among the captured slaves, sick, disabled, or elderly people were picked out and thrown into a common grave.
Some were buried alive. Those who became ill en route were thrown overboard from ships, like the infamous Zong.
There, I was moved to stand at the Door of No Return with a small group of Black Americans who sang Amazing Grace, the hymn which the former Liverpool sea captain and slave trader John Newton had composed.
At parliamentary hearings organized by Wilberforce, Newton described the graphic details of the murders on the Zong. The case for reform and change became unassailable.
But despite all this, the human rights argument – that each person had God-given rights because they were made in His image – continued to be contested and to meet fierce resistance from deep-pocketed vested interests.
Campaigners today puzzle over why there is such opposition to taking a stand against China’s use of Uyghur slave labour in Xinjiang – even in buying billions of items for the NHS made in Xinjiang.
But like those who contested the Trans-Atlantic slave trade they need look no further than the bottom line of cheap goods and big profits.
The influence of dirty money was also what the George Yard abolitionists encountered.
Between 1701 and 1810 almost 6 million people were taken into slavery – with one in every four ships leaving Liverpool alone a slaver. The profits this generated were astonishing. In 1807 in Liverpool the slave trade accumulated a staggering 17 million pounds sterling. The vested interests pitted themselves against reform.
While calling out and exposing these practices, along with the profiteering that accompanied it, Clarkson, and an escaped slave, Olaudah Equiano, faced threats to their lives. They made powerful speeches up and down the land, exhibiting manacles and chains used to degrade and torture other human beings.
To his eternal credit, the Liverpool MP, William Roscoe – Unitarian, poet, philanthropist, and man of letters – joined the campaign against the trade, penning an epic poem “The Wrongs of Africa.” Having voted with Wilberforce in the House of Commons, he was physically attacked by the traders on his return home.
But this first human rights campaign was successfully changing the attitudes of the populace and, through clever legislative measures, was effectively undermining the profitability of the trade.
The end of the 18th century was also a moment of religious revivalism. The political message was reinforced by the ethical and moral arguments proclaimed in the new wave of chapels founded by the great preacher, John Wesley, who denounced slavery as “a scandal of England, of religion, of human nature.” In an inspiring letter, the last he wrote, John Wesley told Wilberforce to use all his political skills to end slavery and to fight for human dignity, to be like the fourth century Christian bishop Athanasius: an “Athanasius contra mundum”an “Athanasius against the world.”
It took many voices to bring change.
This first human rights campaign was not the achievement of just one man, but the coming together of a remarkable civic alliance combining secular and religious, parliamentarians and popular organizers, publicists, lawyers, academics, and first-hand witnesses – including escaped slaves and traders like John Newton.
The little group who had met in 2 George Yard in 1787 may not have anticipated it but, undoubtedly, the pebble they threw into the pond rippled across the world and has rippled across the centuries since.
From their successful endeavour we can see the importance of creating alliances with likeminded people; we can see the way religious belief was channelled into upholding the unique place of every human being; but we can also see that change requires persistence and commitment, dedication, resilience, and determination.
It also required intelligence in identifying the Opposition and knowing what motivates it.
Today, in the case of the Russian and Chinese oligarchs and huge vested interests used to buy influence and power we can see that money is a pretty big factor when it comes to buying collaboration, compliance, or silence.
This was the determining factor in bolstering the position of the trans-Atlantic slave traders. And the trade was ultimately ended by hitting the traders in their pockets.
Money was also a major factor with many of the beneficiaries of Nazi slave labour, such as IBM and Volkswagen, which even built a camp next to one of its factories to ensure a supply of workers.
This lent you could do far worse than read Corrie Ten Boom’s “The Hiding Place”.
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust. Her activism led to her imprisonment and concentration camp incarceration.
She once said that “If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God you’ll be at rest.”
But, having said that, she didn’t then rest herself and abdicate her responsibility to contest the hatred that she saw the Nazis promoting.
The book opens in Haarlem at the Ten Boom’s family celebration of the 100th anniversary of their watch and clock repair business.
Her brother brings a Jewish escapee from Germany to the celebration. Some of his beard had been burnt by assailants.
After the 1940 invasion by the Nazis Corrie turns their family home into a centre of resistance – involving her in forging identities, using stolen ration cards, hiding Jewish families.
Inevitably this compromises her own safety (although a senior Police officer helps by training her in how to respond when, as they both know, the Nazis will eventually track her down).
Ultimately, a spy infiltrates her group and she and her sister, Betsie, and 80-year-old father are sent to prison, where he dies.
The women are then sent first to a Dutch concentration camp and later to Germany’s Ravensbruck – leading to Betsie’s death.
Corrie hangs on to life by a thread but somehow survives and returns to the Netherlands in 1945.
In The Hiding Place she describes her experience of doing forced labour for Siemens in the Nazi camps. The Holocaust saw state-sponsored mass enslavement on an appalling scale.
Extermination through labour in the Nazi camps and factories is comparable to what is happening to the Uighurs and others in Xinjiang – and some of the same companies still put profit before ethics.
Consider Hugo Boss, Kodak, and Siemens.
Siemens ran factories inside concentration camps, including at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen. Boss supplied the uniforms for the Hitler Youth and Waffen-SS. Today it profits from the cotton produced by laborers subjected to genocide in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
In 1948, after the War the same spirit that motivated the friends who had gathered in 1787 in 2 George Yard was at work.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who saw more than 40 of his relatives murdered by the Nazis, coined the word genocide and developed the Genocide convention. His determination to combat this ultimate violation of human rights had been spurred decades earlier, by the death of 1.3 million Armenians and the murders of Assyrians and others at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. He knew that Hitler’s belief that he could kill with impunity (the German leader allegedly referred to the Armenian genocide as his evidence) had paved the way for the Holocaust.
Simultaneously, the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt (appointed to the fledgling General Assembly of the United Nations by President Harry Truman) chaired the drafting committee of the UDHR and used her considerable skills to produce a document which enabled a weary and humbled, yet hopeful, international community to collectively express its belief in human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, argued that freedom of religion was one of the four essential freedoms of mankind, asserting that freedom of religion was an
“International Magna Carta for all mankind.”
In its 30 articles, the UDHR and accompanying documents identify five categories of human rights: economic, social, cultural, civil, and political – ideas rooted in basic rights and freedoms which are the birth right of all human beings.
From the right to life to a prohibition on slavery, these provisions include the principle of equality before the law, the outlawing of torture and enslavement, the right to information and expressing opinions and the right of every citizen to believe, not to believe, or to change belief.
Taking stock of where the world is today, we need to renew the spirit of Roosevelt, Lemkin and the George Yard abolitionists and recognize that human rights are under increasing attack, along with the international order represented by the 1948 edicts.
While we have been pulling down statues or renaming buildings, malign forces are tearing down the architecture so painstakingly created by our forebears. We can see it in the bombed cities and towns of Ukraine and written on the faces of fleeing refugees.
At the very minimum, we are now in a new Cold War – with a world increasingly divided into authoritarian states who abuse human rights (China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, and Venezuela being some of the most obvious) and liberal democracies who uphold the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.
The subversion of multilateral institutions has been accelerated by China’s use of debt bondage through its Belt and Road Initiative – unscrupulously used by the CCP to write new rules, establish institutions that reflect Chinese interests and reshape the world in its image.
The subversion of world order has allowed the CCP to ride roughshod over an international treaty guaranteeing “two systems one country” in Hong Kong; to use kangaroo courts and show trials to arrest and imprison lawyers and legislators; to threaten and intimidate the people of Taiwan; and to lock up its own citizens when they dare to question or criticize Beijing.
And, of course, it has allowed the CCP to degrade the indigenous people of Xinjiang. Around one million Uighur Muslims have been incarcerated and forced to work for free in camps. Academics describe it as the world’s worst incident of state-sanctioned slavery.
One million Uighurs have been incarcerated without trial in a network of sinister re-education camps.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said, as reported in a leaked document, that his officials should “show no mercy” to anyone who disobeys the edicts in Xinjiang. A CCP official said on television that their intention is to “break their lineage … break their connections and break their origins.”
In attempting to break that cycle, Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s Chief Rabbi, wrote about his encounter with a Uighur woman who had escaped from Xinjiang: “An unfathomable mass atrocity is being perpetrated in China. The responsibility for doing something lies with all of us. … I can no longer remain silent about the plight of the Uighurs.
The friends who met in 2 George Yard in 1787 would not have remained silent and nor should we, nor would the originators of the UDHR or the Convention on the Crime of Genocide.
The question is whether we are willing to accept the economic readjustment that will result from being vocal or whether we are willing to see the rule of law and human rights – along with the institutions, values, and ideas they represent – simply wither on the vine.
As a young boy, Judge Thomas Buergenthal was incarcerated in Auschwitz and survived. He throws down this challenge to each of us:
“The human mind is simply not able to grasp this terrible truth: a nation transformed into a killing machine programmed to destroy millions of innocent human beings for no reason other than that they were different. … If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past? … One cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.”
And surely this call to struggle goes to the heart of Judaeo-Christian ideals and beliefs.
My mother was a native Irish speaker. On the wall of the Council flat where I grew up we had some words in Irish which said, “It is in the shelter of each other’s lives that the people live”.
We lived next door to a Jewish lady, Sadie Moonshine, who would have been familiar with Hillel’s admonition that “If I am not myself who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?”
Nelson Mandela often reflected on the idea of “Ubuntu” – a person is a person because of other people and Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained that “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, …and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
Ubuntu is only possible in a person with this common good mentality, a mentality at odds with our cold, calculated utilitarian social mores.
Public policy can never be legitimate if it does not serve and promote the flourishing of each unique created person; and withstand the violation of a minority or even a single individual, because there can be no ‘common good’ that does not respect our equal worth and dignity first.
We don’t exist in isolation; we are not simply individuals – who, in a parody of the Gospel think it’s ok to “do unto others before they do you” – to simply demand bigger faster, better more, and the absolute right to choose, while being oblivious to the consequences for others.
Whether we like it or not we come from a community, with all its faults and failings, and each of us – with all our own faults and failings – have some gift to return to that community. That is how it should be.
Regrettably, too often, public service through politics has been replaced by a self-serving and self-regarding form of careerism: too often dominated by attempts to climb Disraeli’s greasy pole; too often characterised by an intolerance and toxicity – reflected even at universities with the no platforming of alternative views; too often governed by narrow ideologies; increasingly disconnected from communities, creating a vacuum into which organisations with extreme and inflammatory views are able to enter with ease.
And political elites need to understand the contempt in which they are held as public trust has broken down and elites fail to understand what life is like in many homes and in many towns. Mahatma Gandhi warned of the danger of becoming disconnected: “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves”
He also said that if you want change – as the abolitionists did – “You must be the change you want to see in the world”
If we want to change the world, we need to change our nation, if we want to change our nation we must change our communities, if we want to change our communities, we must change our families, and if we want to change our families we must change ourselves. Change doesn’t come about by itself – it comes through active participation and voluntary service.
And yes, sometimes that will be through elected office or through public service..
The African Bishop who once said that politics is not a dirty business – just that some of the players have dirty hands – was right.
Politics is only as good as the people who engage in it.
Every person uniquely reflects the Divine Likeness – from the womb to the tomb – and for that reason alone we are required to uphold the dignity of each.
In rendering unto Caesar, we do not need to stop seeing everything through the lens of our Faith.
When Churchill, who was not known for religious ardour, was once described as “a pillar of the church,” he corrected the speaker by interjecting: “No, no, not a pillar, but a buttress, supporting it from the outside.”
He insisted that “The flame of Christian ethics is still our highest guide. … Only by bringing it into perfect application can we hope to solve for ourselves the problems of this world and not of this world alone.”
Like Churchill, Dag Hammarskjold, a Christian, who served Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953-1961 clearly understood the role of faith in his and our daily lives. He said:
“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”
In all our Faith traditions we need to encourage greater emphasis on our relationship with our Creator and on the outpouring of service which belief requires.
Christians must offer servant leadership fearlessly championing human dignity and the common good..
E.M.Forster, in his book, Two Cheers for Democracy, which he wrote as “a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him” – insists that the idiosyncratic bloody minded back bench MP who gets some minor injustice put right is the justification of our imperfect system of democracy.
Inspired political service can put right more than minor injustices – I have mentioned Wilberforce, who with Clarkson, the Quaker ladies and others campaigned for 40 years against the slave trade.
And think of heroes like Bonhoeffer or Maximilian Kolbe whose stand against Nazism cost them their lives.
But there are countless others, too, who should inspire us to use the gifts which we have been given – and not to be intimidated by either the scale of the challenge or by our own imperfections.
Robert Kennedy’s little book “To Seek a Newer Land” greatly influenced me as a boy. He wrote that we could all make a difference and should not be discouraged by seemingly impossible odds or by the intractable nature of the challenges we face:
“Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.” Kennedy insisted that “each of us can work to change a small portion of events.”
Cardinal John Henry Newman reminded us that we don’t have to wait until we become perfect in order to act; “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault” and that “We are not born for ourselves, but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury our talent in a napkin”
Let me end.
This week Jews have been celebrating Purim which commemorates Esther’s courage in saving the Jewish people living in Persia 2000 years ago from extermination.
In the wonderful Book of Esther, we learn that this powerless young woman saved her people famously saying, “If I perish, I perish” – “how can I look on, while my people suffer what is in store for them?” She knew that she had come into the world, “for such a time as this.”
We don’t have to be Esther or Volodymyr Zelensky to know that we are here for some purpose and for such a time as this – letting our faith inform our response to all the challenges with which we are faced in our daily lives.
www.davidalton.net Twitter: @DavidAltonHL
========================================================
