In defense of the church, part V: process

Posted on by | 2 Comments

There are churches out there that are actively poisonous, no question, and there are people who have been badly hurt by such churches. (Not all of them are in the pews, either—some are pastors.) That said, there are a lot of folks out there complaining about the church for a lot less reason, whose gritching essentially boils down to “the church isn’t perfect according to my standards.” Well, no, it isn’t. You aren’t perfect according to its standards either, believe me. There are three things that need to be said here:

1) It’s an old saw, but it bears repeating because it obviously hasn’t occurred to a lot of people: If you ever find a perfect church, it will stop being perfect the minute you join. This is the most basic thing to understand: every church is an imperfect combination of imperfect people, of whom you are one.

2) Every good church is in process: specifically, in the process of being grown by God the Father through the work of Jesus Christ as applied to us in the power of the Holy Spirit into the church which God intends for us to be. Every church will hurt you at times; every church will let you down at times; every church will fall short of what it’s supposed to be at times. That’s because every church is made up of people, and people do that. What matters is how theyrespond to those times, and particularly how the leadership responds; churches ought to admit their failures and shortcomings, apologize and try to make things right, and then work to address them and get better. A church that generally does that, with leaders who usually model that approach, deserve support and praise, not to be bashed for their mistakes. (Even the best of churches won’t always respond as they should; when they don’t, though, they should be corrected gently and graciously, with humility about our own imperfection.)

We have to understand that we can’t expect the church to get everything right; the most we have the right to expect is that the church be in the right process, moving in the right direction. That’s what the church is, after all: not a bunch of people who have it all together, but a bunch of people who are together, growing together, following Jesus together, and helping each other along the way. We need, as Jared put it, to be willing to “submit to community,” even with all its inevitable imperfections, if we’re going to live as Christ calls us to live.

3) If you want to receive grace, show grace. It amazes me how many people gracelessly and self-righteously bash churches for being graceless and self-righteous. If you show that sort of attitude, you’re as much a problem as the church you’re criticizing.

The general principle here, it seems to me, is one that Tim Lane and Paul Tripp articulate well in their book Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, in a passage quoted by Jimmy D. atCruciform Life:

Worshipping God as Savior means that I acknowledge that I am a sinner in relationship with other sinners. I remember that you are still in the middle of God’s work of redemption—as am I. He is still convicting you, teaching you, and changing your heart. He is faithfully doing all these things at the best time and in the best way possible. None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God’s redemptive work of change is ongoing in all of our lives. When I forget this, I become self-righteous, impatient, critical, and judgmental. I give in to the temptation to play God and try to change you in ways only God can . . .

When I fail to worship God as Savior, I am too casual about my sin and too focused on yours. Our relationships are often harmed when we try to atone for our own sins while condemning the other person for his. When you are sinned against, you will be impacted by the weaknesses and failures of that other person. When this happens, you need to allow God to use you as an instrument in His redemptive hands rather than seeking to make changes in the other person yourself. Only God can accomplish these things. Are you trying to do work in someone’s life that only the Savior can do? (HT: Jared)

Many churches are guilty of this mistake on a systemic level, and I don’t blame anyone for avoiding such congregations. Even those that aren’t, even those that consciously teach and preach and disciple against this, will still struggle with it, because it’s one of the subtlest of the sins that beset us, and one of the most insidious forms of spiritual pride. But when we bash “the church” for being imperfect without acknowledging our own imperfection, when we denounce “the church” as sinful without confessing that we too are sinners—when we insist that the problems of “the church” are everyone else’s fault and we are innocent of all responsibility and all blame—then we too are guilty of being “too casual about my sin and too focused on yours.”

There are, to be sure, many congregations that have problems that are intractable, and many people who have worn themselves out trying (and failing) to bring change to such congregations; but the answer to that is not to write off “the church” as a whole. Rather, it’s to find a church that will love you for who you are while you heal, and in which, when you’re ready, you can step up and use the gifts God has given you to help grow his church into what he wants us all to be. I do not deny that the church is imperfect, sin-riddled, flawed; I simply deny that that’s justification for attacking or dismissing it. Rather, it’s our call to do our part to help fix the problem.

Previous posts in this series:

Part I: Preaching

Part II: The institution

Part III: Doctrine

Part IV: Jesus

On this blog in history: January 2007

Posted on by | No Comments

Jared made a point today over at Gospel-Driven Church that I’ve been thinking about for a bit as well:

One of the inherent weaknesses in the medium of the weblog is the virtual temporariness of the best writing. A good solid piece may exist on a main page for a brief time, and then it disappears into the aether of the archives or random web searches. If a blogger attracts new readers, they will likely never see past posts unless they are the thorough sorts who read archives. But most are not.

His solution to that is to start reposting pieces, which is something I’ve thought about doing as well, but decided against. Given Jared’s example, though, I’m going to try a different approach to the same issue: putting up links posts to past material on this blog. To organize it, I’m going to limit each post to a particular month—maybe everything worth linking from that month, maybe not, depending. We’ll see how this works. I’ll start with January of 2007 because, though I began this blog in 2003, that was the month in which I first started posting consistently. (Even then, it wasn’t much.)Umm, what was that about grace?
On the confusion of grace and justice.The butterfly effect and the providence of God
On the ways God works through every circumstance.The parable of the three little pigs
“The day of the Lord is like three little pigs who went out into the world to make their fortunes. . . .”

Raoul Wallenberg, RIP

Posted on by | No Comments

As long as we’re celebrating great figures in the fight against tyranny, today is a good day to honor one of my heroes, Raoul Wallenberg; this would be his 91st birthday, had he lived. For those not familiar with Wallenberg, he was a Swedish humanitarian sent to Hungary during WW II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and is one of those honored at Yad Vashem. He wasn’t officially an ambassador—he was appointed as the secretary to the Swedish legation to Hungary in 1944—but he effectively was, for he had been authorized by no less than the king of Sweden to operate completely independently of the ambassador. His purpose in Budapest was to rescue the Jews of Hungary from the Holocaust. Between his arrival that July and the arrival of the Soviets, who arrested him and sent him off to Moscow, never to be seen again, he saved at least 20,000 Jews and perhaps as many as 100,000. Wallenberg had the courage not to go with the flow in Europe at that time, but to seek to change it at the risk of his life; he had the courage to carry out the desire of his government to save as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” That his courage and faithfulness led to his death is no surprise; that he lost his life not at the hands of the Nazis but at the hands of Hungary’s Soviet “liberators” is one of history’s bitter ironies.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RIP

Posted on by | 1 Comment

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”—Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe world lost one of its giants today: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead of a stroke at the age of 89. Novelist, historian, poet, Soviet dissident, cultural critic . . . to try to sum up the meaning and significance of this towering modern-day prophet, one of the deepest thinkers and most powerful bearers of Christian witness of our age, is beyond the scope of anything so brief as a blog post, though John Piper took a good shot (thanks to Jared for the link); I’ve linked a few articles below in an effort to do what my words cannot do. For me, the least I can do is to say that our world would be vastly poorer had he never lived. Requiescat in pace, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; you have earned your rest as much as anyone can.The Last ProphetTraducing SolzhenitsynSolzhenitsyn and Modern LiteratureAleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from IdeologyPaul Weyrich: A Tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn25 YearsLions

Skeptical conversations, part VIII: The gifts of the Spirit

Posted on by | No Comments

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VII here. Also, I’ve updated the credo Wordle post.

But this is starting to move me into ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church—and I’m not done talking about the Spirit yet. If the first element of the Spirit’s work is to reveal the Father and the Son, the second comes at the point of conversion. It is the Son who atoned for our sins on the cross, but it is the Spirit who mediates that to us.

A: What do you mean by that?

R: The work of conversion is the work of the Spirit. It is he who moves us to conviction that we have sinned, and he who calls us to repentance; and it is he who applies the saving work of Christ to us, who sets us free from sin and regenerates us. From that point on, then, the Spirit of God lives within us, which is the third thing which must be said about his work. The Spirit brings us into the fellowship of the Trinity, bearing our prayers to Jesus, interceding for us when we do not know what to pray, and speaking to us in return; and as he began our transformation by bringing us new life, so he works to continue that transformation, nurturing that new life in us and making us more and more like Jesus.

A: And you say this process is going on in every Christian?

R: Yes.

A: I would think, if that were so, that I would see more evidence of that. I can’t say that I see very much.

R: In part, I’d say that there are many who call themselves Christian and aren’t saved; Jesus made it very clear that this would be the case. Certainly there are some remarkable perversions of the gospel out there.

A: Such as that church with their picket signs that say “God Hates Fags”?

R: Ahh, yes, Fred Phelps and his “church.” They do make the rest of us look rather bad, don’t they? But of course, I have to be careful in saying that—I know full well that I make Christians and the church look bad sometimes; and if spiritual pride, which is the sin of the Pharisees, is a subtler sort of betrayal, it’s no less poisonous for all that. Indeed, since it tends to creep in when we do something good, if we don’t watch it pride can corrupt all our victories. That illustrates, I think, the other point that needs to be made, which is that sanctification—the process of becoming holy—is a long, hard fight.

In truth, you might say that it’s two processes side by side. One is the unceasing war on sin, the work of putting sin to death; the other is what you might call the positive element, which is the work of nurturing the good. They are closely interwoven, of course, since our soul is going to grow something, whether it is good or bad; clearing out the weeds is an important part of caring for the good plants, while efforts to kill weeds are rather pointless without trying to grow something valuable in their place. Both, however, are the work of the Spirit in us, and both are also our work; once again, we have that combination. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

A: Interesting. I’ve heard people talk about the Holy Spirit before, but only Pen­tecostals, and they seemed more interested in justifying some fairly odd behavior.

R: Ahh, yes. Well, through his Spirit God has given his people gifts to contribute to the work of the church. Note that well, because a lot of Christians don’t really realize it: these are gifts of the Spirit to the church, not just to the individual, and so they aren’t necessarily new to the person who uses them. Some of the gifts of the Spirit are natural abilities which he blesses—administration, for example, or leadership.

A: Administration is a gift of the Spirit?

R: Well, it’s included in a list of them in 1 Corinthians 12. After all, running a church isn’t any easier than running a business; I can testify from personal experience that having someone gifted in that respect to take care of administrative tasks is a great blessing. It might not seem “spiritual,” but it’s a real asset to the ministry of the church. Anyway, many of the gifts of the Spirit are what you might call natural gifts—the gift of teaching is another example—but the supernatural gifts, such as prophecy, healing and tongues, tend to be the ones that draw the attention. It’s understandable, as they’re somewhat spectacular and tend to provoke strong reactions one way or the other.

A lot of people hold that the Spirit doesn’t give these gifts anymore, but I don’t think that argument holds water. The arguments from Scripture for this position are questionable at best, and the experience of the church worldwide doesn’t support it. For what it’s worth, my own experience doesn’t either, as I have seen the gifts of prophecy, healing, tongues, and words of knowledge and wisdom used to build up and strengthen the church; so for all those reasons, I believe that the Spirit still gifts his people in those ways.

That said, it is clear that there is great potential for self-deception and counterfeit gifts, and so it becomes very important to test any apparent supernatural gift. For example, one of my NT professors in college was a Pentecostal (as were all of my NT professors in seminary; rather an odd thing, that), and her rule for dealing with any apparent prophecy was not to trust it unless the Scripture supported it. Indeed, most of the time I have seen someone receive a word for a church or another person, it has been a word of Scripture—which would be a case of the Spirit directing the application of the text he inspired. I wouldn’t want to establish that as a typical means of exegeting Scripture—

A: Sorry, what does that mean?

R: My apologies—force of habit. Exegesis is the process of drawing out the meaning of a biblical text. It goes together with hermeneutics, which is the process of interpreting that meaning for and applying it to the needs and concerns of one’s audience. Rough definitions. Anyway, I’m a believer in careful exegesis supported by careful and detailed study of the Bible, and just because someone quotes Scripture doesn’t necessarily mean what they say is from the Spirit––the Devil knows the Bible, too, after all. The key is whether the statement offered is in line with the whole of Scripture, not just one proof-text; but then, that goes for all our efforts to interpret the Bible, all of which should be illuminated by the Spirit.

In any case, just to summarize: yes, I believe that the Spirit still gives people supernatural gifts, but these must be tested when they manifest themselves to ensure that they are truly from the Spirit of God. It seems to me, though, that to deny that he can or will give such gifts is rooted in our discomfort with them, and that such a denial is in essence an attempt to limit God, to make him more comfortable and predictable—and that is always a dangerous thing to do.

A: You seem to be a firm believer in a dangerous God.

R: I’m not sure “dangerous” is the right word; I would say “perilous,” perhaps because that’s the word Tolkien uses in The Lord of the Rings to describe those who are good and beautiful beyond the ability of mere mortals to handle. I like the way the writer Annie Dillard put it:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offence, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—and I don’t think “fear” just means “respect.” He loves us, but everything about him is so much greater than we are that even his love for us is perilous—we cannot accept it and remain unchanged. Or as Lewis always has it said in Narnia, he’s not a tame lion. Good beyond imagining, but anything but tame.

A: I’m beginning to think that you’re a Christian for the same reason you’re a Tolkien fan.

R: Good, but backwards: I’m a Tolkien fan for the same reason I’m a Christian. For that matter, so was Tolkien, I think. But the thirst for God is primary, and underlies every other desire for that which is good and true and beautiful, and most especially the longing for something more, because God is the source of all that is good and true and beautiful, and because St. Augustine was right—our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

A: Either that or it’s the evolutionary impulse pushing us forward.

R: You could look at it that way, of course. In any case, I want to go back to my assertion that the gifts of the Spirit are gifts not primarily to the individuals who receive them but to the church. We often don’t think of them that way; we think of them as “my gifts,” even if we realize that we have been given them in order to build up the church. But it’s clear from the contexts in which these gifts are mentioned that they are truly gifts to the church through its individual members; the lists in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, for instance, occur together with Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ, in which all the members fit together and each has a role to fill. But while this doesn’t fit our individualistic culture, it does fit the biblical understanding of the church, which is that God calls individuals not as lone wolves but as members of a larger community. His covenant is not with individuals as such but with a people.

Barack Obama: Counting chickens before the eggs are even laid

Posted on by | 2 Comments

During Sen. Obama’s recent trip abroad, John McCain charged him with hubris, saying the freshman senator from Chicago was acting like he’s already president. Sen. McCain wasn’t the only one who noticed, either; Paul Weyrich concluded that this was one reason the trip didn’t seem to benefit Sen. Obama.

The Obama campaign began referring to the candidate as if he already were president. . . .It might have worked but for the contempt the electorate has for the media. I saw at least half a dozen interviews on cables over the air networks. In every case voters said, “He is behaving as if he were already elected.” Most said, “That isn’t right.”

Now it turns out that there was even more reason for that feeling than we knew, because the media have been trying to sweep it under the rug: while in Afghanistan, Sen. Obama told a CBS correspondent that

the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years. [Emphasis mine.]And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.

Now, there are two problems with this. One, it shows once again (as did his “57 states” gaffe) that Sen. Obama has a tendency to get sloppy with numbers—which wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the MSM forgive it in him when they would never forgive it in Sen. McCain. Still, it does raise the question (if only half-seriously), “does this ‘Constitutional scholar’ not realize that there is this little thing called the 22nd Amendment that holds a president to only two, four year terms? Um, that would be a grand total of only 8 years, Barack, not 8 to 10.”The more serious problem in my book is that it shows considerable presumption, and equal hubris, on Sen. Obama’s part. Who is he to expect to be elected President? And beyond that, who is he now to expect that after being elected, he’ll be re-elected four years from now? And as the invaluable Beldar put it,

If Barack Obama is this cocky and this sloppy now, when he’s not yet even the official nominee of his party, then just how much more insufferable and how much more reckless will he be if he actually does become president of the world’s only remaining superpower?

The arrogance underlying his statement is staggering; it makes my head hurt just to think about it. I wanted to like and respect this guy, I really did, even though I knew I’d never vote for him—but honestly, the more I see of him, the less I think of him.

Segregated worship

Posted on by | No Comments

And no, I don’t mean racial segregation, problem though that is in the American church; as J. I. Packer noted recently in Modern Reformation, segregation by age groups is increasingly a problem as well, and perhaps an even bigger one. As Dr. Packer says,

In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That’s a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That’s a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what’s being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don’t believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for.

(My thanks to Andy Naselli for the quote; MR on the web is subscription-only.)

Hypocrites at Panera

Posted on by | No Comments

I’ve gotten the chance this week, among other things, to catch back up on some of the blogs I try to follow; this post over at Between Two Worlds made my jaw drop. Do they really not see the disconnect here? I won’t even try to comment; just go read it for yourself.

Fear of the culture and the American church

Posted on by | No Comments

Fear of the culture has driven the church in a lot of ways over the last two or three centuries. The first part of the story is the birth and rise of modern liberal theology. (Note, I said liberal theology, not liberal politics; this isn’t about whether one voted for John Kerry, or supports Barack Obama. Though it can be related, it’s a different set of issues, as can be seen from the number of prominent evangelical leaders who are quite liberal politically, such as Ron Sider and Tony Campolo.) Liberal Protestantism, though its roots may go back further, began in earnest in 1799 when Friedrich Schleiermacher published his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher, who was only 29 when he began writing this book, was part of a group of young upper-class German intellectuals who met weekly to discuss the ideas of the day. Though the others in the group respected and admired him for his intelligence and wit, though he became quite good friends with most of them, and though he shared most of their beliefs, in one key respect they could not understand him at all. You see, most of those in Schleiermacher’s circle were convinced and passionate atheists, people who despised religion, while Schleiermacher was a minister, a chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin; how could he share so many of their beliefs and yet be a Christian? His closest friends in the group decided to resolve the issue: at Schleiermacher’s birthday party, they badgered him into writing a book.Though he initially tried to avoid writing it, Schleiermacher took the task quite seriously. His purpose as he set pen to paper was not to challenge his friends’ beliefs, nor to bring them to an encounter with the transcendent, personal, holy God of the Bible; rather, his aim was to present them with a conception of religion, and particularly of Christianity, that they could accept on their own terms. He sought, in other words, to produce a version of religion that fit with what the educated culture already believed, to accommodate religion to that culture. Given the beliefs and expectations of that culture, he produced an interpretation of Christian faith that sounds closer to Buddhism than to historic Christianity, in which religion is “to be one with the Infinite and in every moment to be eternal”; and while those who followed after him argued with one aspect or another of the picture he painted, producing their own pictures of religion to fit their own cultural situations, they accepted his approach to theology, seeking to conform their faith not to Scripture but to the demands of their culture. Thus, we had a later German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, “demythologize” the New Testament, removing all miracles and other supernatural elements; after all, the educated people of his time didn’t believe in miracles, so there couldn’t have been any.Around the same time as Bultmann was beginning his career, a backlash was beginning in America. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of twelve booklets were published, titled “The Fundamentals,” which set out five fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity. These were: the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that Jesus was fully human and also fully God; the doctrine of the literal physical Second Coming of Christ; the doctrine that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, by Christ alone; and the doctrine that Scripture is the inerrant word of God. In 1920 the term “fundamentalism” was coined to describe the beliefs of those who held to these five fundamentals, as over against those who didn’t, and for a couple of decades, that’s all it meant. In the 1940s, however, there was a split among those who held to these fundamentals, resulting in a new group which came to be known as “evangelicals.”The cause of the split was, once again, fear of the culture. The fundamentalist movement had fought liberal theology on detail after detail for years, but it had absorbed the belief that the gospel cannot address the dominant culture without changing; so, refusing (rightly) to conform the gospel to the culture, fundamentalism moved to wall out the culture. When some leaders in the fundamentalist movement—most notably a radio preacher named Charles Fuller, who would give his name to Fuller Seminary—sought to go in a different direction, it was that which provoked the split and launched the modern American evangelical movement.There was good reason for that, as the cultural separatism of fundamentalism is problematic on a number of levels. Though it has been a pretty effective way to ensure doctrinal purity, it has severely restricted the witness of that part of the American church. What is more, far too many kids who grow up in that subculture go off to college and see their faith melt on their first real encounter with people of other beliefs; sadly, the result of such encounters tends to be people who don’t believe in much of anything anymore.Unfortunately, while fundamentalism represents the most obvious expression of, and response to, fear of the culture, it continues to be a problem as well for both liberals and evangelicals, if in subtler ways. Specifically, I think many among both liberals and evangelicals are at some level afraid to challenge the assumptions of the culture to which they belong, and so choose to conform their preaching and ministry to fit their culture; the only difference, really, is which section of American culture they’re conforming to. Thus in evangelical circles it seems that most pastors aspire to lead megachurches, and the whole idea of the church as a business and the pastor as its CEO has become very powerful in the last decade or two; thus we have influential pastors of evangelical churches openly measuring their success by their market share. Effectively, then, you can measure how good your ministry is by how good you are at giving your “customers” what they want, whether that be in the music selection on Sunday mornings, in the range of programs you offer, or whatever. The result, too often, is the baptism of American consumer culture, and the Jesus who once overturned the tables of the moneychangers is used to sell coffee mugs, T-shirts and figurines.The flip side to that is the liberal wing of the American church, which is tuned into a very different strain of American culture. Among liberal pastors, it seems to be an article of faith that our culture—by which they mean the culture of our elites—must correct the Scriptures, rather than the other way around. The Bible, on this view, is a rather outdated book produced by cultures that didn’t know as much as we do about biology, psychology, physics, and any number of other things; therefore, if the Scriptures contradict what our culture believes it knows, we are justified in concluding that it is the Bible that is wrong and must be brought into line. Thus orthodoxy is dismissed as old-fashioned and outdated, as if the truth of a statement could be determined by its age, and by whether or not our culture finds it amenable.What we need—and it isn’t easy—is to get free of that fear of what the culture thinks of us, and what it might do to us, and to learn to speak the truth whether it’s what people want to hear from us or not. Democracy is the greatest form of government this world has yet invented (which, as Winston Churchill noted, isn’t saying much), but it has the unfortunate tendency to give us the mindset that truth is determined by majority vote; we need to shake ourselves free of that mindset and learn to recognize, and challenge, the unexamined assumptions in our culture that conflict with the character and will of God. We need to learn to look for the unasked questions, and ask them, knowing that we will be challenged if we do, and then stand up to that challenge. If our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world can stand up to persecution when it might cost them their lives, the least we can do in America (and in the West as a whole) is take a little verbal abuse.