“Look for a building with a cross on it,” people escaping North Korea for China are told, because Christians are more likely than anyone else to help them escape the Chinese police. The police, reports Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, will send them back to the hell-on- earth that is North Korea, where they will be tortured, thrown into prison camps, or killed. You don’t leave utopia.
Christians will help refugees either merge into Chinese society or get into South Korea. People go to jail for this, mind you. It is cheering to know that Christians in China will risk their freedom for strangers. And cheering that the little religious freedom the government has conceded lets the believers put on their churches a symbol of freedom, a symbol not only to those oppressed by sin but those oppressed by man.
Yet, and not to carp, when talking about the Chinese Communist Party’s official atheism, Kirkpatrick declares that “Christianity is about the power of the individual”. No, that’s almost the last thing it’s about. That’s Americanism, not Christianity.
Christianity is about the dignity of the individual, whatever happens to him, however powerless he may be. About the God who loves him when he’s down and out. About the resurrection of his tired, beaten body and the life he is given in the world to come. About, you know, everything that cross North Koreans are told to look for actually means.
David Mills writing in First Things