Get Religion on Persecution
One of my favorite religion bloggers is Terry Mattingly who blogs over at Get Religion and he actually blogged about a story I missed...until now. The article he comments on was originally from the LA Times called A Vigil Against Faith in N. Korea published on November 15th.
Mattingly compares how the LA Times covered the situations of persecution versus how the International Religious Freedom Report describes the persecution. Here's one observation from Mattingly...
I did, however, wonder if the basic “rice evangelism” anecdote was the most powerful lead for this story.
SEOUL — A few years ago, an astonishing rumor spread among the teenagers of Musan, a sad, hungry mining town hugging the North Korean side of the border with China. If you slipped over and looked for a house with a cross, the people inside would give you a lecture on Christianity and a bowl of rice.
Choi Hwa knew this was dangerous stuff. Back when she was an impressionable 12-year-old, she and her classmates had been called out to watch the execution of a young woman and her father who were caught with a Bible. But Choi knew as well that the pangs in her stomach meant she might soon succumb to the starvation that had killed dozens of neighbors. The girl followed her stomach. Through it, she found her way to faith.
After all, this story also included some hellish accounts of persecution and martyrdom, as believers struggled to express their faith while living in the shadows of the allegedly divine Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il. I especially liked the detail from Demick that the North Korean PR writers have a special distaste for Christian faith because they have plagiarized certain sacred details to flesh out their own stories. For example, “doctrine has it that Kim Jong Il’s birth was heralded by a bright star in the sky.”
He then goes on to cite a more descriptive description of the persecution in his article. Check it out here.
This also makes me wonder about how far should a journalist go in describing the horror of persecution? Tell me what you think.