American Christians love to rally around an urgent cause. Just ask the missions committee at any evangelical church. When they ask people to support the ongoing ministry of missionaries around the world, they get a yawn. But when they ask people to support a church in a remote village in Papua New Guinea that lost its building to a hurricane, they get $50,000 checks in the offering plate.
The latest big evangelical cause is the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, where government-armed militias have killed up to 400,000 people and displaced almost 2 million in the last three years. A group called Evangelicals for Darfur took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post with the (catchy but unfortunately unbiblical) headline: Without you, Mr. President, Darfur Doesn’t Have a Prayer. Here’s what they wrote to President Bush:
Ending the atrocities will require your personal leadership in supporting the deployment of a strong U.N. peacekeeping force and multilateral economic sanctions. While we often disagree on matters of politics, we are united in the belief that your intervention can make the critical difference in Darfur.
Basically, they’re asking for military action similar to the NATO occupation of Bosnia. They’ve asked pastors to join the cause, and I was about to start sending out mass emails urging people to demand action from the White House when something made me take pause.
It was an email conversation I had with an extremely knowledgable military officer who is paid to think about these kinds of issues. He’s very familiar with the crisis in Darfur, and he has studied many similar conflicts in recent history. As a result, he’s pessimistic about the prospect for a U.N. military intervention:
This will be an incredibly complex operation and throwing a few African troops at it (which is already happening) will not really solve the problem. Even modern professional armies like the French, British (already overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan), the Aussies and the Kiwis do not have the resources, even combined, to tackle an operation like this.
I should note that the UN has never been successful in situations like this and there is no reason to think they will start being successful now. Unfortunately, I do not think it would be possible to have an impartial force there to protect refugees. The conflict is too deep and interventions are always about politics and money, no matter what label we apply to them.
He says only the U.S. military has the wherewithal to stop the conflict. But here’s the catch:
Our ability to be the world’s policeman is in inverse proportion to our actually acting the world’s policeman. The average person has no idea of the staggering debt that we have accrued in our Iraq and Afghanistan interventions. We are truly at the beginning of the end of our empire. Further interventions that cost us lives and money will hasten our decline as a world power, which will then leave a void to be filled by a power not so benevolent (China).
While there’s no doubt that the suffering in Darfur is severe, he also calls attention to the ongoing misery in other places around the world that nobody’s taking out full-page ads for:
Even if we accept that the situation is genocide, are the people who die at the hands (or neglect) of their government (North Korea, Zimbabwe) any less dead? There are pockets of human misery all over the world. We cannot go around trying to solve all of them.
So what should Christians do about Darfur? It seems short-sighted to demand military action that would probably do little good, and could possibly end up costing even more lives. But we can’t just stand by and watch yet another genocide claim thousands, maybe millions of lives.
First, pray for God to sovereignly change the heart of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir. He has repeatedly rejected any outside involvement beyond the (mostly ineffective) 7,000 African Union troops that are currently there. This week he is meeting with the special U.S. envoy to Sudan, who sees signs of openness to change.
Second, email President Bush and ask him to put diplomatic pressure on China. The weapons that are killing helpless women and children in Darfur are paid for by profits from oil that the Sudanese government sells to China. Beijing has unique leverage over President al-Bashir, and could easily demand a cease-fire in Darfur.
Update: I just learned that Treasury Secretary Paulson is in Beijing right now. This is a perfect opportunity for him to raise this issue.
Third, support the Christian relief workers who are boots-on-the-ground in Darfur. They are keeping many thousands of displaced people from starvation. World Vision is currently feeding 300,000 people in 20 refugee camps. Global Hope Network (who we’ve partnered with in Lebanon) is working along the Sudan/Chad border.
If “pure religion” means caring for widows and orphans in their affliction (James 1:27), then this might be the purest it’s going to get for a while.