Christians caught with a Bible in North Korea have faced death and had their families, including children, thrown in prison for life, a new report says
Christians caught with a Bible in North Korea have faced death and had their families, including children, thrown in prison for life, a new report says
By Ryan Pickrell
May 26, 2023
North Korea offers freedom of religion to its citizens on paper but not in practice.
It has imprisoned tens of thousands of Christians, according to a State Department report, citing NGO research.
The recent report reveals executions and imprisonment for life for people caught with religious materials.
North Korea is notorious for the cruelty it inflicts on people deemed undesirable by the state. In the Hermit Kingdom that prizes weaponry over its own people, many of whom are starving and live in abject poverty, tens of thousands of Christians are said to be languishing in prisons.
A recently released Department of State report notes that while North Korea constitutionally allows for religious freedom, there is no such thing in practice.
The constitution vaguely states that religion must not harm the state or social order, giving authorities room to target those who seek to openly follow their faith.
The report from the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, citing research conducted by non-governmental organizations which have gathered testimony from defectors, says as many as 70,000 Christians have been imprisoned in camps along with those believers from other religions.
One NGO, Open Doors USA, has reported that for Christians in North Korea, life is a “constant cauldron of pressure” and “capture or death is only a mistake away.”
As State highlights in its report, North Korean government documents state that “freedom of religion is allowed and provided by the State law within the limit necessary for securing social order, health, social security, morality and other human rights.”
Anything beyond that can land citizens in deep trouble.
People who have been arrested for religious crimes have reportedly faced detention and forced labor, torture, sexual violence, and death.
Christians are considered a “hostile class” in the songbun system, in which people derive status from loyalty to the state and its leadership. Christians, ODUSA reported, are regarded as the lowest in society and are constantly “vulnerable and in danger.”
The Department of State, pulling from information collected by NGOs, noted that an entire family, including their two-year-old child, was imprisoned following the discovery of their religious practices and possession of a Bible.
The family, which was most likely targeted by the Ministry of State Security that handles roughly 90 percent of these cases, was sentenced to life in prison.
A report from the NGO Korea Future documented a shocking incident in which a man caught praying was nearly beaten to death by guards. Another incident involved a Korean Worker’s Party member who was found with a Bible, taken by authorities out to an airfield, and executed before a crowd of thousands.
North Korea celebrates the Kim family, specifically the current ruler, Kim Jong Un, and his late father and grandfather, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, above all, recognizing the Kim dynasty or Mount Paektu bloodline in ways reminiscent of deification.
The State Department report, pointing to Korea Future’s research, says that the state ideology “Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism” has “many hallmarks of religion.” It notes the state regards the two previous leaders as “extraordinary beings.”
ODUSA has reported that Christian materials, including Bibles, are leftovers from the early 20th century up to World War II and are passed among believers. Though there have been reports of underground churches, it is unclear if these are active given that, as one defector said, “meeting other Christians in order to worship is almost impossible.” Some even fear being reported by their own family members.
This situation has long been a problem in North Korea, and State noted that “multiple sources indicated the situation had not fundamentally changed since” the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report on human rights in the in North Korea was published. That report found that North Korea “denied the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” and engaged in “crimes against humanity.”
The Word ‘Homosexual’ Is in the Bible by Mistake: The Explosive Documentary That Is Under Attack
The Word ‘Homosexual’ Is in the Bible by Mistake: The Explosive Documentary That Is Under Attack
LOVE THY NEIGHBOR
The documentary “1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture” claims that one human error 75 years ago stoked decades of homophobia and hate. Extremists don’t want you to see it.
By Kevin Fallon
November 7, 2022
The first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible was in 1946. That year, a committee gathered to translate an updated English version of the book from the Greek. Religious scholars, priests, theologists, linguists, anthropologists, and activists have done decades of research and investigation into the instances where the word appears in the book. Their conclusion is that it was a mistranslation.
In other words, the Biblical assertion that homosexuality is a sin—the catalyst for an entire shift in culture, with political repercussions, religious implications, consequences for LGBT rights and acceptance, and, frankly, deadly results—was, they allege, a mistake.
As a new film asserts, it was “the misuse of a single word that changed the course of history.”
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a new documentary directed by Sharon “Rocky” Roggio. Ahead of its premiere this week at the DOC NYC festival, it has, as one might expect, gone viral within the conservative and Christian communities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yly6Q0GbtFk
A grassroots campaign to promote the film on social media has gotten its official TikTok account more than 185,000 followers. That makes sense. For most people—practicing Christians or otherwise—what the film is stating is shocking.
There are layers to it: the realization that the Bible has been translated many times over the centuries, and that human error may have been involved in the process. That may be obvious, but it’s eye-opening. Moreover, there’s coming to terms with the notion that human error could be responsible for the stoking of homophobia—a mindset of hatred, oppression, and religious nationalism that has defined the last 75 years of our existence.
Before anyone has even seen the film, there has been an organized effort to attack and debunk the film’s claims. Roggio and others involved in the making of the documentary have received threats. Campaigns have been waged to get even innocuous social media posts taken down. An entire book was published to refute the evidence—even though the film has yet to be screened.
“The opposition is quite vocal about our film, trying to debunk it because they’re afraid,” Roggio tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview ahead of 1946’s New York premiere. “We’re literally unmooring them and pulling the anchors out from underneath.”
Those attacks are coming from all sides.
“We’ve been hit by the conservative audience,” Roggio says. “We’ve been hit by the atheist audience. We’ve been hit by LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church and who have now left the church, because they feel that we are subscribing to religious supremacy by even playing along in this dialogue.”
1946 takes a journalistic, academic approach to substantiating these claims. Poring over thousands of historical documents, centuries of ancient texts, and Bible translations in many languages, the experts in the film conclude that two Greek words were mistranslated to mean homosexual. One more accurately means effeminate. The other connotes a person who was a sexual abuser and who had harmed someone.
As the film outlines, years after the translation, when the mistake was pointed out, the committee recognized and attempted to correct it. But, by the ’70s, the implications of those verses had become widespread. By the time the AIDS crisis arrived in the ’80s, that mindset was weaponized by the moral majority, particularly in the merging of politics and religion in the United States.
“A big point of our film has been biblical literalism,” Roggio says. “We do just think that it was a magical book that was just dropped down to us, but these are real people who have made these decisions that impact our real reality. People are going to feel unmoored by this idea that it’s man that has messed up, not God. As much as we are combating biblical liberalism, we want our conservative audience to journey with us, in the sense that this is not an attack on God. This is not an attack on the Bible. This is a real issue of a mistranslation.”
Before 1946 premieres at DOC NYC on Nov. 12, we spoke with Roggio about the work she did (along with scholars and activists Kathy Bullock and Ed Oxford) to meticulously substantiate the film’s claims, the challenge of getting through to a Christian community that refuses even to hear the evidence, and how a documentary like this could change the world.
I grew up in the church, but I am still someone who found the idea of “homosexual” being a mistranslation in the Bible to be shocking. What has been people’s response to this?
We’re talking about the biggest book in the world. This impacts the three largest religions in the world. This impacts everyone. And we don’t discuss these things. That was what intrigued me as someone who grew up in the church, was a victim of bad theology, and was discriminated against because I’m a member of LGBTQ community. Realizing that the word homosexual wasn’t in the Bible until 1946, that was a click for me. I think that it’s gonna be a click for a lot of people.
Even the basic principle that the Bibles we read were translated by a human, and there may have been a mistake in that translation—that’s a mind-blowing realization for people.
One of the biggest concerns that we see in America today is Christian nationalism and people using the Bible who are saying that it is inerrant. They are biblical literalists. It has sovereignty over us. It can’t be changed. The word is the word. That is dangerous. It’s dangerous for so many people. We see it playing out in our reality today, and I call that religious supremacy, really. My idea in finessing these themes is to hopefully get the conservative audience to join with us and be honest about this. Words have power and words have meaning. The way that we use the Bible and use these old texts is very important. So what we try to do is contextualize.
What is the goal of that contextualization?
Our movie is more than just theology. It’s history. It’s society. It’s politics. It’s law. It’s oppression. It’s how, again, these words have meaning. We as a group of people have had to negotiate the text. A group of people over time have had to pick and choose which verses stand out, which verses we follow—which verses play out in our land and our law. To really be an honest reader of Christian scripture, we have to find a way where we’re not oppressing people, where we’ve contextualized the text—we understand where it comes from and how it impacted a group of people.
When you’re introducing this idea, which is seismic and likely upsetting to a lot of people, how do you explain it to them at the most basic level?
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is about the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible. We had a team of researchers who wanted to ask the question: Who made this decision, and why? What was discovered, through a series of letters written by the translation committee that put the word “homosexual” in there, is that it was a mistake. Then it was discovered how the word “homosexual” went viral in print in the ’70s. That impacted the ’80s and the moral majority, and how we see the merger of politics and religion, specifically in America. What we now see today is the dangers of Christian nationalism, and it’s only grown.
Can you talk more specifically about the mistranslation of the word “homosexual” and what happened there?
We’re talking about a word, a medical term that has a connotation of a group of people that have an orientation, as opposed to what the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts are referring to, which is an aggressor, somebody who was an abuser—somebody who has abused someone else, and there is a victim on the other side. It’s a very different connotation. So that was my drive for making the movie, because now I have tangible evidence, letters written from the committee [acknowledging this].
This translation committee also has not only recognized the error but continues to rectify it and make their translations reflect the connotation of abusive behavior. Whereas now we see malice in the conservative committees, who since the ’80s have done the opposite. They say it refers to consensual acts, so it’s been amplified as homophobia because of this mistranslation.
From my experience, I know there are many Christians who are unmoving in their beliefs, who operate from a point of blind faith. What is it like to arrive with all of this evidence, research, and proof—even just an ask to listen to what the movie is alleging—but be met with that stubborn certitude?
It’s like hitting a wall. You get two kinds of Christians. You get people like my dad. [Roggio’s father is a pastor who appears in the film and repeatedly challenges its claims.] They want us to think they love us so much, that they’re just trying to give us the truth. And my dad is very kind and he’s never hurtful. But there are other people that I’ll see, especially on social media, who turn their fear into anger and then hatred. They’re vicious. A lot of what I see on social media and TikTok is the epitome of the phrase “There’s no love like Christian hate.” They’re just so disgusting.
Is it ever productive? What is it like to encounter that, on a human level?
We have reached a couple of people who actually will listen and watch the movie. But there are so many people who are so close-minded. It’s heartbreaking that people aren’t even open to recognizing us as human. It’s just dehumanizing. With the church being comfortable othering people—it’s not us, it’s you—it’s easy for them to dehumanize the LGBTQ person. A key barrier is that even some of these theologians that will put out this harmful rhetoric, they don’t have relationships with LGBTQ people.
Do you think that makes a difference?
One reason why I wanted to put my dad in the movie and my story in the movie is because we are a prime example of that “hitting the wall.” Here’s an example of someone who I love very much, who is my biggest oppressor. There’s no getting through to him at all. And so the other thing is, you know, we’re not going to change everybody’s minds, and that’s OK. But at the end of the day, my dad needs to keep his beliefs where they belong, and stay out where my beliefs are.
I don’t impede his equal rights and he doesn’t need to impede mine. I’m doing this to provide equal protection for everyone under the law, because if we don’t get a handle on this now, with the Bible in this country, we’re all in trouble—no matter what you believe.
Italy: African Muslim destroys invaluable historic statues in four Roman churches, terrorizes tourists (two minute video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df_si1PnEcY
Minnesota public schools encourage students to pray, but only if they’re Muslim
Well this is just plain hypocritical:
How one Minnesota school district handles a rising immigrant population
March 23, 2016
In the district’s middle and high schools, Muslim students have access to private rooms with prayer rugs for the five daily prayers.
Passenger says Muslims protected Christians in Islamist attack on Kenyan bus
These Muslim passengers could have taken the cowardly route and told the Muslim terrorists which passengers were Christian, but instead, they bravely refused to do so. Hooray for these brave Muslim passengers!
http://news.yahoo.com/somali-militants-kill-two-bus-attack-northern-kenya-133010287.html
Passenger says Muslims protected Christians in Islamist attack on Kenyan bus
December 21, 2015
MOMBASA, Kenya (Reuters) – Somali Islamist militants sprayed a Kenyan bus with bullets on Monday, killing two people, but a passenger said he and fellow Muslims defied demands from the attackers to help identify Christians traveling with them.
The attack took place in Mandera, in northeast Kenya. A year ago, al Shabaab gunmen stormed a Nairobi-bound bus in the same area and killed 28 non-Muslim passengers execution-style.
Abdi Mohamud Abdi, a Muslim who was among the passengers in Monday’s incident, told Reuters that more than 10 al Shabaab militants boarded the bus and ordered the Muslim passengers to split away from the Christians, but they refused.
“We even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily. We stuck together tightly,” he said.
“The militants threatened to shoot us but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters. Finally they gave up and left but warned that they would be back,” he said.
In previous attacks, al Shabaab has often killed both Muslims and non-Muslims.
Julius Otieno, the deputy county commissioner, confirmed the account, saying that the militants “were trying to identify who were Muslims and who were not,” and that the Muslim passengers had refused to help.
The militants then fled the scene, both men said.
Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military spokesman, said the group had fired shots at the bus.
“Some of the Christian enemies died and others were injured,” he told Reuters in a statement. The militants did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the role of Muslim bus passengers during the attack.
The 2014 bus attack shocked Kenya and led to a shake-up of security ministers. Since then, buses carrying passengers from Mandera have been given police escorts, but Kenya Police spokesman Charles Owino said that had not happened in this case because the bus had bypassed a police roadblock.
Owino said that in addition to the two deaths, four people were wounded.
Al Shabaab has said it will continue its attacks on Kenya until Nairobi withdraws troops from an African Union force fighting the militants in Somalia. It has also said northeastern Kenya should be part of Somalia.
Kenya’s long northeastern border with Somalia is widely considered a security weak spot. Factors include poor coordination between security services, and a culture of corruption that allows anyone prepared to pay a bribe to pass unchallenged.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 