Osler's Razor

Even though I should have known this happens, I was still shocked by the execution of a woman in North Korea for distributing the Bible:

Ri Hyon Ok, 33, was also accused of spying for South Korea and the United States and organizing dissidents. She was executed in the northwestern city of Ryongchon near the border with China on June 16, according to a report from an alliance of several dozen anti-North Korea groups.

Ri's parents, husband and three children were sent to a political prison camp in the northeastern city of Hoeryong the following day, the report said, citing unidentified documents it says were obtained from North Korea.

Obviously, I think this is shocking and wrong. Like many of the stories uncovered by groups such as the International Justice Mission, it reveals an aspect of the human experience that I wish was not a part of our world.

But what of us who live in places where Christianity is the dominant faith? Sometimes I hear Christians say that they feel oppressed in the U.S., but the fact is that this is probably one of the safest places in the world for that particular faith. Rather, it seems to me that rather than oppression, in the U.S. we have a dominant Christian culture that encourages adherents to not live their faith where it conflicts with dominant culture.

For example, sticking to the core teachings of Christ himself, consider his repeated teachings that we keep the Sabbath. If anything is clear in the gospel, it is this. Yet, do we take note of this? Does it matter? We live in a society where Sunday is a shopping day and/or a working day for most Christians. Many Christians make no accommodation at all for the Sabbath beyond going to church. While Christ may have authorized healing the sick on the Sabbath, there is no question that he meant the day of rest to mean something, but too often we (myself included) let his words slide by.

Imagine, then, that suddenly the law required people to work on Sunday-- weekends would switch to Friday and Saturday, and the work week would begin on Sunday. We would have a fit, of course. That kind of legal oppression of the dominant faith would be a crisis. That is not the nature of our oppression of Christianity, which is deeper and sadder, perhaps. Instead of the government decreeing that Christ's injunction be violated, we... just do it ourselves, each of us, by letting the river of commerce wash us down with everyone else. It is the oppression of not caring, of prioritizing what we want to do over what we should do, of not making Christ real in our lives.

In North Korea, the symbol of oppression is an execution. Perhaps in America, it is the Christians flowing into Best Buy on Sunday afternoon, because the flyer in the paper said that flat-panel televisions would be a little cheaper today.