Regime changes

Francis Galassi’s Catiline, The Monster of Rome: An Ancient Case of Political Assassination (Westholme, 2014) is an engaging history of the intrigues that occupied Cicero, Cato, Brutus, and others. The March 15 assassination of Julius Caesar was not all that unusual, given such a tradition; but Christians will want to contrast such regime-changing efforts with the wisdom of chapter 13 of Romans. Paul told oppressed Christians that they should still respect rulers: In God’s time regimes will change as more persons become Christians; but government wields the sword, and those who wield swords against it are likely to perish.

Eighteenth-century Americans understood that and did not pick up the sword until local government clashed with the imperial government: Then they had to choose. Twenty-first-century Chinese Christians also practice patience, so they give patriotic respect to the Beijing government and the Communist Party, while practicing “cooperative resistance” to push for greater religious freedoms. Timothy Conkling’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Mobilized Merchants-Patriotic Martyrs: China’s House-Church Protestants and the Politics of Cooperative Resistance (2013) explains the nuances, and thus becomes the most valuable book for understanding China’s blossoming Christian movement since David Aikman’s Jesus in Beijing (Regnery, 2003).

Conkling provides a nuanced view of the chess game Chinese churches need to play. Dubbing house churches the good guys and the officially allowed Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) the bad guys is simplistic: Some TSPM leaders help the house churches, and some TSPM attendees are genuine in their faith. A few house churches are heretical cults, and their pastors, as in the United States, sometimes take advantage of female members. Some local government officials are oppressors, while others warn house churches that a central government official is coming for a week, so it might be wise to skip Sunday school (only for that week).

Conkling also reports the meeting President George W. Bush had with three Chinese house-church leaders who visited the White House in 2005. Bush asked, “How can we help you?” The response: “Please firmly and persistently express your concerns regarding the situation of religious freedom in China at any occasion with the Chinese leaders.” That’s exactly what Bush did, and he also said, in a speech carried live on Chinese television, “Freedom of religion is not something to be feared; it’s to be welcomed, because faith gives us a moral core and teaches us to hold ourselves to high standards, to love and to serve others, and to live responsible lives.” As Christianity spreads and Chinese leaders find that statement to be true, we can pray that their experience of practical gains will outweigh Communist ideology.

From Luther to the internet

Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media—the First 2,000 Years (Bloomsbury, 2013) comes through on its audacious subtitle. One chapter, “How Luther Went Viral,” suggests that the view “without printing, no Reformation” overstates the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, but “without printing, no successful Reformation” may be true. Luther without his printed pamphleteering would probably have been burned at the stake like Jan Hus or declared a heretic like John Wycliffe, with his body exhumed and burned.

Standage’s chapter on the rapid development of the telegraph in the 1840s and 1850s shows how “telegraphers were member of the world’s first online community.” They developed common abbreviations like SFD (stop for dinner) or GA—dash dash dot, dot dash—for “Go ahead.” They played checkers or chess over the wires when they had no messages to transmit.

Some operators who met each other online developed friendships and even romances. Hundreds of operators in 33 offices along a 700-mile line once had a meeting by telegraph: the first chat room. “Such was the sense of online camaraderies that some operators in remote places preferred to commune with their friends on the wires than with the local people.” Sounds familiar. —M.O.

For more on Timothy Conkling, see “A look at China’s patriotic martyrs” by June Cheng.

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