The Human Rights Activists News Agency said Sunday it has verified at least 3,919 deaths during a massive wave of protests that swept Iran in recent weeks, and fears the number could be significantly higher. Other human rights groups and insiders estimate that between twelve and fifteen thousand people were killed.
Demonstrations that began in late December have reportedly subsided as “an extraordinarily violent crackdown by Iranian security forces appears to have succeeded for now in driving protesters from the streets.” Foreign Policy calls the regime’s response “the greatest massacre in modern Iranian history.”
Why would a government kill so many of its own people?
How can it do so and survive?
Fighting the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan”
The recent protests were sparked by an economic crisis that can be fixed only if Iran gets relief from international sanctions. This would require the regime to compromise on its nuclear and missile programs. Such compromise would obviously be in the best interest of the Iranian people.
However, these programs are essential to the government’s Islamist purpose: opposing the US (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Little Satan”) to establish a “true” Islamic state that will hasten the coming of the Mahdi, their messiah.
In this ideological frame, Western pressure makes Iran’s case that they are fighting for the existential survival of Islam. Protests against the government are viewed as opposition to Islam. The regime is therefore willing to kill as many of its own people as necessary to survive. Like autocrats in Cuba, China, Russia, and North Korea, they claim that such sacrifices are outweighed by the ultimate benefit of their ideology for the collective good.
By contrast, our Declaration of Independence claims that governments “are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is why we are ultimately governed by laws, not people, and why we elect people to represent us in making and enforcing these laws.
However, while our system provides checks and balances on unaccountable individual power, its intended secularism cannot articulate those transcendent purposes and morality that lead to ultimate flourishing. The same governmental system that abolished slavery in 1865 also produced Roe v. Wade in 1973, leading to the deaths of more than sixty-five million babies in the US.
“Sanctity of Life Sunday” was observed in churches across the nation yesterday to remind us that the battle for life continues. And to call us each to do our part.
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question”
Service is the intended theme of today’s holiday. According to the Smithsonian, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is “the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer and improve their communities.” As Americans pause to remember the great civil rights leader, we do well to remember the ideology that inspired him.
Dr. King stated, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” He added,
Everybody can be great . . . because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Where, however, does our fallen culture find such a “heart full of grace”?
In How Christianity Changed Civilization . . . And Must Do So Again, historians Mark Aquilina and James L. Papandrea outline seven “revolutions” birthed by the Christian movement that changed the world:
- “A revolution of the individual affirmed that all people are created equal, in the image of God, and no one is expendable.”
- “A revolution of the home affirmed it as a place of safety and love, where women and children are not to be exploited.”
- “A revolution of the workplace affirmed that people are not property, that they must be free to choose their work, and that they must be given free time for worship, for artistic expression, and for the enjoyment of their loved ones.”
- “A revolution of religion taught the world that God is love.”
- “A revolution of the community taught people to love their neighbor.”
- “A revolution of the way people thought about life and death rejected the culture of death and affirmed a culture of life and of hope, encouraging people to stand up for human rights.”
- “A revolution of government set up the ideal that rulers should serve those whom they rule (not the other way around), and that all people should enjoy freedom of religion.”
In other words, when Jesus began saving souls and changing lives, he produced a movement of hearts “full of grace.” And this grace changes hearts and nations still today.
When an individual has “started living”
Albert Einstein noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” But when we submit our lives daily to Jesus in the “white funeral” that dies to ourselves and ask him to remake us like himself (2 Corinthians 3:18), we experience the “amazing grace” that changed John Newton and changes all who embrace it today.
I visited Newton’s graveside in England several years ago, where I found the epitaph he wrote for himself:
John Newton, Clerk, Once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.
If Jesus is your Lord, you have been “preserved, restored, [and] pardoned” as well. If you have submitted your life to him as your Lord today, you will “preach the faith” as an inevitable and empowering consequence of his Spirit’s work in your life.
According to Dr. King,
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
Have you “started living” yet?
Quote for the day:
“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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