NY Times on Christian Event for North Korea

I’ve previously blogged about Deborah Fikes here, and about meeting and talking with her at the Freedom House Conference, here. Now, the New York Times has discovered her Midland Ministerial Alliance, which put on what appears to have been a very substantial event to publicize the same human rights issue that the Times has been ignoring for the most part.

As with Nick Kristof’s recent piece, the article manages the difficult balancing act of being both patronizing and envious of the crazy-eyed Christian fanatics who have found a better human rights cause than the liberals in Manhattan in spite of themselves.

There is one demonstrable factual inaccuracy as well, in reference to Kang Chol-Hwan, who attended and praised the event. The Times claims that Kang had never discussed his religious conversion in his memoir, but I read Kang’s book back in 2001 (or early 2002) and distinctly remember him talking about his conversion to Christianity, inspired in part by Christian broadcasts from the South.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a page number because I sent the book to my Dad after reading it (readers?). The error is significant because–at least as I see it–it’s part of the Times’s effort to paint the Christians as crazies while crediting the sincerity of Kang and the Rev. Douglas Shin, who will tell you that he’s no religious zealot almost before you ask.

The Times seems to have fallen for an oversimplification inspired by bias. I’ve met people who were fanatic about a wide range of ideas–religious, ideological, egomaniacal–and found that fanatical belief has the potential to inspire extraordinary energy and moments of clarity, including moral clarity for some, just as it can impose heavy logical and moral taxes on truths that infringe on dogma. What escapes me is why Christianity is unique in that regard, and why it deprives Fikes and her movement of the capacities for sincere compassion and logical truth.

Any fool can spray-paint Bible verses on the side of a bus, but it takes a logical mind to build an influential movement. Any death cult can strap bombs to children, but there’s a broad chasm between that and trying to feed and inspire hungry and hopeless people. I can’t claim to be one of Fikes’s confidants, but I got enough of a sense of her to know that the Times underestimates her at its own peril, and that of the people her organization is determined to help.

Afterthought: I concede that to an extent, I fall into the same trap by implictly applying the word “fanatical” to Fikes and her organization in my fifth paragraph. It’s a very poor choice of a word on my part, for which I offer a sua sponte apology. Fikes is openly and devotedly Christian, and undoubtedly she’s far more religious that I am. But a person guided by faith to use compassionate and nonviolent means to help suffering people cannot be called a fanatic without the speaker committing a grievous error. In that sense, I’ve committed the same error of which I accuse the Times correspondent.