Face to face with the danger of faith

In the face of compassion fatigue, connecting with the humanity of a cause requires the artistic, not just the imperative. Belle Tindall reviews Clay and Canvas.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A refugee looks out from a cover photograph of a book resting upright against a cylinder

The cover of Clay & Canvas.

Open Doors.

In 2018, in the Houses of Parliament, Hannah Rose Thomas displayed a collection of radiant portraits she had painted of Yazidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity. She did this to bring their ongoing plight to the attention of the Government. In 2019, at the London Riverside Development, three photographers (Chris de Bode, Abbie Trayler-Smith and Nora Lorek) used their photographs to powerfully tell the story of the hunger crisis in Sudan, Liberia, and the Central African Republic. In 2021, a 3.5-metre-tall interactive puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian girl named Amal was walked from Turkey to Kent, and in so doing, gave the world a glimpse of what such a journey entails for thousands of refugee children. And in 2022, the advocacy group, Open Doors, published a striking book entitled Clay and Canvas, which compellingly tells seven stories of individuals who have faced un-imaginable trauma because of their belief in Jesus.

While these projects were created by different people, at different times, highlighting different situations, it seems to me that the powerful impact of all four artistic offerings is twofold. Firstly, they each force us to move beyond numbers and statistics, inviting us to come face-to-face with the humanity behind the headlines. And secondly, the utter beauty with which these pieces have been both created and curated hints at the startling beauty that can be found in the midst of pain. The glimmers of light that are ever present, even in the darkest of contexts.

This is most certainly the case with Clay and Canvas.

Its strikingly minimal aesthetic ensures that it can comfortably sit alongside the most classic of ‘coffee table books,’ but instead of being filled with recipes, interior decoration inspiration, or the complete lyrical works of Paul McCartney, this holds within it stories that will simultaneously break and inspire its reader’s heart.

There are around 360 million people in the world who are currently under some sort of threat because of the Christian beliefs that they hold, and this book tells just seven of those harrowing stories.

It introduces us to Baheer and Medet, two friends who played together as children, but now find themselves in a torture chamber. One of them is being electrocuted because of his Christian beliefs, while the other is looking on at the torture of the friend that he himself had reported to the authorities. Both are utterly terrified.

We also meet Rebekah, Eti and Ratina as they are thrown into the back of a police van, sentenced to five years in a high-security prison for telling children about their belief in a man called Jesus.

And then there’s Kirti, who is being continually hounded by a violent mob, her body repeatedly broken and battered by their sheer anger at her refusal to deny her faith.

These stories are an afront to the comforting habit one may have of disassociating individual realities from vast statistics.

These stories don’t give their readers the blissful luxury of ignorance. They are an afront to the comforting habit one may have of disassociating individual realities from vast statistics, of regarding this epidemic of violence as some sort of faceless or nameless phenomena.

Rather, readers are brought face-to-face with the detail of religious persecution. We are shown the thought-processes of a man on the brink of death, we are walked through the moment-by-moment decisions of a person attempting to flee for their life, we are exposed to the agony of three women being separated from their children.

The writing is heart-wrenchingly powerful, the stories its telling, infinitely more so. This is certainly not your average ‘coffee-table book.’

As well as the written stories, there are photographs of these persecuted individuals dotted through-out the book. Readers are not only told their stories, they are also shown their faces. These pictures serve to remind us that this discrimination isn’t happening to people who resemble cinematic-style heroes, it is happening to husbands, wives, daughters, sons, neighbours, friends, mothers, fathers.

2023 is the most dangerous year to be a Christian on record, it is integral to the increasing number of people who are losing their right to hold their beliefs that this reality is continually, and indeed creatively, amplified.

And yet, as noted earlier, the darkness of these stories is not devoid of glimmers of light. There is a distinct thread of redemption that is weaved through this resource, and indeed, these people’s lives. The beauty is found in the forgiveness shown by those who have been betrayed, the hope found by those who have nothing else to hold onto, the ‘gentle, defiant glow’ of those who are stubborn in their selflessness – all of it all the more staggering for being completely true.

This book presents its readers with a costly kind of goodness. A truly counter-cultural form of beauty. If you sit with it long enough, it will begin to chip away at the modern and ever-so-Western tendency we have to consider pain and beauty as forces that are mutually exclusive.

Art, in its various forms, is one of the most powerful tools we humans have, and that is never more evident than when it is used to communicate circumstances with a depth that statistics alone could never reach. Clay and Canvas is certainly one such example.

Clay and Canvas has been produced by Open Doors in Partnership with Something More Creative

Review

Books

Culture

4 April 2024

4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book

Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.

Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale. The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18. The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths. The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses. By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more. But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive. The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits. The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed. The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions.

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive. Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible. In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature. Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

The word remember is coded with meaning. When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened. This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time. We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience. The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester.

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal. Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol. Xi Jinping suffered himself. His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province. This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him. But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms. Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book. If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs. The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ. Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’. This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life. He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so. Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles. Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work. It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture. There is no direct link, despite some claims. But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel.