I've just read a remarkable article on the Iranian Church from Mission Frontiers Magazine. It's available on pdf, but the links are a little funny, so you have to download the entire issue, but it's worth it.

As the Iranian Islamic Revolution struggles to hold on early in its fourth decade of life, many Iranians are risking trouble by exploring other religions. Meanwhile, the Armenian minority group, starting in the sixties and continuing today, has developed a missionary mindset toward the Persian majority, including taking the incredible step of beginning to hold Church services in Farsi (the Persian language).

As any minority group or immigrant group can testify, the Armenians are doing this at the risk of their particular identity; this is a tremendous sacrifice. To hold services in the language of their at-times antagonists includes doing away with all your songs; these Armenian Christians have penned hundreds of Farsi-Language hymns.

The result: Christianity is losing its Armenian-identification in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors. In the last ten years, the pseudonymous author says,

A new term has become widespread throughout Iran, which can be literally translated “Persian-Christian,” or as they would conceptually translate it “Muslim-Christian” (farsimasihi).

For centuries, it was assumed that if you were a Christian, you were Armenian. If someone saw you wearing a cross they might ask, “Are you Armenian?” or “Have you become Armenian?” But today the question has changed. This new identity is highly significant, testifying to the presence of a truly indigenous, self-reproducing movement.

And this giving-up of the self is having a very big impact, if the author's uncited surveys can be trusted.

Recent nationwide surveys reveal that over 70% of the population is watching Christian satellite programs. These same surveys indicate that at least one million have already become believers, and many millions more are on the verge.

This growth has happened so fast, the underground church can hardly keep apace. In one example, a house church that began with two people several years ago has now multiplied into over twenty groups. The leader of this network remarked,

“Starting churches in Iran is easy! Everywhere you go to evangelize, people are ready to receive the gospel, or they have already become believers through satellite broadcasts.”

Training leaders is also easy, remarks another leader. The government has left young people with nothing to do. So believers spend time with one another everyday. They are constantly gathering for prayer, Bible study and evangelism. When a group reaches 25 people, they divide in half and begin again. Within two years, a new believer is expected to become a leader of a new house-fellowship and a discipler of new leaders.

So even if these national surveys overstate conversions by as much as a factor of ten, this is a trend in Persian Christianity not seen since the 600s of the Christian era.

A development in oppression is highlighted by Miklós Haraszti in Eurozine, in a reprint of an article from Index on Censorship.

The trick: the more I read the article, the less I could tell who was the oppressor and who was being oppressed.

In Haraszti’s perspective, several (primarily Muslim) regimes around the world are using the language of multi-culturalism (specifically, laws prohibiting the defamation of others’ religions) to quash dissent. So for instance the Danish Cartoon controversy.

On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning 'defamation of religions' as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with 13 abstentions. The resolution "Combating Defamation of Religions" has been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in 2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or at least promoting it into a universal anathema.

As with the Danish Cartoons, this is a European secularist rant with no room for controversy: Islam is wrong a priori, because Islam believes in judgment. Thus the proponents of the resolution are presented as sneaky; certainly not as people with a coherent logic.

There is nothing backward looking or historicising in the declaration. It adopts the language of human rights so that the proposal sounds compatible with the advanced multiculturalism of liberal democracies. All the signatories have acquiesced: the late-communist and the post- communist governments among them, along with the post-colonial or predominantly Muslim nations. Yet only very few of the 23, amongst them South Africa and Indonesia, are democracies equipped with a truly pluralistic media. The consistently high number of abstentions, including by nations with free speech guarantees, helps ensure the proposition is officially accepted every year.

Now: I don’t know where I stand here. I believe in freedom of conscience, and in particular the freedom to change religions, but I’ve also always felt that the unlimited-free-speech crowd has a knack for framing arguments in impossible armor, so that offensiveness is not merely permitted, but crucially important for the survival of civilization itself. Lurking in the background is usually a caricature of the Vatican, with a half-baked narrative of enlightenment = secularism (actually, the French word laïcité, which is much more nuanced).

What Haraszti fails to do is explain exactly why the Muslim nations are being sneaky in using human rights language. This is important: it suggests an unwillingness to listen to the argument. This in turn is fascist; it’s a fascism of speech, in which to be part of a liberal democracy is to swallow mockery. I don’t know what the answer is. It’s tempting to throw up the hands and say that debate is futile.

One of my favorite chores while editing urbana.org for several years was posting entries from the Global Urban Trek. These are students spending a few short weeks (eight or so) in the slums of developing world  mega-cities. The Trek is the child of Scott Bessenecker, who writes the Least of These blog on this site.

Anyway, look at this one: The Thai that binds, by Ann Fergeson of the Bangkok team. Discussing language learning with their host missionary, she learns: language is a social exercise, not an intellectual one.

That's a simple but important observation, one for me to keep in mind during my academic work, for which I must access sources in several languages (Swiss-German, German, French, Latin, and possibly Dutch and Danish). That's the order of my familiarity. By the time you've reached Dutch on this list, the measure is not actually communicating, but only understanding written texts.

Which is less about people and more about codes. Which is to say, it's about power, not about belonging.

But missionary communication, Ann Fergeson reminds us, is not about codes. It's about mutuality.

As an inveterate watcher of culture changes, I'm particularly fascinated by migration, which hurls entirely different peoples up near each other, who would otherwise certainly never have met.

That's certainly the case in my neighborhood, full of immigrants from Philippines, Honduras, Mexico, Italy, Cambodia, Laos, and more.

The children from these homes pick up the school bus in my front yard, giving me a little early-morning soap opera to enjoy (squabbles, re-enactments of action movies and hip-hop moves, sibling rivalries, etc.) One thing the children all have in common is a solid grasp of the English language.

Which sets them apart from their parents. Most parents in my block have enough English for their blue-collar jobs (truck-drivers, handymen, hotel housekeepers and more), but the kids are enrolled in school, a more intense English than many workplaces.

Anyway, here's a story from the research news at Wisconsin: English language appropriation by immigrants seems to have taken much longer in 1900 than today. By a factor of generations.

Researchers noted, for example, that German so dominated Milwaukee at that time, that Irish immigrants were likely to acquire German, while mono-lingual Germans experienced no economic handicap.

Lutheran churches in the area began experimenting with English-language sermons in the late 1920s, well after WW1.

All this is entirely interesting, but here's a question: why are today's immigrants so much quicker to learn English?

We can only guess, because the article here only talks about the past, not today.

I'd love folks' opinions: is assimilation accelerating? If so, why? What's going on?

[pictured: From the New York Public Library on flickr, a German Stowaway awaiting deportation in 1911]

Speaking of languages, I was reminded of an unfortunate question and answer during Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s primary debate in Austin this spring.

That debate was co-hosted by CNN and Univision. The Univision anchor posed this question to the candidates:

Is there any downside to the United States becoming a bilingual nation?

Both candidates seemed to understand the question in terms of the bilingualism of the citizenry, as opposed to, say, a Canadian-style bilingual government. It’s a convenient omission, because a bilingual citizenry more or less suggests that the vast majority of citizens can speak more than one language; a bilingual state, on the other hand, means to empower diversely monolingual citizens.

Anyway, here are their answers. It’s significant because Obama’s our next president and Clinton our next diplomat-in-chief:

CLINTON: Well, I think it's important for as many Americans as possible to do what I have never been able to do, and that is learn another language and try to be bilingual because that connects us to the rest of the world.

I think it is important, though, that English remain our common unifying language because that brings our country together in a way that we have seen generations of immigrants coming to our shores be able to be part of the American experience and pursue the American dream.

You know, I have been adamantly against the efforts by some to make English the official language. That I do not believe is appropriate, and I have voted against it and spoken against it.

I represent New York. We have 170 languages in New York City alone. And I do not think that we should be, in any way, discriminating against people who do not speak English, who use facilities like hospitals or have to go to court to enforce their rights.

But I do think that English does remain an important part of the American experience. So I encourage people to become bilingual. But I also want to see English remain the common, unifying language of our country.

OBAMA: Well, I think it is important that everyone learns English and that we have that process of binding ourselves together as a country. I think that's very important. I also think that every student should be learning a second language, because you know, so, when you start getting into a debate about bilingual education, for example, now, I want to make sure that children who are coming out of Spanish-speaking households had the opportunity to learn and are not falling behind.

If bilingual education helps them do that, I want to give them the opportunity.

But I also want to make sure that English-speaking children are getting foreign languages because this world is becoming more interdependent and part of the process of America's continued leadership in the world is going to be our capacity to communicate across boundaries, across borders, and that's something frankly where we've fallen behind.

One of the failures of No Child Left Behind, a law that I think a lot of local and state officials have been troubled by, is that it is so narrowly focused on standardized tests that it has pushed out a lot of important learning that needs to take place.

And foreign language is one of those areas that I think has been neglected. I want to put more resources into it.

In other words: both want more Americans to learn other languages; neither wants English to lose its monopoly of Government.

Also: our chief diplomat can’t speak another language. In other words, around the world, she will be expecting all negotiations to take place on her terms.

There is a deep cost here, one that neither candidate was willing to discuss: becoming a multilingual nation is only possible if we become a new kind of people, a people willing to push hard for consensus in resolving problems.

That’s a million miles from our political culture, which is marked by impatient pushiness on the part of the ruling parties, and intransigence on the part of the opposition.

If accidental monolingualism is poverty, insistent monolingualism is poverty mentality.