Nina Shea should know. No one has done more than she has to mobilize opinion on the issue of persecuted Christians, now the hottest human-rights cause in Washington. Director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, a human-rights group, Shea is no dangly-earringed liberal. She’s a mother of three with a long shock of blond hair, a very big Rolodex and a lot of support from firebrand conservatives on Capitol Hill. ““She has been the prime fighter on religious issues,’’ says Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, where Shea is a favorite witness. Her recent book, ““In the Lion’s Den,’’ about the persecution of Christians in 11 countries, opens with five pages of encomiums from top religious leaders and political conservatives.
The Clinton administration has handled Shea gingerly. ““A bulldog’’ is how one official describes her; others say they listen to voice mail from her in crouch mode. But State Department officials praise her performance on a new advisory committee on religious persecution. Shea has also had input into a new bill banning foreign aid, loans and exports of crime-control equipment to countries that persecute believers (China, Vietnam and Sudan top the list). The bill would create a new White House job to monitor persecution and report annually to Congress; Shea herself could be a logical candidate for the post.
Some human-rights activists question Shea’s accuracy. ““She talks about things that happened many years ago as though they took place yesterday,’’ complains one. The back cover of ““In the Lion’s Den’’ claims that ““more Christians have died for their faith in the 20th century than in the previous 19 centuries combined.’’ Shea says she got the figures from a Virginia religious group’s Encyclopedia on Christians; it’s the kind of assertion that many experts greet skepti- cally, but few can marshal the numbers to challenge it. ““It’s an attention-grabbing statement,’’ says one member of the religious-persecution committee. ““She’s not really a human-rights worker. She doesn’t know the languages; she doesn’t read the original documents. She’s a promoter.''
And what’s wrong with that? ask her supporters. ““Anybody who’s trying to be a gadfly is willing to push and dramatize the facts to the limit,’’ says Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network. ““You don’t speak moderately if you want to shake up people.’’ Shea says simply, ““I stand by my facts. My facts are good.’’ She feels that many human-rights activists are elitists who resent her for pushing an issue that they have long neglected. ““They see me as an upstart,’’ she says. ““Victims of religious persecution are not their traditional constituents.''
The daughter of a Pennsylvania dentist and his hygienist, Shea was a liberal Democrat when she worked in the 1980s for the International League for Human Rights. But after she published a report on abuses by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Shea says, her friends began to shun her. She married an editor at a con- servative Washington think tank and re- discovered her own Roman Catholicism. ““Everyone focused on the human rights of journalists, of political dissidents, of Jews,’’ says Shea. ““Christians have been ignored.''
Mobilizing Christians behind a new human-rights issue could revolutionize American foreign policy, Shea says. She argues that after the Soviet Union fell apart and apartheid collapsed in South Africa, the human-rights issue lost its momentum. A groundswell of interest in the fate of Christians could re-energize that tattered crusade. It could also, perhaps coincidentally, reorient the human-rights lobby from a basically Democratic slant to a basically Republican one. Shea says she’s spoken on more than 100 Christian talk-radio shows since January. Not the first place you’d turn for balanced debate on foreign policy, perhaps. But as Shea herself has shown, no longer a venue to be ignored.
