Why a North Korean toddler’s Bible arrest offers a dire warning to America
OPINION:
“The entire family, including a 2-year-old child, were given life sentences in political prison camps.”
I had to do a triple-take when I first read this disturbing line in the State Department’s “2022 Report on International Religious Freedom,” a sobering reminder of the horrors North Korean citizens routinely face.
The revelation a toddler was reportedly detained in 2009 alongside his or her family members by North Korean officials seemed unbelievable, yet anyone aware of the crisis in North Korea understands the circumstances are diabolical and deadly, particularly for Christians.
This child’s family was guilty of the shocking crime of … possessing a Bible.
Here in America, where many of us melt down when Starbucks fails to properly heat our lattes or we’re unsuccessful in forcing others to validate our flippant perspectives, we have no concrete concept of what real persecution truly entails.
Armed with our privilege and freedom, we too often ravenously seek out grievances, issues and causes to gin ourselves up into anger and furor. We’re free to openly complain, and it’s an exercise we partake in at rapid speed and zeal.
Many people speak and act as though we’re living in the bowels of a third-world nation while relishing in the riches and favor of the greatest country mankind has seen.
This isn’t to say America doesn’t have issues. With humans comes sin and with sin comes individual and systematic malfunctions. But Americans undeniably live better than any other culture in human history, with daily access to tools and resources most around the world can only dream about.
And yet too many of us are obsessed with injustice, seeking its percolation and manifestation at every corner. This conundrum of cancel and grievance culture is perhaps most palpable in the wake of Memorial Day — a time when we remember the lives lost defending this great nation.
Sadly, too many fail to appreciate not only the struggle to create and maintain this great nation but also the fire and grit needed to maintain it for future generations.
And yet we look abroad at places like North Korea and we’re given a grim reminder of what happens when people fail to create — or keep — vibrant and hospitable cultures. We see what happens when freedom becomes a mere figment of a populace’s imagination.
With so much misplaced anger and rage, a perpetual victimhood mentality, and an apathetic cluelessness, it seems a great number of people believe America could never become a North Korea. And I hope they’re right.
But repressive regimes don’t start where North Korean dictatorships have landed. They progressively move in that direction, slowly devouring every ounce of liberty until their people are suffocating in an oxygen-less sociopolitical nightmare.
Persecution watchdog Open Doors offers a sobering look at North Korea, ranking the nation the worst place in the world for Christians to live. With 400,000 Christians making up just 2% of the population in North Korea, the religious minority is treated like an enemy within.
Open Doors calls the nation a “brutally hostile place for Christians to live” and explains the full penalty for believing in Jesus: destroyed lives.
“If discovered by the authorities, believers are either sent to labor camps as political prisoners where the conditions are atrocious, or killed on the spot – and their families will share their fate as well,” Open Doors’ World Watch List report reads. “Christians have absolutely no freedom. It is almost impossible for believers to gather or meet to worship. Those who dare to meet must do so in utmost secrecy – and at enormous risk.”
The heartbreaking reality is North Korea is a death chamber entrapping its people in the unthinkable. There’s no telling where that innocent toddler is today or whether he or she survived, though the child’s story is a clarion call to remember how profoundly fortunate we are, and how, at all costs, we must defend ourselves from such evils manifesting in our nation.
Of course, it would be alarmist to definitively claim we’re heading in that direction, though the erosion of freedom and basic constitutional understanding in America today is, at the least, alarming. North Korean defector-turned-U.S. citizen Yeonmi Park has openly warned she sees perilous patterns unfolding in the U.S. today.
“I was realizing that freedoms that I thought Americans had, it was like slipping away from all of us,” she told me this year, citing free speech crackdowns and what she sees as the use of race to divide citizens.
She also spoke out in other interviews decrying the false narratives and complaints raging in today’s culture, juxtaposing her experience as a sex slave against the backdrop of American freedom. Speaking about some college students she encountered in New York City, Ms. Park told the New York Post she found their grievances alarming.
“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” she said. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”
Ms. Park’s experience, again, is true persecution and horror. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans will never experience anything remotely similar.
Americans should address inequalities and fight for causes they hold dear, but not without profound gratitude for the liberty and freedom to be so vocal. And beyond all else, we must remember: freedom isn’t free.
Keep the haunting image of that toddler being hauled off to a prison camp for life in your heart and mind and let the horror catapult us all to protect this great nation — at all costs.
• Billy Hallowell is a digital TV host and interviewer for Faithwire and CBN News and the co-host of CBN’s “Quick Start Podcast.” Hallowell has written more than 14,000 stories on faith, culture and politics, has interviewed hundreds of celebrities, authors and influencers and is the author of four books.
