Many believers focus on Darfur crisis

Among the armed conflicts killing innocents around the world, the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan has become a moral tsunami for many religious believers in Massachusetts.

Rabbis in Lexington and at Andover Newton Theological School preach about Darfur, where government-backed Arab militias have killed tens of thousands of black Africans -- some counts reach 400,000 -- most of them Muslim. An Episcopal church in Natick donates $2,000 to relief efforts for the victims. Interfaith programs in Wayland and Wellesley stage teach-ins and music benefits.

"It's the first genocide that the world has called out while it's going on, as well as the first genocide of the 21st century. . . . That's a really powerful word," says Eric Cohen, cochairman of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur, which counts churches and synagogues among members from the Merrimack Valley to Martha's Vineyard.

"This is not to say that Darfuri lives are worth more than [those in] the Congo," site of another protracted, brutal conflict, Cohen says. But "there is some moral clarity [in Darfur]. The government is causing this to happen."

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the United Nations to memorialize those slaughtered in Hitler's "final solution." The Bush administration has declared Darfur another attempt -- similar in motive to the Nazis, if not in scope -- to kill an entire people.

This weekend of sad reflection coincides with at least two more faith-based, Darfur-related events.

Brookline's Christ Church Unity plans to screen journalist-turned-minister Liz Walker's documentary about the work in Sudan by her fellow Boston minister, Gloria White-Hammond, a cofounder of the Darfur coalition.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Wellesley plans to teach a lesson on Darfur to its Sunday school students. The fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders will have instruction tailored to their ages, with the youngest spared the worst details, says Peter Lull, a parishioner who handles outreach activities.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who has preached about Darfur though his op-ed columns, has compared the killings to a stockyard. In one example he reported last year, a man and his wife, holding their 3-month-old baby, fled their village after the government-backed janjaweed militia attacked. The attackers caught up with the wife, beat her into a coma, and, because the baby was a boy, shot him.

The two churches' programs follow a whirlwind of events held over the holidays last year, when the coalition used the good will felt from Thanksgiving through Christmas to prick the conscience of worshipers about the Sudan suffering.

The coalition arose from efforts by the state's religious community "and draws an enormous amount of energy from that," but it is not restricted to believers, says Cohen, a member of Temple Isaiah in Lexington. "If you're an atheist off the street and you care, hey, we can help you get connected to events."

One of the coalition's upcoming efforts centers on the Massachusetts State House, where the coalition will rally support for a bill to divest the state of holdings in companies doing business in the Sudan. And yesterday, the coaltion announced a public campaign to pressure Fidelity Investments to divest from Chinese oil companies doing business in the Sudan.

The Rev. Evrol Officer knows too well about the existence of other crimes and other suffering. Ten years ago this month, he says, his 23-year-old son was shot to death in a robbery. Yet Officer, pastor of Christ Church Unity, calls Darfur, "triggered by some of the same misunderstandings" that ignited the Holocaust, especially worthy of prayerful attention.

The perpetrators all share a moral amnesia, he says. "They have missed the point that they are doing it to a brother or a sister" and that when you kill and maim brothers and sisters, "you are doing it to yourselves."

Ask Officer what can be done to stop the slaughter, and he suggests educating the perpetrators to remember that common humanity.

It's of a piece with his church's teaching that, as he puts it, God is "everywhere present in every single one of us," despite our worst atrocities against fellow humans. "God's kingdom is not something that comes when we die or in some future world. It's now."

That may strike some as more idealism than the present situation warrants. Kristof, for instance, has called for a no-fly zone and international peacekeepers, to achieve with arms what prayer has failed to accomplish.

For its part, the coalition takes no official stand on a solution. "We do not try to run a mini-Congress to get everybody to agree," says Cohen. "Basically, any nonlunatic idea we're trying to help people with."

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