The following was extracted from an article printed in the Christ State International, the magazine of the Original Christians in Germany. The atrocities described by this minority group are exemplary of those which surface routinely in today’s Germany. Being “non-traditional,” this church and its members have been denied even neutral treatment and their pleas for aid and protection go ignored.
Besides soothing their bad conscience this year with candlelight processions for the foreigners and compensating centuries of crimes against the Jews with money, the Germans have already found a new scapegoat.
n Germany, the label of “sect” today creates a deplorable effect much like the branding of “witches” and “heretics” did in the Middle Ages.
The modern sect-hunters come straight out of the old witch-hunters school. They don’t need a funeral pyre any more; they simply burn their victims by publicly destroying their reputation with help from the media.
They say, for example: The Original Christians . . . have lost every possibility of forming a conscience or of practising criticism, they are a human species of low moral qualities, who are materially and psychologically dependent and under the yoke of totalitarianism, a danger to youth.
A man in official ecclesiastical robes says all this about people who, for years and even dozens of years, have worked as colleagues and employees, teachers and professors, doctors and lawyers, judges and pastors or priest of both confessions and were viewed as respectable contemporaries—until they committed an unpardonable mistake: They understood Christianity in a different way than the official bureaucrats of faith, and followed a path of Christian faith that diverges from conventional practice.
Since then, it is permitted to deny them their conscience and thus their human dignity, and, yes, to brand them as psychopaths—permitted even by state prosecutors and judges who don’t care much about protecting the honor of those so abused. On the one hand, they avoid a decision for months at a time during which the slander and defamation continues full steam ahead, while on the other hand, they shrug it off with superficial reasons: within the framework of the freedom of opinion, all of this is permitted, especially to a sect-watch officer, who, in the end, is simply exercising his freedom of opinion.
Protestant Lutheran sect-hunter Behnk, who, with his predecessor Haack (“if you happen to think I’m into inquisition, you’re right. . .”) and his Catholic colleague Graf Magnis, has to answer for the greatest campaign of incitement since wartime. Mobilized by his public relations work, a citizen’s initiative group demands: “Don’t sell the Original Christians any lots! Deny them every political office!” And in another place, the cemetery is closed to them, they are thrown out of youth hostel associations; and, in a divorce case, a mother loses her right to care for her child because there are hints she belongs to [the Original Christian church]; elsewhere, businessmen publicly point out that they have nothing to do with the Original Christian church; and under pressure from the [established] Church, the railroad advertising department refuses to accept further advertising in its schedule information. A masterpiece of infamy: The arsonist adds fuel to the fire and then reviles his victims because they call for the fire department.
Public witch-hunts with such discriminating results have already happened once in Germany during this century. The Original Christians have been pointing to this fact for some time now—and are being reprimanded for it. In no way are we comparing our present suffering with the terrible last phase of the persecution of the Jews. But who can challenge the fact that it began with horrifyingly similar acts of marginalization?
