When I walk into my local bookshop, they have a table labelled “Banned Books.” On it there are offerings from Mikhail Bugalov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Anthony Burgess, Harper Lee and Mark Twain. There is even a copy of Alice in Wonderland, banned by one Chinese province in 1931 for portraying animals as the intellectual equals of humans.
Books are dangerous – they are filled with ideas and stories that can inspire, re-enchant and disgust. All autocratic regimes ban some books, sometimes even some democratic nations do too. Certain books are a step too far. But there is one book that you will never find on the banned books table; one book that even today is banned or heavily restricted in 52 nations. A book that in some countries people die to read. This book is the Bible.
This month, Open Doors celebrates its 70th anniversary. A young Dutch missionary known as Brother Andrew began to smuggle Bibles in the Soviet Union in his blue Volkswagen Beetle. He did so because the Christians there were desperate for them. They treated the words on these pages not simply as stories or information, but as the source of life itself. For them, the scriptures were not a luxury, but a necessity – a necessity that many, even now, would risk their lives to access. If you want to see what a deer panting for water looks like, then watch a video of Chinese believers receiving a Bible for the first time; it is life-giving, shocking and convicting.
I’ll never forget hearing the story of a man who, during the Soviet era, heard that Bible smugglers from Open Doors were bringing Bibles to his area. He woke up early and hiked all day in the bitter Siberian winter. When he arrived, he found a man holding an empty box. The man had given away all the Bibles. “Can I at least have the box that they came in?” asked the Soviet believer, “that’ll sustain me until you next come.”
Every year, since 1993, Open Doors has produced a ranking of the hardest countries in the world to live as a Christian. For many years North Korea has sat at the top of that list (it briefly dropped to second place when the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan). In North Korea the Bible is seen as the most dangerous book in the world. It is not only the case that owning one will lead to execution or imprisonment in a concentration camp, but even having an extended family member who is caught with one can result in your imprisonment. There are reports of babies being imprisoned in these camps after their parents were discovered to own a Bible.
And yet, even in these circumstances, the Bible is the centre of these Christians’ lives. One North Korean described how she would be worked to the bone all day in these camps, then, in the middle of the night, she and her Christian friends would wake up and sneak out of their dormitories. They would go to a tree under which they had buried a Bible, uncover it and read it together at night, only to wake up early to go back to the labour that was their daily burden.
The authorities see something in the Bible in these repressive nations. In China, online copies of the Bible have long since had the Chinese characters for ‘Christ,’ ‘Christian(s),’ and ‘Jesus’ replaced or simply removed. Likewise, Bible apps have been removed from Apple and Google stores in the nation. In 2019, Chinese individuals who had purchased Bibles up to a decade earlier from the Wheat Christian Bookshop, were arrested and questioned.
As Open Doors celebrates our 70th anniversary, we have been reflecting on the central role that Bibles have played in our work. We began, in 1955, with one man faithfully obeying the call of God to get Bibles in the hands of believers – risking his life to take them into places which feared its liberating power. In June of 1981, Open Doors smuggled a staggering one million Bibles, behind the Bamboo Curtain, into China in one night. Today, we continue the legacy of Brother Andrew by getting Bibles into the hands of those who would otherwise never read one; smuggling the book into the hardest-to-reach places on earth – although these days, some of these are on data cards the size of a fingernail.
When I think about how those who don’t have easy access to Scripture treat it, it confronts me with my own attitude. We have freedom to read our Bibles, to go to church and hear it preached, to watch or listen to sermons – I’ve just checked and I have five different Bibles on my phone! The Bible is powerful. That is why it is feared by regimes who want all power to rest solely with them. Scripture dignifies, gives hope and brings life. The words of the Bible have the power to transform lives and nations, it has the power to tear down and build up, it has the power to save.
“Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” – Romans 10:17
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” – Hebrews 4:12
Daniel McIlhiney is parliamentary officer for Open Doors UK & Ireland. Find out more about the work of Open Doors at opendoorsuk.org
