Here’s Why You Should Never Rescue People From Prison Or Brothels By Paying Off Their Captors

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Pastor Foley

These days, the most natural connotation of the phrase “ransoming the captive” involves well-meaning Christians raising money to pay off governments, gangs, pimps, and prison guards to release their unjustly-held victims, typically either sex-trafficked women or Christians imprisoned for their faith.

While seemingly quite compassionate, this is a bad, bad, very bad idea indeed. It takes a heartbreaking situation and pumps it up into a limitlessly profitable line of work for the most reprehensible people on the planet.

You will recall I serve as CEO of Seoul USA, and a primary field for our work is North Korea. That means that we deal daily with some of the most anguishing cases of sex-trafficking and Christian persecution on the planet.

A background note may be helpful: Women are sex-trafficked into China from North Korea by Korean-Chinese gangs as a result of China’s one-child policy, which as Nicholas Eberstadt notes has resulted in way too many Chinese men and way too few Chinese women, especially in the countryside:

China will face a growing number of young men who will never marry due to the country’s one-child policy, which has resulted in a reported birth ratio of almost 120 boys for every 100 girls…By 2030, projections suggest that more than 25% of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married. The coming marriage squeeze will likely be even more acute in the Chinese countryside, since the poor, uneducated and rural population will be more likely to lose out in the competition for brides.

Enter North Korea, which is only too happy to make (a lot of) extra money by selling its young women.

There is, however, another source of equally lucrative income on which North Korea and the Korean-Chinese gangs also depend: Money from Christians seeking to buy the freedom of the women who are held captive.

After all, why use a 13 year old as a prostitute (or why execute an underground Christian) if instead you can make a lot more money through ransom? What business sense is there in going for the minor profit when there’s serious money to be made if you expand your criminal horizons? A pimp who kidnaps young girls from their homes is only too happy to diversify his profits. A young prostitute can make a few dollars a day for him, but Christians halfway around the world are happy to pay literally hundreds of times more. Do we think pimps and prison guards are unaware of this?

When we started in North Korea work ten years ago it was possible to bribe someone out of the worst North Korean prisons for less than a thousand dollars. Today, the going rate for ransoms is $15,000 to $20,000, or higher. What accounts for the price hike?

Christians driving up the market through this misunderstanding of ransoming the captives as a willingness to pay the ransom demanded by the captor.

The real tragedy is not the price inflation, however. It’s the staggering demand created in the market for more ransoms. (Heartbreakingly the same dynamic is at work in international adoptions, where some well-meaning but impatient Christians working through dodgy channels are driving an escalating market of baby kidnapping and wombs-for-hire because their desire to do good can be monetized by people desperate for any way to make a buck, sometimes just to stay alive. Don’t stop adopting but do read E.J. Graff’s The Lie We Love for a sobering reality check that will keep you out of the wrong channels and in the right ones.)

The math is irresistible to fiends: If one Christian in prison or one 13 year old girl in a brothel produces one ransom, then ten Christians or ten 13 year old girls produces ten ransoms. That’s mafia economics, and it works with Wall Street precision.

Sadly, some well-meaning nonprofits believe that looking at the big picture is the opposite of compassion. They say, “Yes, what you are saying may be true, but 13 year old Nan is in a brothel and we can rescue her for $80. How can we not act to set her free?”

But the true opposite of compassion…is compassion–the wrong kind of compassion, that is. Compassion that frees Nan but thus consigns 12 year old Ann, Tran, and Lan to the brothel with a buyback of $120 each.

As we talked about last post, theologically it is always bad practice to negotiate with the devil. It is of course the worst form of negotiating with terrorists: Even if it results in one person being freed from prison (and, by the way, that’s no foregone conclusion–nonprofits are suspiciously quiet about the number of these ransom deals that go bad), it only results in new prisons and brothels, more victims, and greater demands.

“So what are we to do?” sigh the well-meaning Christian nonprofit organizations in exasperation. “Ignore Nan? Turn a blind eye to our brothers and sisters in prison who are persecuted for their faith?”

Not at all. But as we’ll talk about in our next post, the cost will run us a lot higher than $80.

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Video Interviews With A Former North Korean Christian Captive

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Pastor Foley

I mentioned last week the release of our new book, These are the Generations, which is not only a fascinating read but also one of the best contemporary studies in ransoming the captive. 

(And trust me–that’s no authorial bias or boast. Mr. and Mrs. Bae’s story is so riveting that it would still be a fascinating read even if a block of wood had written it up.)

As we study ransoming the captive together this month, be sure to visit the These are the Generations page on the Seoul USA website, where you’ll find a sample chapter of the book along with several exclusive interview clips where Mr. Bae talks about his investigation by NK authorities, conditions inside NK prisons, public executions in NK, and the biggest danger North Korean defectors face. There’s also a link there to order the book from Amazon.com.

One of the insightful points Mr. Bae makes is that the story of captivity does not end for the Christian in a persecuted nation when he or she is released from prison. Instead, what happens after release from prison is in many ways the hardest time of all. Fortunately, as Mr. Bae affirms, it is thus the time when God’s grace shines the brightest.

Great stuff. I hope you’ll take time to watch each of the interview segments this week as part of your own personal study of ransoming the captive this month.

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If Christ is a Ransom, To Whom Was He Paid?

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Pastor Foley

With each month’s Work of Mercy, we begin by asking, “How did Christ first do this Work of Mercy to us?” Since we’re called to mirror his work into the world, we need to pay careful attention to what he did and do the same thing, so as to invite the world to grapple again with his grace and mercy.

In the case of ransoming the captive, a central verse is Mark 10:45:

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

This has raised for many inquiring minds the following question:

To whom did this ransom need to be paid? Satan? God? China? (They own most debt these days, after all. Who’s to say they’re not dabbling in the atonement market?)

As with any matter of what seems to be idle theological speculation, huge swaths of the Internet are filled with no shortage of (typically ill-formed or personal agenda-serving) answers. But as Rich on Faith and Life and Mark M. Mattison each point out:

a. Scripture doesn’t answer the question, and
b. It’s not because God forgot to tell us.

When Scripture doesn’t answer specific questions, the lack of an answer is usually, profoundly, the answer we may not be looking for but really need to hear. In the case of the question of to whom Christ is paid as a ransom, the silence is deeply instructive. The first thing it ought to prompt us to do is to ask, “Is there anywhere else in the Scripture that speaks to this same subject?”

And in this case, indeed there is. As both Rich and Mark point out, Scripture points to the Exodus. Says Rich:

The quintessential story for the writers of the New Testament was the Exodus. In the Exodus the Egyptians are the enemy and they walk away empty handed. They aren’t paid anything for the freedom of the Israelites.  This I believe is the single most informative understanding of what redemption and ransom is all about.  The story of the Exodus is the story of being set free from slavery.

Adds Mark:

Consider Deuteronomy 7:8, which says that the Lord “brought you [Israel] out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” Did God literally “redeem” Israel from Pharaoh? Did he give Pharaoh (for example) the Hittites in exchange for the Israelites, substituting one race of people for another? Obviously not.

But why in the world does Scripture in neither case answer the question to whom ransom was paid? For the answer to this question, we turn to Pastor Foley’s second Heuristic Helper for the month:

When Scripture doesn’t tell us something, it’s because what it does tell us is so important that we have no need to look beyond it…and every need to look right at it, again and again.

In the case of Christ as ransom, the identity of the ransom is infinitely more important than the identity of the captor and even the identity of the captive. This makes no sense to us, because in the human equation the identity of the captor and the captive are the consequential elements. The only question anyone ever asks about the ransom is: Can we afford to pay it? But when your ransom is GOD–well, you now know everything you need to know. End of story.

As we begin to think through how to carry out the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive, then, we are now faced with an uncomfortable truth:

The gravity of that work will be found in neither the one bound nor the one who binds, but in the ransom itself–i.e., you, in your work of mirroring and thus re-presenting for the world’s reckoning the greatest Ransom ever paid.

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