That ship may have sailed already but I still resist when I can. I am happy I do not have to resist this at my parish church. The only images of me I have seen there have been of the back of my head. So I think I am happy enough with that. I would not like an 'audience pan' shot though.
Indeed, there is an actual risk of persecution of the laity and indeed the torture of young children in the event of a shift in the politics of a country, such as happened to the Syriac, Armenian and Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, the Russian Orthodox and Catholics, and also the minuscule Protestant population, in the former Russian Empire in 1917 (most Protestants left Russian jurisdiction when the Baltic States and Finland became independent, only to be returned in the former case due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact under which the Nazis agreed that Stalin could annex the Baltic States without Nazi Germany invading the Soviet Union as an immediate response; that Molotov did such a deal with a convicted and executed war criminal, von Ribbentrop, was controversial in the Kremlin after Stalin’s death in 1953), or Jews, Catholics of Roma ethnicity (also known as “Gypsies”), and confessing Lutherans and Eastern Orthodox Christians, some of whom were also Roma, in Germany in the 1930s. A genocide could happen in the US or Canada or Europe if a political shift occurred.
This is why I both support webcasting and simultaneously believe that unrestricted audience pans that occurred at churches like the Crystal Cathedral or at Coral Ridge during the ministries of Rev. Schuller and Dr. James Kennedy, both of blessed memory, are unsafe. People need to be informed of the camera angle.
However, conversely, some people may want to take the risk and be on camera, and this is good; we must remind ourselves that martyrdom is equivalent to instant salvation and instant sainthood. A crown of martyrdom is painful to receive but worth it in the eternal scheme of things. However, because most parents don’t want to see their children cut to pieces as happened to the Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic (probably most Armenian Catholics, actually), Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian, Syriac Catholic, and Pontic Greek Orthodox Christians in 1915, in the genocide that the Syriac Orthodox call the Sayfo, meaning “the Sword” owing to the modus operandi of the Turkish practitioners of the genocide, who conducted it in a much more brutal and less organized manner than the Kafkaesque mechanized nightmare of the Holocaust, with both being equally horrific, but in different respects), or marched off to gas chambers, it seems reasonable to demarcate which areas of the church will be filmed, as a safety precaution.
I am not calling for dissimulation and I think it ideal that families in solidarity make themselves visible, but the risk is real and we cannot ask people to take it. Also as a practical measure it is desirable to avoid the complete annihilation of Christians that resulted in some historical genocides against our religion, for example, in North Africa, Nubia (the Sudan), the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen, or for that matter the ethnic cleansing in which Christians were forcibly removed from Turkey as part of a population exchange with Greece after WWII, and Turks likewise removed from Greece, this pattern repeating itself on Cyprus after the illegal Turkish conquest of North Cyprus, and also in the Balkans, distastefully along sectarian lines in some cases (also in Ireland).
The danger against Christians thus becomes more pronounced when we recall the plight of Catholics in Elizabethan England, and surrounding lands which were under English control although not yet formally united as one Kingdom, or the plight of Huguenots in France and Waldensians in Piedmont (Italy), who experienced a genocide known as the Piedmont Easter. Christians unfortunately are known to succumb to demonic temptations to kill other Christians in fratricide, as Cain killed Abel, and consequently, the risk of martyrdom from sectarian violence is always present in addition to the risk of martyrdom at the hands of Muslims, extremist totalitarian elements such as Bolsheviks and Nazis, and other political movements such as that of the Young Turks, from whom many of the instigators of the genocide in 1915 originated.
