This Easter, don't forget about persecuted Christians around the world
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has long advocated for the religious freedom of individuals of diverse faiths and beliefs across the globe, from Uyghur Muslims facing China’s campaign of genocide to Jews experiencing an alarming rise of antisemitism in Europe and nonbelievers facing challenges across Africa.
This Easter, we also highlight that Christians – millions who suffer at the hands of both state and nonstate actors – are experiencing terrible threats and persecution across many countries.
In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, the Algerian government has forcibly closed 13 Protestant churches and ordered the closure of seven more, while two decades of conflict, instability and genocidal terrorism have reduced Iraq’s indigenous Christian community from 1.4 million to fewer than 250,000.
Rising tide of intolerance
Elsewhere, India has a growing patchwork of laws that violate religious freedom or enable its violation, amid a rising tide of religious intolerance emboldened by Hindu nationalism. A third of India’s 28 states maintain laws restricting religious conversion, which are used as a pretext to target Christians and enable violence against them.
The government has also turned on Christian religious freedom advocates, such as Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who spent his life helping India’s marginalized religious communities. He was arrested in late 2020 under a decades-old law against “unlawful activities” and detained in harsh conditions, where he contracted COVID-19 and died last July.
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In Myanmar, a symbiotic relationship has steadily grown between the ruling military junta – the Tatmadaw – and Buddhist nationalists. Alongside its six-year genocidal campaign against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority, the Tatmadaw continues to rain violence down on the country's Christians. In 2021 alone, its rampage included raiding the Hakha Baptist Church in the capital of Chin state in February, murdering Pastor Cung Lian Ceu and three others in March, attacking a Catholic church in Kayah state in May, and gunning down Baptist Pastor Cung Biak Hum in September.
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Central government failure, state government repression and religiously motivated violence by nonstate actors have turned parts of Nigeria – Africa’s most populous country of approximately 211 million, including nearly 100 million Christians – into a crucible of persecution. Last September, a violent mob in Kano state, emboldened by the state’s imposition of a strict interpretation of Islamic law, killed a local pastor for allegedly helping a Muslim convert to Christianity.
In October, gunmen opened fire on a church in Kaduna state during morning prayers, killing two worshippers. And Muslim militant groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State-West Africa Province (ISWAP) continue to abduct, rape and murder Christians. ISWAP, for example, has continued to enslave Leah Sharibu for refusing to convert to Islam.
We can make a difference for persecuted Christians
The statistics behind these country-level dynamics are deeply disturbing. According to Open Doors’ latest World Watch List, last year more than 360 million Christians lived in places where they experienced “high levels of persecution” while 5,898 Christians died for their faith; 6,175 were detained, arrested, sentenced or imprisoned; and 3,829 were abducted.
The sheer scale of this repression can appear quite daunting – and yet we can, as a nation, make a difference. For example, many individuals have fled religious repression and persecution in their home countries. The United States can and should provide refuge, through asylum and refugee resettlement processes, to those most vulnerable families and individuals, and in doing so serve as a role model to the world in support of freedom of religion or belief.
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C.S. Lewis wrote in "A Grief Observed": “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
Many Christians today, in fact, are facing this very reality. And for those of us who have both the freedom and the means to speak out, we must do so to support and protect the lives and the fundamental right to religious freedom of followers of all faiths – or of none at all – including millions of Christians around the world.
Frederick Davie and Jim Carr are commissioners of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.