Chris Lange, FISM News
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The number of groups and individuals persecuted for their faith has grown in tandem with “remarkable” silence from the world’s leading democracies on the subject.
According to Aid to the Church in Need’s (ACN) 16th annual Christian Persecution Today report, religious persecutions are on the rise in nearly every part of the world.
Included among the report’s examples and statistics of religious freedom violations is a pointed rebuke of Western leaders who exhibit “willful deafness and blindness toward autocrats,” particularly when doing so serves a political purpose. It might also have something to do with the fact that Western democracies made the cut in this year’s report.
1 IN 7 CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED
An estimated 340 million Christians live in countries where they are subjected to targeted persecutions, according to ACN research, ranging from arbitrary arrests to torture and murder. Put another way, ACN said that, from a global perspective, one in seven believers suffer some form of persecution.
Targeted religious persecutions in West Africa and Pakistan include abductions, sexual violence, sexual enslavement, and forced religious conversion.
Under strict anti-conversion laws in Asia and North Africa, Christians are denied work and economic opportunities, leading to impoverishment.
Marcela Szymanski, ACN’s head of advocacy, singled out China at a press briefing on the report’s findings. She noted that the CCP “continues to try to exert totalitarian control over all areas of society, including religion.” She also described India as a nation “where state-sponsored ethno-religious nationalism manifests itself, among others, in the form of harsh anti-conversion laws.”
In Latin America, organized criminal groups have increased attacks on religious leaders and other church personnel. According to the ACN, “Religious representatives, champions of migrants and other disadvantaged communities, were targeted — abducted and even murdered — for speaking out against criminal gangs and taking action to stop them.”
The report also notes an alarming rise in violence against Christians in Africa perpetrated by Islamist extremists. There are near-daily reports of Islamist Fulani militants burning down entire villages and slaughtering thousands of Christians in Nigeria. Intersociety, a Nigeria-based human rights group, recently reported that more than 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009.
Rev. Samson Ayokunle, president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, told ASN that Islamist Fulani herders, in particular, want to completely “wipe away Christianity.”
REPORT CONDEMNS WEST FOR INACTION
Many autocracies that allow or condone religious persecution share something in common: a commodity Western nations prize.
Fear of sanctions and other penalties from wealthy democracies historically kept human rights abuses at bay. Today, despotic rulers carry them out with impunity, according to Szymanski.
“Normally, the West would be at least saying something … ‘Oh, you don’t do that, or I’m looking at you, I’m going to impose some sanctions, I’m going to reduce your trade facilities, etc. Now, they are not doing anything,” she said.
Szymanski noted that there exists a “willful deafness and blindness towards these autocrats because they (leaders in the West) need them.”
In the U.S., for example, President Joe Biden recently fêted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House, despite Modi’s troubling record on human rights abuses. Members of Biden’s own party threatened to boycott Modi’s bicameral Congressional address last week in protest, per a Fox News report.
Meanwhile, as American dependence on China for lifesaving drugs and cheap goods increases, so too does the U.S. government’s willingness to overlook China’s history of human rights abuses, from the CCP’s widely-reported internment of minority Uyghur Muslims to its detainment of U.S. citizens.
REPORT EXPOSES INCREASED RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION EVEN IN DEMOCRACIES
The ACN explained the manner in which authoritarian regimes gradually introduce state-sponsored religious persecution.
It begins with what the report describes as “hybrid” cases of persecution, characterized by a combination of “polite” restrictions on religious freedom with the introduction of certain laws, followed by the “normalization” of attacks against individuals of certain faiths.
There is a reason this strategy may engender a sense of alarming familiarity among Western observers.
The ACN report notes, significantly, that religious persecution has increased in democratic nations via “increased scrutiny,” controversial laws, censorship, and “mass surveillance.”
Social media, for example, has become a powerful tool used “to marginalize and target religious groups.” This is done by way of “compelled speech.” The report explains that in this age of “cancel culture,” individuals whose opinions or religious beliefs stray from majority-approved language and sentiment are singled out for “harassment…legal threats and loss of job opportunities.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is noted for its significant role in normalizing religious persecution. American and Canadian churches and church leaders were subjected to extreme levels of arbitrary enforcement of COVID-19 lockdown measures while secular businesses – including bars and strip clubs – were allowed to remain open. It was during this period that three Canadian pastors were arrested for holding worship services.
The ACN report also noted an increase in aggression toward Jewish communities in the West that coincided with COVID-19 lockdowns. Reported anti-Semitic hate crimes reported in countries belonging to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) increased from 582 in 2019 to 1,367 in 2021.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the FBI infiltrated Catholic churches to identify prosecutable so-called “domestic terrorism.”
Believers who dared speak out against the atrocity of abortion were also persecuted in the U.S., seeing their homes raided and hands cuffed by FBI agents while hundreds of violent attacks against churches and faith-based organizations remain unprosecuted, let alone investigated.
In the U.K., the act of silently praying is now a crime.
HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS RESPOND?
While the ACN report is certainly troubling, believers can take heart that religious persecution has in no way taken the Lord by surprise. Jesus tells His followers in Matthew 10:22 that they will “be hated by all for My name’s sake” but that “he who endures to the end will be saved.”
One of the stories highlighted in the ACN report is that of Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez, who was detained and tortured for four years by Islamic extremists in Mali. Following her release, she shared a vivid recollection of the unmitigated hatred in one of her captor’s eyes as he sneered, “Let’s see if your God gets you out of here.”
“It is difficult to be chained. It is difficult to be hit. But I lived in the moment as God presented it to me, and I wished no harm to my captors,” she said.
Along with the Savior’s assurance that those who choose to follow him will have troubles in this word is the admonition for the faithful to “be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
Ultimately, the main goal for Christians while still in this world is to worship God in all circumstances and spread the gospel to a lost world, even to those who we disagree with or persecute us.