(Daily Signal)—One in every eight Christians around the world faces persecution, ranging from imprisonment and censorship to extra-judicial and government-sanctioned martyrdom, according to a new report.
“Each year, an estimated 300 million Christians around the world are persecuted because of their faith in Jesus. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are beaten, imprisoned, and even killed for their faith,” said the International Christian Concern’s 2025 Global Persecution Index, released last Friday, which documents instances of governments denying rights to a share of the world’s estimated 2.38 billion Christians. “In many countries, it is illegal for them to share the Gospel.”
“The details of persecution you will read in our report are not isolated incidents,” clarified International Christian Concern President Jeff King. These repressive acts represent the reality of “Christians worldwide who face daily threats to their lives and religious freedom.”
The index, formerly known as the “Persecutors of the Year” report, ranked 20 countries based on the danger they pose to their Christian population: red (where Christians are regularly tortured or killed for their faith), orange (where nations “severely oppress” Christians), and yellow (“lesser offenders” who subject Christians to arrests, attacks, or oppression).
“2024 was a harrowing year for massive numbers of Christians worldwide,” said the ICC report, “[f]rom underground house churches in China to remote villages in Nigeria.”
ICC’s conclusions overlap with Global Christian Relief’s “2025 GCR red list,” which documents the 25 worst nations for Christian persecution, broken into five separate categories.
Four of the five deadliest nations for Christians are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Global Christian Relief: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. The ICC report’s red list also included Somalia and Eritrea, the Marxist dictatorship of North Korea, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, now dominated by the Taliban (but excluded Ethiopia).
The world’s two most populous nations, China and India, fall just below the worst level of persecution, making ICC’s orange list, with Iran and Saudi Arabia. ICC’s yellow list includes Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, and Vietnam.
Both reports agree Christians face the greatest persecution in Africa’s Sahel region: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Nigeria Becomes World’s Deadliest Nation for Christians After Biden Backs Off Criticism
“Nigeria is the most dangerous place on earth for Christians, where they face the most intense violence,” said Isaac Six, senior director of advocacy for Global Christian Relief, on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “We documented 9,814 killings in a two-year period.” Nigeria also tops GCR’s list for anti-Christian abductions and assaults, with 9,311.
The safety of Christians has only eroded since President Joe Biden removed Nigeria’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern, which President Donald Trump applied for the first time.
“We were trending in a positive direction during the last Trump administration, and all that was lost,” lamented Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
The Biden-Harris administration has instead exerted U.S. power trying to convince nations such as Sierra Leone to liberalize their abortion laws and created an economic boycott aimed at coercing Uganda to repeal a law that outlaws homosexual child molestation, knowingly having sex with others while carrying the AIDS virus, and drugging or coercing vulnerable people into nonconsensual gay sex—acts the bill describes as “aggravated homosexuality.” Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Christian population continues to testify of its faith even unto death.
“The stories coming out of Nigeria are almost unimaginable. And I think if the American church heard some of these stories on a regular basis, they would be shocked,” said Six. He highlighted the story of a Nigerian woman kidnapped by the Islamist fundamentalist terrorist group Boko Haram. “Four of her sons were executed in front of her as soon as she was taken captive. Then she spent another year and a half in captivity [before she] finally escaped and had nothing at all,” said Six. “One of the pastors we support there found her. We were able to provide her with a new home to live in, to be reunited with her children. We helped her start a new business and basically start her life again and get back on her feet.”
Six: President Trump Must Do More to Help Persecuted Christians, Starting on ‘Day One’
While private Christian relief groups can help Christians facing oppression, politicians must do their part, said Six. “We need to redesignate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern. President-elect Trump can do that on Day One when he steps into office,” said Six. “Nigerian authorities … need to understand that the relationship with the United States is going to deteriorate quickly if these mass killings and attacks continue.”
Redesignating Nigeria as a CPC would signal to all countries guilty of oppressing Christians that “the United States and others are extremely concerned about what’s happening, and it can open up these countries to economic sanctions and other measures,” argued Six. He believes such measures could exert needed leverage for the Nigerian government to begin protecting Christians. “It’s going to take a concerted, organized effort at the policy level and also at the ground level to shift the tide in Nigeria, but it’s simply been unaddressed,” Six emphasized. “The federal government and the state governments in Nigeria need to be put under a lot more pressure. … They probably have the resources, but they’re just not prioritizing protecting Christians.”
“It’s going to take political pressure as well, because a lot of these areas where Boko Haram and these other groups have come in and wiped out Christian communities, other Muslim groups have moved in and taken over their land and property, and they’re not planning to give it back,” Six explained.
India Engages in ‘Mass Suppression of the Church’
Property crimes are a key concern in India, which topped GCR’s list for targeted attacks on Christian property with 4,949 attacks. The ancient Christian community in the region of Kerala believe the Apostle Thomas planted the Christian faith during his apostolic ministry in the first century. But today, the Malankara Orthodox Church and Syro-Malabar Catholic Church face targeted assaults.
“This isn’t just random violence. Persecutors use violence to drive out Christians to take control and capture the culture in some of these countries,” said Six. “This is a decade of systematic, planned, organized occupation of some Christian areas. And it’s now at the point where every single rung of civil society and government is armed against impoverished Christian communities,” which “have no recourse.”
India engages in “mass suppression of the church,” observed Six. Yet Perkins said India is “getting a pass from many in the West, because of its growing economic power.”
Anti-Christian Persecution Fueled by Communist Dictatorships, Islamist Extremism
“From China, which has refined and exported this belief around the world, to Nicaragua, where the Catholic church is viewed as a political enemy of the state, dictators everywhere appear to be increasing their focus on controlling religion or eliminating Christianity altogether,” noted the ICC report. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas’ “communist government increasingly surveils, detains, and forces Christian leaders into exile.” Communist nations of concern to ICC include China, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.
Islamist persecution includes murderous raids from the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, al-Shabab in Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. “The growth of radical Islamist insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Sahel, and now deep into the southern and southeastern parts of Africa is uprooting things there. Mozambique is one of several places where there has been mass displacement of Christians,” Six told Perkins. “These are places where only 10 years ago, Christians and Muslims generally got along peacefully. There was not as much dissension. And that whole landscape is changing.”
Eritrea meets at the crossroads of Islamist extremism and socialist persecution. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s People’s Front for Democracy and Justice “represents a radical left-leaning nationalist ideology that is completely closed to civil liberties and political rights,” said the ICC report. “Ideologically, Eritrea follows many of the patterns seen in Communist China. President Afwerki even traveled to China in the 1960s to study Maoism, returning inspired and ready to implement Maoist policies in his country.”
Although Eritrean Christians account for between 47% and 63% of the population, “[o]fficials enforce the narrow bounds of state-approved worship with severe penalties, including torture, imprisonment, and even death,” said the report. In 2022, the leader of the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, Patriarch Antonios, died after 16 years of house arrest for resisting government interference in church affairs.
Persecution of Christians resumes or intensifies in areas of political, economic, or ethnic conflict. Sub-Saharan Africa contains “immense mineral wealth,” said Six. He estimated approximately 70% of global cobalt production, which is used in batteries, takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The situation may worsen in Syria, after the familial dictatorship of the Assad regime was toppled in December by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a “former” al-Qaeda affiliate that experts say continues to hold a jihadist worldview.
“These areas are riven by this conflict, so it’s going to have effects across the globe. And that’s why we need people in the church in America to become involved, because they can help us stand against this tide,” urged Six.
Murders, Displacements
After Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo experienced 390 documented murders of Christians, followed by Mozambique (262) and Ethiopia (181).
Russia ranked fifth, after Islamist fundamentalists targeted members of the Eastern Orthodox Church last summer.
“A lot of the numbers we verified are the result of an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, in a region called Dagestan, which borders Azerbaijan and Georgia and the Caspian Sea. And so there we see Russian Orthodox Christians and others being targeted by Islamist violence,” Six told Perkins.
Members of the terrorist group ISIS-K killed 20 people (including a 66-year-old priest) and injured 46 in coordinated attacks on Russian Orthodox churches and a synagogue in Dagestan on the Orthodox holiday of Pentecost.
Armenian Christians suffered more displacements than any other nation, thanks to an invasion by a Muslim-majority neighbor. “Azerbaijan drove out 120,000 Christians in late 2023. They wiped out 1,700 years of Christian presence in an area called Nagorno-Karabakh,” explained Six.
Historians believe Armenia may have become the world’s first Christian nation, when St. Gregory the Illuminator brought Christianity to the nation in 301 A.D. The Armenian Apostolic Church, a part of the Oriental Orthodox communion, represents an estimated 92% of the population.
This conflict has occasionally bled into the United States. As Family Research Council scholar Arielle Del Turco documented in a comprehensive report, in 2023 vandals desecrated an Armenian church in Massachusetts with the message, “Artsakh is Dead, Karabakh is Azerbaijan.” Six hopes U.S. leaders will begin “pushing Azerbaijan to reopen that corridor, to give these people the right to return home—even if they’re not going to relinquish the territory.”
China arrested 1,559 Christians last year, more than any other nation, according to GCR.
‘The Blood of the Martyrs Is the Seed of the Church’
Despite the heavy hand of persecution, “Christianity is the fastest growing religion in Asia and seems to be flourishing, in a sense, even in areas where despotic rulers are working relentlessly to eliminate it. In the clerical Islamic theocracy of Iran, Christianity is growing at such a rate that some estimate the Iranian church may be the fastest growing church in the world,” noted the ICC report hopefully.
The report seems to verify the close paraphrase of early church writer Tertullian, an advocate of religious liberty, who wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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