Report: ‘1 of 8 Christians Worldwide Persecuted for Faith in Jesus’

"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." That quote is from the Daily Signal below to this writer for MHProNews and this Patch is the following provided in Part I. As regular readers of this column should know, there will be additional information plus other topics provided in Part II beyond what is covered in this shared headline article.

Part I

News

Report: 1 in 8 Christians Worldwide Is Persecuted ‘Because of Faith in Jesus’

Ben Johnson | January 12, 2025

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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

Part II - Additional Information with More Analysis and Commentary, plus Different Topics

1) There are media outlets that consistently seek to do a good job of reporting on topics that are often ignored or downplayed by others, including those that may lean left. That's not to say that left-leaning news doesn't catch and report information that might otherwise be missed too. But it is to say that agendas in media often seem to drive the way news reports are crafted. It is useful to understand the perspective of a publication, writers, and editors because those routinely drive the way narratives are created and presented to the public.

2) There has been persecution of Christians here in the U.S. too, even though that wasn't mentioned in the report above.

Sometimes, this writer frankly starts an article and then due to time constraints and other pressures, fails to finish it. The item below was started 11.16.2024, but in my view needed something like the above to be paired with.

3)

“As Democrats and others assess the fallout from last week’s red bombshell, they’re looking at surprises in the exit polls. Here’s one that shouldn’t be missed: The nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump.” So wrote Mary Eberstadt in First Things on 11.14.2024 in an article entitled Why Catholics Voted for Trump. The Miami Herald said "U.S. Catholics favored Trump over Harris by a 18-point margin — the biggest gap in the past two decades, according to multiple exit polls."

Bill Donohue, president of the religious civil rights group Catholic League, told Fox News that Catholics resoundingly rejected Harris because of what he called a "clear animus against Catholics." "She [Harris] was rejected primarily because she is associated with the politics of extremism, and that is something the American people will never countenance," he said.

"In one way, that endorsement [by Catholics voting Trump] might seem to require explanation," wrote Eberstadt. "After all, no one’s personal failings have been more exposed to global sunlight than Trump’s; and Catholics as a whole, unlike many evangelical Protestants, weren’t ground-floor MAGA fans. Even so, the fact that a Catholic majority in 2024 signed on to Trump-Vance makes inescapable sense, for at least three reasons."

Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. Several of the points Eberstadt raised in First Things Christians in general, and sometimes Catholics more specifically.

Eberstadt said: "key Democratic party policies have been locked in combat with key Catholic moral teachings for a long time now—ever since yesterday’s “safe, legal, and rare” abortions became “always, forever, and lots.” Not only is this grim consensus longstanding. It is also enforced. “Pro-life Democrat,” once a political identity, is now an oxymoron. Nor is abortion the only issue forcing many believers into a choice between faith and party. From Obama’s disparaging of “guns and religion,” to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” to the baiting of Catholic nominees before Congress for being Catholic (see Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris), the party’s leaders have proved time and again that the Democrats have a Catholic problem. As of last week, a majority of voting Catholics seem finally to have noticed."

That was the first of "at least three reasons" why Eberstadt's research led her to conclude that as curious as it may seem at first, given years of Catholics voting for Democrats, why that pivot in the 2024 election makes sense. She said: "After all, no one’s personal failings have been more exposed to global sunlight than Trump’s; and Catholics as a whole, unlike many evangelical Protestants, weren’t ground-floor MAGA fans. Even so, the fact that a Catholic majority in 2024 signed on to Trump-Vance makes inescapable sense..."

"The record of the Biden-Harris administration, for its part, pushed some voters rightward on its own. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the Catholic vote by 5 percent. Biden and Harris then went on to back policies that antagonized many of those same voters," Eberstadt stated. "From support for initiatives like the Equality Act, which would have gutted religious freedom, to calling transgenderism “the civil rights issue of our time,” the second Catholic president seemed scripted by the decidedly un-Catholic Human Rights Campaign. In another eyepopper, the emboldened Biden-Harris Department of Justice alerted the FBI to a new “threat”: tradition-minded Catholics. The resulting FBI memorandum even suggested that the agency should infiltrate churches. Throughout these and other progressive indulgences, party-wide animosity toward the Dobbs decision and its Court architects, some of them Catholic, raged on."

4) According to Google's AI powered Gemini, which cited the Canadian news outlet CBC as a source is the following.

"In Canada, at least 85 Catholic churches were damaged by fire or vandalism since May 2021. In the United States, arson is the leading cause of church fires.

Canada

• In January 2024, CBC News reported that there were 24 arsons and five suspected arsons at Christian churches in Canada since May 2021.
• Roughly half of the fires occurred at Catholic churches."

5) According to a post on the USCCB website from 2024 is the following.

Arson, Vandalism, and Other Destruction at Catholic Churches in the United States

Summary

At least 366 incidents have occurred across 43 states and the District of Columbia since May 2020. Incidents include arson, statues beheaded, limbs cut, smashed, and painted, gravestones defaced with swastikas and anti-Catholic language and American flags next to them burned, and other destruction and vandalism. This list shows incidents of vandalism, arson, or other destruction at Catholic sites that have been publicly reported in news media. It excludes incidents where circumstances suggest a motive other than hostility toward the Church.

6) The evangelical Focus on the Family website's Daily Citizen said this: "tracked assaults on pregnancy resource centers and pro-life groups for the past 10 months. There have been 82 attacks on these groups since May 2022, when a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press." That's in a post dated March 16, 2023.

That same article, citing CatholicVote, said this: “Some of the churches have been attacked multiple times,” the group adds, noting that they’ve “found evidence of an arrest in connection with an attack against a church in only about 25% of cases.”

7) So, while the supposedly Catholic Joe Biden (D) sat in the White House, or while he was often on vacation, Christians and Christian inspired causes here in the U.S. were being persecuted too. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was chasing often politically motivated investigations that included parents pushing back against 'woke' policies in various school districts, so-called Latin Mass Catholics, and others that didn't fit into the leftist agenda.

8) There is ample evidence that God is real as the two articles that follow demonstrate. The first of those two articles provides compelling evidence for the Christian faith.

Yet, there is persecution of Christians in the U.S., Canada, and in numbers of nations around the world? Why is that so?

9) Perhaps part of the answer is found in an unpopular but important three letter word. Sin. What caused humanity to be shown the exit from the Garden of Eden? Sin. Failure to do God's will. God gave us all free will. We can and do make untold numbers of choices daily, some of them merely matters of taste, but others may be morally and spiritually important choices. God is calling us constantly, but the Creator of all respects our free will. God could have created a universe of what amounted to robots - creatures that had no ability to disobey. But when God gave us the ability to choose between good and evil that made the fall of humanity into sin possible. But it also set the stage for our redemption by Jesus Christ.

10) We should not fear Christianity. Nor should we fear seeking to do choose what is good over what is fashionable yet evil. We have a world that God called "good" but heaven is perfect and hell is forever. Those are the ultimate motivators. And apart from an understanding of what is right or wrong, we will have difficulty making sense of this life and its great opportunities.

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L. A. “Tony” Kovach is a publisher who has earned multiple awards in history. He and his family live in a manufactured home on private property in Winter Haven, FL. He is the co-founder of Manufactured Home Living News.com (MHLivingNews.com) and Manufactured Home Pro News.com (MHProNews.com), trade publications serving segments of the manufactured home industry. Having worked in several segments of the manufactured home industry for over 3 decades, Kovach is a widely acknowledged and often praised expert on manufactured housing. ###