Though this estimate is now sixteen years old, conservative religious freedom advocate Paul Marshall concluded in 1997 that there were two hundred million Christians at that time suffering “massacre, rape, torture, slavery, beatings, mutilations, and imprisonment,” as well as “pervasive patterns of extortion, harassment, family division, and crippling discrimination in employment and education.” Marshall further concluded that there were four hundred million Christians in the world subject to “discrimination and legal impediments,” the vast majority of whom, he wrote, live in non-Western cultures. Though developments since that estimate was crafted would doubtless change the raw numbers, such as a rough end to the slaughter in Sudan and the declaration of independence of strongly Christian South Sudan in 2011, the overall picture presented by Marshall remains more or less the same.
The Situation in the Middle East
In January 2013, Fr. John E. Kozar, a longtime expert on the Middle East and the secretary of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, estimated that there are twenty-five million Christians in the Middle East alone “exposed to situations of poverty, and victims of war and persecution.” Kozar was speaking at a meeting of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, a Catholic organization devoted to supporting the church in the Holy Land. The Christian churches of the Middle East, Kozar said, face “great suffering because they find themselves in areas of deep tensions, of war and injustice, linked to a series of enormous problems. Many of these Christians have fled in recent years because of persecution, instability and political developments.”
Kozar attributed the lukewarm Western response to the risks facing Christianity in the Middle East in part to ignorance. “Most people in the West are familiar only with the Latin Church,” he said during a press conference in Rome on January 18, 2013. “They know little of the rich patrimony of the traditions of the Oriental churches. In many cases, these are the most historic and antique churches that make up the Catholic church.”
WHY CHRISTIANS?
German scholar Thomas Schirrmacher is a spokesperson on human rights for the World Evangelical Alliance, as well as chair of its theological commission. He’s also a longtime observer of religious freedom issues and contributed a chapter to the 2012 book Sorrow and Blood: Christian Mission in Contexts of Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom (William Carey Library Publishers). In a 2008 essay, Schirrmacher attempted to explain why Christians are the most persecuted religious group on the planet. He began by conceding that motives for victimizing someone are almost always complex, and often hostility against Christians is mixed in with racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, economic, and other factors.
That said, these are the ten forces that, according to Schirrmacher, explain why Christians today suffer persecution at such an astronomical rate.
1. Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with 2.2 billion adherents, so its raw numbers on any index are likely to be larger than everyone else’s.
2. Christianity is experiencing phenomenal growth around the world, especially its evangelical and Pentecostal forms, and much of that growth is coming in dangerous neighborhoods such as parts of the Asian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and even regions of the Middle East. In some places, this growth threatens the traditionally dominant position of other religious groups or the state.
3. Aside from Islam, most non-Christian religions are not experiencing the same missionary success or don’t have the same missionary ambitions. As a result, they don’t tend to attract the same attention and resentment.
4. Some countries with a colonial past are now looking to regain their identity by recovering their precolonial, and hence pre-Christian, religious traditions. In so doing, these nations often rely upon legal means to suppress “foreign” religions, especially those identified with Western colonialism—that is, Christianity.
5. Many countries are witnessing an increasingly strong connection between nationalism and religion, with Christianity, or some forms of Christianity, perceived as a threat to national identity. India and the rise of Hindu nationalism is a classic example.
6. Christians in some places have become outspoken advocates for human rights and democracy, which means they’re seen as threats to authoritarian regimes—especially since Christians often can plug into international networks of support that most other religious groups don’t have.
7. Christians in other places challenge well-established connections between religion and industry, or even between religion and crime. As Schirrmacher puts it, “Drug bosses in Latin America behind the killing of Catholic priests or Baptist pastors surely do not do this because they are furthering the cause of an opposing religion. Rather, it is because the church leaders are often the only ones who stand up for native farmers or indigenous groups, or standing in the way of Mafia bosses.”
8. In some cases, the basic peacefulness of Christian churches—the fact that most forms of Christianity explicitly reject violence committed in the name of religion—may actually invite persecution, because the perpetrators do not have to worry about retribution.
9. Christians at the local level are often identified with the West, even though that’s almost always inaccurate. For one thing, Christianity’s origins are in the Middle East, not the West. For another, today’s Christians in Africa, Asia, or Latin America are almost entirely indigenous and autonomous, meaning they have no real ties to Christianity in the global North.
10. The international dimension of Christianity is seen as a danger in totalitarian states where allegiance to the nation is the highest value. China, for instance, is willing to tolerate churches that are subservient to state regulatory agencies, but not a form of Christianity that posits a higher authority than the nation.
The sixth point, about the role of Christians in pro-democracy and human rights movements, has become an established observation of political science. Samuel Huntington coined the term “third-wave democracy” to describe a broad trend toward democratic government that began to crest in the 1970s, and he attributed the movement in large part to the influence of Catholic social teaching and activism in the Philippines and parts of Latin America. Today, some of the most engaged activists in the Middle East pressing for democratic and pluralistic states are drawn from the region’s Christian minority. In most African societies, the most outspoken critics of corruption and partisans of good government are drawn from the ranks of Christian activists. Naturally, those positions arouse opposition, and sometimes they lead to violent blowback.
GEOGRAPHY OF THE GLOBAL WAR
Given the Pew Forum’s estimate that Christians have suffered harassment in a robust total of 139 nations, the truth is that the global war on Christians can break out anywhere. In 2011, a devout Mexican Catholic named Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, who had been a leader in the Scalabrinian lay movement and a popular blogger, was beheaded for exposing the activities of a drug cartel. She ran the risk of death on the basis of her deeply held religious conviction that God was calling her to make a stand. Mexico is the second-largest Catholic country on earth, yet believers are every bit as vulnerable there, when they challenge entrenched interests or take stands in defense of the Gospel, as they might be in North Korea or Sudan.
Nevertheless, there are some corners of the globe where simply being a Christian on a routine level—owning a Bible, going to church, having religious symbols in one’s home, and so on—is, all by itself, dangerous. Based on the Open Doors World Watch List in January 2013, the following are considered to be the most hazardous nations on earth in which to be a Christian.
1. North Korea
2. Afghanistan
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Somalia
5. Iran
6. Maldives
7. Uzbekistan
8. Yemen
9. Iraq
10. Pakistan
11. Eritrea
12. Laos
13. Nigeria
14. Mauritania
15. Egypt
16. Sudan
17. Bhutan
18. Turkmenistan
19. Vietnam
20. Chechnya
21. China
22. Qatar
23. Algeria
24. Comoros
25. Azerbaijan
Eighteen of the twenty-five countries are majority-Muslim nations, and the threats facing Christian minorities in those societies are real. As chapter 9 will show, however, it would be a mistake to conclude that Islam and its discontents are the lone force in the global war on Christians. Six of these nations are in Asia, seven in Africa, eight in the Middle East (broadly defined to include places such as Egypt and Algeria), and four in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet sphere. That distribution underscores that this is truly a global war, and these locales are far from the only places where it’s being waged.
THE BODY COUNT
Perhaps the single most bone-chilling statistic regarding the global war on Christians is its estimated annual body count. Depending on which Internet site or advocacy group one trips across, different numbers may be floated, generally hovering in the range of 100,000 to 150,000 new Christian martyrs every year. These estimates are sometimes attributed to various sources, such as the Catholic relief agency Aid to the Church in Need or Italian sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne, and they’re also frequently cited without any attribution.
Drilling down, however, all these estimates have a common origin: the annual “Status of Global Mission” report produced by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a Protestant institution with its main campus in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Each January, the center publishes in the International Bulletin for Missionary Research an estimate of the number of Christian martyrs per year over the previous decade. From there the figure usually takes on a life of its own, cited all over the place, and often without explaining where it comes from or how it’s calculated.
The disparity in the numbers given, from as low as 100,000 Christians killed each year to as high as 150,000 or more, is explained by the fact that what the center provides is not actually a total of Christian martyrs in any given year, but rather an average number per year for the last full decade (e.g., 2000–2009, 2001–2010, etc.). The center’s estimate in 2010 was 178,000 Christian casualties per year for the previous decade, while by 2011 it had dropped to 100,000—not because the killing of Christians trended downward in 2011, but rather because the peak periods of violence in both Sudan and Rwanda in the late 1990s were no longer part of the decade under consideration. (Notably, the violence in Rwanda was largely Christian on Christian, a point to which we’ll return.)
In January 2013, the center published its estimate for the period 2003–2013, which once again came out at 100,000. According to Johnson, the major contributor to that average was the carnage in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All told, the thrust of the latest estimate is that in the period 2003–2013, there were 1 million new Christian martyrs and a grand total of 1.3 million martyrs in the opening years of the twenty-first century.
To be clear, no one actually moves around the world every year and conducts a physical body count of Christians who have been killed. Among other things, doing so would be essentially impossible in some of the most high-intensity killing fields, such as North Korea or Somalia, where no external human rights monitoring is permitted. As a result, the estimate put out by the center at Gordon-Conwell is based on statistical modeling and the analysis of various global conflicts to determine what share of their casualties may have been Christian—and to what extent those people died as a result of being Christian, as opposed to other ethnic, political, geographical, and sociocultural factors.
Todd Johnson, one of the researchers at Gordon-Conwell, says they use the following standard to establish when a particular death merits being included: “Believers in Christ who have lost their lives prematurely, in a situation of witness, and as a result of human hostility.” That excludes deaths due to forces such as accidents, crashes, earthquakes, and other acts of God, but it doesn’t require that someone be killed explicitly on the basis of hatred for some specific aspect of the Christian faith at the moment of death. Instead, as Johnson puts it, the standard is a death that’s the result of “an entire way of life, whether or not the believer is actively proclaiming his or her faith at the time of death.”
Though most people credit the “Status of Global Mission” report for providing a statistical baseline for contemporary realities, some experts believe it has an overly elastic conception of “martyrdom,” which, in turn, results in an inflated body count. Critics charge that the estimates are being generated at least as much for political reasons, meaning to shock world opinion and to motivate people to action, as in the interests of strict accuracy. Even some scholars highly sympathetic to the case for defending Christians question the estimate of 100,000 deaths every year, on the basis that in the long run it won’t serve the cause to float claims that seem shaky or overheated. During a September 2012 conference on anti-Christian persecution at the University of Notre Dame, Allen Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma called for a more rigorous examination of purported Christian casualties, based on “intercoder reliability” and “decision rules in advance,” so that the final tally would be more empirically unassailable.
Hertzke says that field advocates have stressed the need for resources to help local people document the persecution.
“Because the term ‘martyr’ is, at least in part, theological, an organization like the Pew Forum would never touch it,” Hertzke told me in early January 2013. “But I continue to believe that a major foundation-supported effort is necessary to assemble a high-level research team that would refine definitions, criteria, and decision rules, and then would support local groups and advocates across the globe to provide documentation.”
In August 2011, Schmirrmacher of the World Evangelical Alliance argued that for a death to count as part of a war on Christians, the test should be the following: “Christians who are killed, and who would not have been killed had they not been Christians.” He granted that it’s an expansive standard, making no distinction, for instance, among children, lapsed believers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even by that fairly elastic rule of thumb, however, Schirrmacher was dubious that one could arrive at a count of 100,000 martyrs every year. He considered a tally of perhaps 20 such Christian fatalities per day, which adds up to 7,300 a year, more realistic. In any event, Schirrmacher concludes: “We are far from having a reliable report of the number of martyrs annually.”
To be clear, Schirrmacher did not mean to suggest that anti-Christian persecution isn’t that big a deal. On the contrary, he believes that at least 90 percent of all people killed on the basis of their religious beliefs in the world today are Christians, and that doing something about it deserves to be the premier human rights and religious freedom campaign of the early twenty-first century.
For his part, Johnson concedes that it sometimes takes years to sort out how many deaths in a given conflict situation can actually be considered instances of martyrdom or of anti-Christian oppression. Still, he argues that the broad view reflected in the center’s estimate is consistent with recent trends in Christian theology in thinking about martyrdom, toward emphasizing not only deaths as a result of hatred of the faith but also those that result from hatred of the virtues and works of charity inspired by the Christian faith. Scores of men, women, and children who went to their deaths in Congo, Johnson argues, may not have been killed explicitly for their religious faith, but they nevertheless died in “a situation of witness.” By that test, Johnson believes the estimate of 100,000 martyrs per year in the last decade is justified.
THE FUTURE OF MARTYRDOM
Looking forward, Johnson believes that five factors may determine whether the annual body count of Christian victims goes up or down in the near-term future.
1. Belie
f versus unbelief. The world is less religious in 2010 than it was in 1910, Johnson says, but it’s more religious in 2010, following the collapse of Communism and the global rise of both Christianity and Islam, than it was in 1970. This could augur increasing collisions between believers and nonbelievers, which might put more people at risk of becoming the victims of oppression and violence.
2. Migration. There are 214 million people on the move in the early twenty-first century, 80 percent of whom are Christians and Muslims. How these migrants and refugees interact—whether they perceive a sense of common cause based on the similarity of their circumstances, or whether they fracture along confessional lines—will have enormous consequences.
3. Fragmentation of Christianity. Not only are the long-standing denominational divisions in the Christian family proving surprisingly enduring, but in the early twenty-first century the most rapidly growing forms of Christianity are fissiparous and essentially independent versions of Pentecostal and evangelical spirituality. It’s not yet clear whether these new centrifugal energies in Christian life will make it more difficult for Christians to mount a unified effort on behalf of their persecuted coreligionists.
4. Uncertainty of the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Johnson notes that in the year 1800, just one-third of the world’s population was made up of Muslims and Christians. Today it’s one-half, and the projection is that by 2100, two-thirds of humanity will be composed of Christians and Muslims. By definition, how this relationship sorts itself out will have massive implications across the board, including for Christian martyrdom.
5. Relationship gap. According to Johnson’s data, 86 percent of all Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the world do not personally know a Christian. That lack of familiarity, he said, creates a relationship gap that makes it easier to fall back on negative stereotypes in assessing the Christian “other.” The extent to which Christians around the world are able to forge personal friendships with members of other religious traditions may, therefore, also have some impact on whether anti-Christian persecution trends up or down.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 5