Global Overview of Persecution
Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, Writer-at-large for Open Doors International
THIS map is compiled from our World Watch List - a detailed survey conducted each year by Open Doors.
The countries coloured in shades of red show where persecution, harassment and discrimination against Christians occurs on a daily basis. The darker the colour, the more severe the persecution!
But three seismic shifts in the 1990s all play into the difficulty of creating an understanding of the dynamics of persecution today. The Cold War simplicities are gone. The world is more complex.
It is difficult to find authoritative statistics, but roughly a billion Christians live in countries where their religious liberty is restricted, and a billion others enjoy more legal freedom than ever before.
A terrible war between Muslims and Christians broke out in the Moluccan Islands of Indonesia in January 1999. The slaughtering dominated the headlines, and every Westerner I knew said to me, ëIsn't it terrible what is happening to the Christians in Indonesia?"
However, in the rest of Indonesia, things actually got a lot better for the church.
For example in Java, the most populous island, incidents against churches dropped dramatically, and the new democratic leaders of Wahid and Megawati inaugurated a new toleration.
So were getting both better and worse in the same country, at the same time.
And it's the same globally. It is fair to say that more Christians are being persecuted today than ever before, but it's also important to recount the good news, and that more Christians have benefited from a rise in religious freedom than ever before.
Global persecution - the good news
Listen to the good news for a second. Let's start with Latin America. Dave Miller, managing editor of Compass Direct, travels to Cuba quite often. In the 1980s he was staying with a pastor friend and noticed that, on his way to church, he would always put on one shirt and pack another.
"Why do you do that?" Dave asked him.
"Because I get pelted with eggs, tomatoes and rubbish by people on my way to the service," explained the pastor.
"I don't want to preach in a soiled shirt, so I change into my clean one when I get to the church."
Today, pastors in Cuba walk to their churches in the shirt they will preach in. They will not be pelted.
Why? What has changed?
In a book published in 1985, entitled Fidel and Religion, Fidel Castro reversed his longstanding antipathy to Christianity.
It quoted Castro as saying: "It is not anti-Cuban to be a Christian."
Up until then, people followed Castro's line that to be a Christian was to be against the Cuban revolution and Cuban nationalism.
That meant that Christians were very unpopular.
But once Castro removed this stigma, thousands flocked to the churches in the mid to late 1990s, and a powerful revival swept the island of Cuba.
Or take Peru. In 1998 President Fujimori jailed a total of 309 evangelicals as part of his crude sweep against Shining Path guerillas.
Fujimori had spectacularly overreached himself, and was bundled out of power in November 2000. Now those prisoners are mostly out of jail.
What about Africa?
Is there any good news there? Yes:
The main ideological villain behind the radical Islamic coup in Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi, has to rank in the top five of the world's most effective persecutors of Christians.
His influence extends far beyond Sudan. In 1991 he brought together Islamic extremist organizations from fifty countries and formed the Popular International Organisation - the first effort of its kind. Osama Bin Laden moved for a time to Sudan to base his operations there.
But in June 2000, Turabi fell out with President Bashir, and languished in jail for a time, his influence drastically curbed. He remains under house arrest.
In Asia, there is good news to report in many places also.
In Indonesia the conflict in the Moluccas and on Poso has died down considerably since the Islamic extremists - Lasker Jihad - abruptly disbanded in October 2002 in the wake of the Bali bombing and (apparently) on orders from Saudi Arabia..
Relations between Muslims and Christians at the highest level have never been better.
In China, more and more Bibles are available, and Western Christian ministries continue to be invited in by the Government to run orphanages and hospitals.
In Sri Lanka, a ceasefire in a 30-year-old civil war is holding, with some benefits to the churches.
What about Europe?
In 1993 religious liberty got a huge boost when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in a landmark case that proselytisation was a vital right to be protected. The Court ruled that "proselytism was integral to religious freedom."
Any national law in the EU that does not allow a person to evangelise must be set aside.
So for first time, there is a legal case to show that 'proselytising' is a human right.
And the court also issued other rulings requiring Eastern European countries lining up to join the EU to drop their discriminatory legislation protecting the state churches. Hungary, for example, had to change its laws accordingly.
Now of course, there is a lot of bad news too. There are many places where it is definitely worse.
The situation of Christians has deteriorated considerably throughout the Middle East.
It is seriously worse in India, Nepal and Pakistan, and just as terrible as it ever was in North Korea.
And in China, horrifying reports periodically emerge of the torture of Christians in prison.
But it is important to remember good news if only to remind ourselves that religious liberty is a constant fight on many fronts, and the church has its victories as well as its losses.
The big shifts of the 1990s
When we consider the dynamics of global persecution however, the old map has gone. The new chart is more complex.
To illustrate this, consider the question: "In which country was the largest number of Christians killed for their faith in 2002?"
If we were answering that question in the 1980s, the answer would have been simple: China or North Korea. It was easy then. Atheistic communism was the biggest persecutor by far. Now, it's different.
It's actually an extremely difficult question to answer.
It could still be North Korea, but we don't know for sure. The society is so secret we cannot obtain reliable information. Hundreds could die there each year and we will never hear of it.
It could be Colombia. Over 24 pastors alone were martyred in Colombia by bandits and guerillas, for standing up against corruption and intimidation. This year, in 2003 the number is 29 and counting.
It could even be India, the world's largest democracy. Richard Howell of the Evangelical Fellowship of India told me recently, "The number of Christians killed here could run as high as 100 a year, but we rarely get to hear about it."
So it could be India, but another good guess would be Pakistan. We just don't know for sure.
But my point is that the sources of persecution are much more complex and multifarious today.
Why is this so?
Three big shifts took place in the 1990s to make the new chart so much more complex:
Communism replaced by Islamism as primary persecutor
Although five countries are still Communist in name - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea - only the last of these still enforces atheism in public and private life.
China and Vietnam are introducing capitalistic economies with frightening speed.
Replacing
Communism as the prime persecutor has surely been extremist Islam, which
grew from strength to strength when the Ayatollah Khomeni toppled the Shah
of Iran in January 1979 and established an Islamic republic for the first
time in centuries.
Iran bankrolled extremists throughout the world, and the Saudis used their oil billions to export their fiercely militant and fundamentalist form of Islam, called Wabbihism.
Islamic extremism also got a great military and economic boost in the 1980's from Western states such as the USA and France, who trained and armed Islamic resistance movements like Afghanistan's Mujahadeen as a means to contain Soviet expansion.
The abrupt withdrawal of these western funds only served to antagonize the extremists further, who felt used and betrayed.
The terrible consequences of this shift are seen in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Indonesia particularly.
In Africa some states, notably Sudan, fell into the hands of more Islamic radicals, who have been persecuting Christians mercilessly. Over 500,000 Christians from the Nuba tribe have lost their lives as a result of what has been termed "Islamic genocide.
Throughout the Middle East relations have drastically deteriorated between Christians and Muslims, causing a huge exodus.
In Iraq, in the 1990s alone, over a quarter of the Christian population emigrated.
And in the state with the world's largest number of Muslims - Indonesia, with 190 million Muslims - Christians have been caught up in vicious civil strife, often instigated by Egyptian or Saudi backed extremist armies.
The rise in the political importance of religion
Throughout the world secular identities are decreasing and religious identities are increasing in importance.
In Russia the atheistic state has given way to a pro-Russian Orthodox state, with the current leader, Vladimir Putin, quite happy for it to be known that he is a church-goer.
In Turkey Ataturk's concept of a secular nation state is under attack from more Islamist parties who triumphed in recent elections.
In
India the government since 1997 has been the extreme Hindu nationalist BJP,
who have little respect for the traditional liberal democratic model put
in place by Gandhi and Nehru.
If a society's identity is defined in terms of a religion, then intrusions of other religions into that society may be seen as threats to that identity.
So when Russia becomes more Orthodox, laws get enacted to keep Western Evangelicals out. As India becomes more Hindu, attacks on Christians have increased.
Also, governments are increasingly seeking legitimacy through religion; and the flip side of this is to see some religions as a particular threat to their legitimacy.
For example, in Burma the unpopular military dictatorship shamelessly promoted Buddhism as the state religion in order to curry favour with the people, and this has resulted in a crackdown on the Christian tribes.
Even Castro invited the Pope in January 1998 to bolster his flagging rule.
And in many Muslim states, the leaders have persecuted Muslim radicals all the more, like in Egypt and Algeria, out of fear that these radicals are a threat to their rule, as they want to make the state into an Islamic theocracy.
Again, the net result is more religious persecution.
Third, the 1990s were marked by an explosion of ethnic conflicts, many of which were fueled if not sourced by religious differences.
Most religions have a side that is inclusive, peace giving, and justice promoting. But there can be a darker side to the personality, as many adherents use religion to exclude, attack, and divide.
So the Indian government can use Hinduism to call for the removal of Muslims and Christians from the Gangetic plain, or conflicts in Indonesia rise to a higher intensity because they elevate local disputes into a "Christians v Muslims" mentality.
The upshot of all this is that, the more religion is regarded as important, the more likely governments are to control it, resulting in more persecution.
The rise in the profile of persecuted Christians
A third major shift is a very happy one: that the plight of persecuted Christians became one of the hottest concerns of Western Christians in the late 1990s.
Examples include annual church services focusing on praying for the persecuted; two Christian books about persecution have become best sellers; and the US Houses of Congress actually passed a law mandating the State Department to produce an annual report on the state of religious liberty in the world.
The Day of Prayer was of course, IDOP, still going strong. The two best selling books were Nina Shea's In the Lion's Den and Paul Marshall's (much better) Their Blood Cries Out.
And the Congressional bill in question was the International Religious Freedom Act, made law in America in November 1998.
No one expected this sudden shift of persecuted Christians to the centre of the Western agenda.
It's not an unmixed blessing however, and I would be wrong to suggest that concern for the persecuted church is the case all across the board.
Far more questions need to be asked, and the realities are often not susceptible to immediate comprehension.