10 Stats That Show the Dire State of Christian Persecution
Our brothers and sisters around the world are suffering.
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Corinthians 12:26-27).
What comes to mind when you hear the word persecution? If you are like us, your mind will instantly conjure up images of the 21 Coptic Christians kneeling on the beach with the name of Jesus Christ on their lips as they courageously faced death at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
Today an estimated 5.5 billion people (77 percent of the world) of all faiths (Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist and others) face some form of religious persecution, including economic discrimination, imprisonment, physical violence and death.
Here are 10 countries where the body of Christ is suffering. These individuals, their families and their churches are keeping the Christian witness alight in some of the darkest parts of the world:
Iraq
In the land of Eden, Jonah and Daniel, Christians have shrunk from 1.5 million to 300,000.
“We are being massacred and I don’t know how much further we can go,” a tearful Assyrian Christian activist told a packed audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. ISIS has systematically targeted religious minorities for murder and abduction and has auctioned off girls and women kidnapped from religious minority groups. It prices the youngest (ages one to nine) at 200,000 dinars/ USD $170.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) warns that the ongoing violence could “well mark the end of ... its ancient Yazidi and Christian communities.”
Syria
Only one percent of Syrian refugees in camps are Christians because “they fear negative repercussions from Sunni refugees identifying them with the regime.”
The Syrian Christian population has been decimated. According to The New York Times, by 2013, almost 25 percent (450,000) of Syria’s Christians had fled. The number of registered Syrian refugees then was 1,877,020. Today, it has more than doubled to 4,086,760, so if displacement rates have remained the same, more than 50 percent of the country’s Christian population may have become refugees.
Because of their fear of Muslim refugees, most Christians will not access the bulk of the $4 billion of U.S. assistance which is distributed through the UN.
Read the other 8 HERE
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