Apr 16, 2022

This op-ed was originally published by USA Today on April 16, 2022.

By USCIRF Commissioners Jim Carr and Fred Davie

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has long advocated for the religious freedom of individuals of diverse faiths­­ and beliefs across the globe, from Uyghur Muslims facing China’s campaign of genocide to Jews experiencing an alarming rise of antisemitism in Europe and nonbelievers facing challenges across Africa.

This Easter, we also highlight that Christians—millions of whom suffer at the hands of both state and non-state actors—are experiencing terrible threats and persecution across many countries. In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, the Algerian government has forcibly closed 13 Protestant churches and ordered the closure of 7 more, while nearly 20 years of conflict, instability, and genocidal terrorism have reduced Iraq’s indigenous Christian community from 1.4 million to less than 250,000.

Elsewhere, India has a growing patchwork of laws that violate religious freedom or enable its violation, amid a rising tide of religious intolerance emboldened by Hindu nationalism. A third of India’s 28 states maintain laws restricting religious conversion, which are used as a pretext to target Christians and enable violence against them. The government has also turned on Christian religious freedom advocates, such as Father Stan Swamy, an 84 year old Jesuit priest who spent his life helping India’s marginalized religious communities. He was arrested in late 2020 under a decades-old law against “unlawful activities” and detained in harsh conditions, where he contracted COVID-19 and died last July.

In Burma, a symbiotic relationship has steadily grown between the ruling military junta—the Tatmadaw—and Buddhist nationalists. Alongside its six-year genocidal campaign against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority, the Tatmadaw continues to rain violence down on the country's Christians. In 2021 alone, its rampage included raiding the Hakha Baptist Church in the capital of Chin State in February, murdering Pastor Chung Lian Ceu and three others in March, attacking a Catholic Church in Kayah State in May, and gunning down Baptist pastor Cung Biak Hum in September.

Central government failure, state government repression, and religiously-motivated violence by non-state actors have turned parts of Nigeria—Africa’s most populous country of approximately 211 million, including more than 100 million Christians—into a crucible of persecution. In September 2021, a violent mob in Kano State, emboldened by the state’s imposition of a strict interpretation of Shari’a law, killed a local pastor for allegedly helping a Muslim convert to Christianity. In October, gunmen opened fire on a church in Kaduna State during morning prayers, killing two worshippers. And radical Islamist groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) continue to abduct, rape, and murder Christians; ISWAP for example, continued to enslave USCIRF Religious Prisoner of Conscience Leah Sharibu for refusing to convert to Islam.

The statistics behind these country-level dynamics are deeply disturbing. According to Open Doors’ latest World Watch List, in 2021 over 360 million Christians lived in places where they experienced “high levels of persecution and discrimination” while 5,898 Christians died for their faith; 6,175 were detained, arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned; and 3,829 were abducted. The sheer scale of this repression can appear quite daunting—and yet we can, as a nation, make a difference. For example, many individuals have fled religious repression and persecution in their home countries. The United States can and should provide refuge, through asylum and refugee resettlement processes, to those most vulnerable families and individuals, and in doing so serve as a role model to the world in support of freedom of religion or belief.

C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” Many Christians today, in fact, are facing this very reality. And for those of us who have both the freedom and the means to speak out, we must do so to support and protect the lives and the fundamental right to religious freedom of followers of all faiths—or of none at all—including millions of Christians around the world.