A Few Cases Closer to Home
Chapter six
Learning from the Persecuted Church
Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
—Hebrews 13:3 (niv)
Stay disciplined and watchful. Your opponent the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for somebody to devour. Stand firm against him in faith, knowing that your spiritual family throughout the world is experiencing the same sorts of sufferings.
—1 Peter 5:8–9
Be faithful even to the death, and I will give you the victor’s wreath of life. Let anyone who has ears heed what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
—Revelation 2:10–11
I know where you live—where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city—where Satan lives.
—Revelation 2:13 (niv)
It is probably no coincidence that nearly all of the earliest non-Christian references to John the Baptist, Jesus, Jesus’s brother James, and Jesus’s other early followers mention them dying for their devotion to God.1 Persecution varied by place and generation after that, but it has hardly vanished.
Tortured for Christ
Romanian Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand endured years of torture, drugging, isolation, near starvation, and malnutrition-related disease for his faith.2 He recounts how his Communist torturers in Romania sometimes made him stand motionless for hours in a tight container surrounded by inside nails that would pierce him if he relaxed.3 His wife, Sabina, and other prisoners often suffered the same torture.4
Even more frequently, Sabina was kept in crowded cells that sometimes held eighty persons, rendering movement nearly impossible.5 Through malnutrition she and many other prisoners suffered from scurvy and other deficiency diseases; dysentery was also pervasive.6 After one woman mocked Sabina for her faith, a guard entertained himself by tossing Sabina into the Danube River. Rocks there broke two of her ribs and left much of one side of her body discolored, but the labor camp’s overseers would not excuse her from work. Only God’s healing intervention enabled her to continue.7
The Wurmbrands share others’ stories as well. Sometimes guards hung believers upside down and beat them so hard “that their bodies swung back and forth under the blows.”8 Tormentors drove starving rats into one prisoner’s cell, forcing him to remain awake continually to defend himself.9 Guards regularly beat Adventists on Saturdays, when they faithfully refused to dishonor the Sabbath by working.10 One work colony was a virtual death camp for “elderly men, many in their seventies,” who were forced to haul loads barefoot.11
Soviet authorities exiled medical doctor Vera Yakovlena from Ukraine to a Siberian labor camp for ten years. Among the minority of survivors, she recalled, “Every day people died, collapsing from overwork in the snow.”12 After guards caught her sharing her faith, she was forced “to stand for hours barefoot on ice.”13 One day she strayed into a prohibited area, and for ten minutes a guard tried to shoot her, yet found his arm immobile only during those minutes. Afterward, he correctly acknowledged that she must have a praying mother.14
Richard Wurmbrand invited Western Christians to help the persecuted church by sharing their lives of sacrifice and joining them in praying for their persecutors’ conversions.15 Yet he found the complacency of Western Christianity more shocking and painful than the persecutions he endured from open enemies of the cross.16
Global Persecution Today
While news programs often limit the level of graphic violence they display, friends in different continents sometimes send me firsthand videos of Christians experiencing persecution for their faith. These include churches targeted and set on fire, Christians’ homes burning as mobs chant in unison against them—usually incited by false accusations—or Christians being terribly beaten. Sometimes they include the bodies of dead fellow Christians. The most horrific, heart-rending video sent by a friend showed the bodies of recently slaughtered young Christian mothers. In this case, the killers had spared their babies, who were clinging to their mothers’ fresh corpses and mostly still crying.
At least 70 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with significant restrictions on religious freedom.17 While many faith groups face prejudice, this is particularly true, at least numerically, for Christians; at least 200 million of them globally face significant intolerance.18 Other recent estimates are higher. Open Doors, known for careful research, estimates that at least 380 million Christians face severe discrimination and sometimes even violence.19 Some researchers estimate that Christians are the object of three-quarters of all “acts of religious intolerance” globally.20 By contrast, Christians constitute less than one-third of the world’s population. (Meanwhile, some 85 percent of countries with the greatest religious freedom for all have a Christian heritage.)21 Noting the regress of religious freedom around the world, the US secretary of state in 2012 lamented, “The world is sliding backwards.”22
Open Doors reports that in 2023, over fourteen thousand churches, Christian schools, or Christian hospitals were attacked or forcibly shut down, especially in China and India. Global Christian Relief documented the destruction of nearly five thousand churches and Christian homes in India in 2024.23 Facial recognition technology has facilitated greater government control in China, requiring further decentralization of urban churches there.24 Global Christian Relief documented the arrest of 1,559 Christians in China in 2024. While this is a tiny percentage of Chinese Christians, it puts China ahead of Eritrea, Nicaragua, Russia, and apparently even North Korea in the number of Christians arrested for their Christian activity.25
One caveat before I proceed: Although I have more examples of persecutors from some religious groups (especially Muslim extremists) and some nations (such as Nigeria or India), they do not by any means represent the actions of all their religious or national compatriots. Islamic extremists dominate official lists of terrorist organizations, but in some cases (e.g., at times in northern Nigeria and in Mindanao, Philippines) Muslims have protected Christians, and most people in Nigeria and India, for example, do not support religious violence. While millions support violent jihad, most Muslims globally do not.26 The examples reflect merely my sources and my focus. I offer these examples for prayer and exhortation, not to incite enmity. I offer fewer examples from North Korea simply because I have fewer on hand, yet that is currently the most repressive state for Christians.
Christians face significant hardships in places like Iran and Pakistan, but Western Christians should embrace Iranians and Pakistanis with love and prayer not least for the sake of our many brothers and sisters there. Indeed, governments that oppress Christians should recognize that true Christians elsewhere love these governments’ peoples all the more because we have brothers and sisters among them. The world should also know that the God of heaven shows more collective mercy on them because of his people among them.
Nigeria
I spent three summers in Plateau State, Nigeria, in the late 1990s, most often in Plateau’s chief city of Jos. Everyone I met welcomed me hospitably, and the university and seminary students seemed eager for whatever I would teach them about the Bible. Where I taught in Plateau State, churches were everywhere, and often entire villages attended morning prayer. For the first time in my life I witnessed what looked like a (majority) practicing Christian civilization that, if it ever existed in the United States, no longer did, at least where I have lived.
Yet Nigeria in general and the northern region near Plateau in particular have become a major epicenter of Christian martyrdom. Terrorist group Boko Haram’s violence led to an estimated two thousand deaths and harm to twenty-six churches in Borno State in 2009.27 In 2012, Boko Haram demanded the removal of millions of Christians in the north.28 From 2009 to early 2023, an international commission estimated the murder for religious reasons of more than fifty-two thousand Nigerian Christians.29 In 2023, from May 15 to 17 alone, more than three hundred Christians were killed for their faith just in Plateau State.30 In that year, more than four thousand Nigerian Christians died for their faith31—on average, ten a day, or one dying for her faith nearly every two hours. In December alone that year, attacks displaced ten thousand people. To put that more pointedly, ten thousand more people are now homeless because of these attacks. These may be low estimates. Based on concrete sources, Global Christian Relief reports that in 2024, nearly ten thousand (9,814) Nigerians were murdered because they were Christians.32 Since many northern states introduced sharia law, tens of thousands of people have died, “most of them Christians or adherents of traditional religions.”33
Some secular observers try to minimize the religious dimension of the conflict. While other factors are also involved, a purely secular explanation displays little understanding of the prominent role of religion in most of the world’s experience. For example, on Christmas Eve 2023, jihadists targeted full churches celebrating Jesus’s birth. They slaughtered 170 Christian worshipers in Plateau State, evoking earlier bombings on Christmas there such as those in 2010 and 2011. Elsewhere, armed by jihadists, Fulani militants burned a church to which residents of a village had fled for sanctuary. The residents cried in agony as they burned to death; the forty-four victims included the pastor’s “wife, four of his seven children, and two of his grandchildren.” At the mass funeral the next day, the killers returned and slaughtered others.34 Citing Job 2:10, the pastor insisted that they must accept hardship as well as blessing from the Lord.35 Militants slaughtered at least fifty more Christians, many in their sleep, on Palm Sunday 2025.
Genocide in Nigeria
One woman shared the gospel with some Muslim youths in Niger State on June 28, 2006. When their elders learned what she had done, they falsely accused her of insulting Muhammad, and hundreds pursued her. The local police rescued her, but the crowd so overwhelmed the police that, concerned for their own survival, they abandoned her to her fate. The crowd then clubbed her to death.36 Before reading this account, I first heard about it—as I have many others—from my Nigerian friends.
Since 2009, the extremist violence has killed at least thirty-five thousand people (with many estimates even higher), and more than two million have been displaced from their homes. In 2010, a single attack in a Christian farming community in Plateau State killed 483 people, now entombed in a mass grave.37 An early 2025 mailing from Voice of the Martyrs begins, “Islamic attacks have widowed more than 10,000 of our Christian sisters in northern Nigeria in the past 20 years.”38
A couple of years ago, Nigerian friends who had not seen each other for a while were visiting Médine and me. Discussing jihadist attacks in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, they caught each other up on who they knew who had been killed recently.39 An update from Voice of the Martyrs laments, “Nearly all Christians in northeastern Nigeria have lost family members or friends in attacks by Boko Haram or militant Fulani Muslims.”40 (I will talk more about the difference between these groups below.)
In Benue State, a surge in attacks displaced farmers into eight camps. These camps are so crowded that men normally sleep outside; the displaced receive rations of corn stew. When one couple ventured back to their farm, militants killed the husband and sent the wife back to their camp with the warning: “We have taken over. Don’t come back.”41 Traumatized farmers sometimes panic now if they see a cow, assuming that Fulani herders are nearby.42
Another friend explained the irony. Much of the world complains that Muslim herders (who want to graze on Christian farmers’ land) and Christian farmers just can’t get along. But if you find a driver’s dead body and then somewhere down the road someone driving the deceased’s car, you might suspect the new driver of having had something to do with the former one’s murder. When herders have now settled in deceased farmers’ homes and taken over their land, however, many refuse to draw the logical corollary.43
Suzanne is one of the recent victims of Boko Haram in Nigeria. After killing her father, a terrorist shot Suzanne through the temple. Astonishingly, she survived, though she is now blind and must be led around by others. She loves Jesus even more than before.44 Amina, attacked with a machete by a Fulani militant in Nigeria, was left for dead. During her four months in the hospital, she eventually found grace to trust God’s sovereign plan. When she later met her assailant, she forgave him.45
In another village, Boko Haram ordered thirty members of Habila’s church to convert to Islam or die. Refusing to deny Christ, all thirty were killed. Habila too was shot through the head with an AK-47 and left in a pool of blood. Nevertheless, he survived and experienced miraculous healing. He prays daily for God to forgive and save his persecutors.46 Such survivors, though, are a minority. Nigerian jihadists praised a seven-year-old boy for finishing off one Christian by cutting his neck.47
Heartbreak for My Friends
While I was in Nigeria, some of my Nigerian pastor friends also shared about some of their own pastor friends, often classmates from seminary, martyred in the north. They also shared reports of jihadist mercenaries from outside Nigeria. One Nigerian friend, now an Anglican priest, told me that before he began teaching he was doing campus ministry at a religiously mixed university in the north. One day anti-Christian riots broke out in the city; they were supposedly spontaneous, but militant Islamists had already mapped out where local pastors lived.48 Many pastors were hacked or burned to death; my friend, his wife, and their two precious young children lived to recount the story only because their downstairs Muslim neighbor went outside and declared that this was a house of peace.
When I first visited Nigeria, Sani Abacha was the dictator, and he ruled with an iron hand. My first week in the country, I attended a meeting of some church leaders who discussed a march to protest government repression. Media was so tightly controlled that those present did not even know that police had raided the university where I was staying that morning, driving out students because of protests. As the only foreigner present, I had no business speaking, but I nevertheless pleaded against the march, because it would surely cost many lives. The church leaders agreed about the cost, but they responded that everything else had been attempted and failed, so they resolved to march. By God’s grace, it turned out that there was no need for the march—that week Abacha died.
The next summer I was in the country when former general and political prisoner Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian from the southwest, was sworn in as president. Nevertheless, jihadist attacks remained a threat. I was invited to teach at a denomination’s headquarters church about one of Revelation’s seven churches of Asia Minor. I explained that while churches in some regions have to resist materialism, churches in other regions have to be ready for martyrdom. Obviously this was not news to them; indeed, a few years later a jihadist’s plan to blow himself up in a crowded service at that church was stopped only by a providentially timely (but sadly fatal) motorcycle accident outside the sanctuary.49
The New Testament teaches often about persecution, which means that New Testament professors also must teach about it. But it felt harder for me to teach about it in central Nigeria than in the US, because in Nigeria it was obvious that my very sober hearers were not merely hearing a random Bible lesson but counting the cost for their own lives. I felt this pain most personally during one of the weeks I spent teaching Nigerian missionaries preparing to reach unreached (mostly polytheistic) people groups. One of my students there had already been expelled from her Muslim family in the southwest for becoming a Christian. Although her outreach would not be focused on Muslims, she was very cognizant of the real possibility of facing death for preaching Christ in unreached areas.
News in September 2001
In September 2001, I received frantic news from close friends in Jos.50 Riots had begun during the Friday, September 7, Muslim prayer services, and Christians were being slaughtered. One of my previous students, a Nigerian lawyer, was trapped in a church under siege for three days with a corpse and no water.
During the first three days of slaughter, I desperately tried to contact US news organizations, hoping that someone would pay attention and get out urgent pleas for help. Instead, one journalist responded reluctantly that if the news wasn’t dealing with terrorism impacting the US, oil prices in the US, or something else that people in the US care about, they couldn’t cover it. News organizations in the US compete for viewers, and consumers allegedly don’t care what happens in most other places—especially, I was eventually given to understand, if the people in those other places aren’t white Americans. If 1 percent of those deaths occurred in events in North American or European suburbs, they would be headline news, barring competition from events elsewhere of greater popular magnitude (for instance, happenings in the lives of celebrities).
Concerned journalists themselves lament the information problem. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof notes that television networks neglected crises in Darfur and Congo because coverage of them brought lower ratings. Indeed, he complains, “Christianity Today ended up covering Darfur more assiduously than either Newsweek or Time.”51
Rupert Shortt, religion editor for The Times Literary Supplement, notes that over the course of three decades, Sudan’s government had precipitated “the deaths of 2 million Christians and other non-Muslim civilians.” Likewise, over the final three decades of the twentieth century, the Indonesian government killed one hundred thousand Catholic civilians in East Timor—a sixth of the population.52 What do the lower ratings say about the interests and thus hearts of their viewers? Shortt points out that whereas Western media can portray Muslims in the West as a minority needing protection, they usually remain silent regarding Muslim genocide against Christians in much of the world. “There is scarcely a single country from Morocco to Pakistan in which Christians are fully free to worship without harassment.”53
Because US media must give consumers what they believe they want, secular media remain largely silent about thousands of faithful Christians genocidally martyred in northern Nigeria, or jihadists slaughtering hundreds of Christians in Mozambique. This is the case even though the death toll of Christians murdered in Nigeria rivaled the death toll from ISIS even at the latter’s peak.54 Had another religion been targeted, the coverage might well have been higher. (Happily, CBN is now covering it.) Location and the availability of footage are also issues. The news magazine to which I once subscribed finally devoted a half page to genocidal war in Congo-Kinshasa only after some three million people had perished, and never did mention the war that had displaced a quarter of the population of my wife’s smaller Congo-Brazzaville.
Almost immediately after September 7 in Nigeria, on September 11, jihadists attacked the US too, and three thousand people died. I grieved, having also a special love for New York City from my summer in urban ministry there. Yet I thought that finally this attack would awaken the world to the genocide in Nigeria due to the common thread of jihadism. Instead, the events here drowned out even further any attention to Africa. Over the course of the year, the death toll in Jos grew much higher than in New York.
Even Nigerian news coverage was not always even. On various occasions the media reported a few casualties in northern Nigeria, faith unspecified, killed in northern riots; my friends on the ground countered that so many Christians had been killed that morgues and refrigeration units could not hold them all. When I did try to publicize my accounts of what was happening in northern Nigeria, a Nigerian from the south declared that I was merely producing Christian-biased propaganda. I think he must know better by now.
Not Just Boko Haram
Today the world talks about Boko Haram, founded in northern Nigeria in 2002. Boko Haram became famous in April 2014 by kidnapping 276 girls from a secondary school in Chibok. Initially even some in Nigeria ignored the kidnapping because it was merely “one more tragedy” among hundreds;55 within several months, in fact, the estimated total of kidnapped minors came to two thousand girls and ten thousand boys, the latter forced to fight for Boko Haram.56 Their captivity finally went viral after women’s rights supporters in the West joined the online protest.57
Most of the Chibok girls were from Christian families; some of them were children of pastors and Bible translators.58 Their captors forced them to memorize Qur’an passages, teaching them that women brought sin, that democracy was sinful, and even that the world is flat.59 The girls were told to marry young so as to bear many children (who would be raised in the movement);60 they were given the choice between being slaves or marrying the male fighters, who were considered theologically justified in forcing sex on them.61 When one leader insisted that a student named Naomi marry or be gang-raped, she refused marriage, so he struck her, leaving a scar.62 (Elsewhere, too, Christian girls are kidnapped or forced into Muslim marriages to bear children for Islam.)63
After being captive for two years, the girls began to starve.64 Although negotiations brought the release of many girls (including Naomi, mentioned above), roughly a hundred remain missing to this day. Negotiations also released some other students taken captive on later occasions, but these did not include fourteen-year-old Leah Sharibu, taken February 19, 2018. Her captors kept her prisoner because she refused to deny her Christian faith, despite her friends’ pleas that she merely pretend conversion as they had done. As of 2024, she is twenty-one years old. Reports have circulated that her captors married her to a rebel commander. She is likely unaware of the protest marches that have pleaded for her release, or of the courage that her story has stirred among other Christians. In 2024, more than nine thousand Nigerian Christians were kidnapped for money or to be forced brides of jihadists.65
But as should be obvious from my pre-2002 examples, jihadist attacks were occurring well before the founding of Boko Haram.66 Certainly they occur much more widely now. Fulani militants once had only sticks, but Islamic extremists, expanding their reach, eventually armed them with automatic weapons. Radicalized Fulani herders now kill and displace more people than Boko Haram does.67
In an earlier period Islamic rulers had tried to subdue the Middle Belt, but conquest mattered more than conversion. Islamic law permitted the enslavement of Africans so long as they didn’t convert to Islam.68 Under British rule, however, the Islamized Hausa-Fulani were given administrative control over northern Nigeria.69 Plateau State is overwhelmingly Christian, but as the Sahara expanded southward, more northern Fulani began grazing on Plateau’s farmlands. What an opportunity for Christians to show love to Muslim neighbors! Yet letting herders graze one’s farmland is hard on farmers, and genuinely as well as nominally Christian farmers resisted. Meanwhile, some Islamist teachers have proved eager to indoctrinate and recruit other Muslims with certain Qur’anic teachings about conquest.
Retaliation or Escape?
It was not only Christian noncombatants who died in the wake of September 7, 2001. Many Christian youths, fed up with their elders always “turning the other cheek,” eventually armed themselves and burned local mosques, some of them even killing Muslim noncombatants. A Muslim woman in Jos told one of my Christian acquaintances there, “Our people started this, but your people went too far in responding!” The overall loss of life was horrific.
The vast majority of Christians do respond nonviolently, but when local Christians have dared to fight back and kill their assailants, Islamic militants mock them for violating Jesus’s teachings about peace and nonretaliation. Years ago a Nigerian friend and I wrestled over this question. I insisted that discipleship meant nonresistance and martyrdom; he talked about genocide and caring for one’s family. If their government can’t or won’t defend residents, should residents simply surrender their homes to invaders and settle in refugee camps? Farmers who had worked their land for generations lose their livelihoods (and sometimes their food access) when they flee, and no other territory will simply give them new land. US Christians critical of others who retaliate should remember US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq in reprisal for attacks here. In any case, the farmers are so outgunned now that without government intervention self-defense might be suicidal.
I support Christian nonretaliation based on Scripture, but I also recognize that I have not earned the personal right to stand in judgment. Nobody has been killing my family members or forcing us into a refugee camp. My friend and I each found the other’s arguments persuasive. He significantly qualified my virtual pacifism (beyond the personal level) while also recognizing Jesus’s teachings on nonretaliation. Where we could certainly agree was that even by historic just-war principles, it is wrong to kill noncombatant Muslims in retaliation for the murder of noncombatant Christians. With one hand tied behind our back while our aggressors use both hands, we must depend radically on the Lord.
Retaliation in Yelwa, Forgiveness from Kaduna
When I was in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, I taught a large group of local pastors in the area of Yelwa Shendam, which is part of Plateau State. I accumulated quite a few mosquito bites overnight, but I knew that the pastors had provided me the best accommodations available, better than their own. The local pastors who hosted me were financially poor, but they banded together and gave me a chicken to thank me for my teaching. While eating with them (not the chicken), I noticed a foreigner who appeared to be perhaps from the Middle East, gesturing menacingly toward me while talking with some local Muslims.70 The pastors took it in stride; menacing looks are common but normally harmless.
A few years later, Muslim extremists there slaughtered many local Christians, including some inside a church, although other Christians escaped. Afterward they reportedly declared an Islamic state and turned the many local churches into latrines. At the time I saw no media coverage and just heard from close friends in the area. When Tarok tribespeople in the surrounding region later responded by massacring an even larger number of Muslims in Yelwa, suddenly it made global news. Muslims controlled most of the regional media.
In nearby Kaduna State, Muslim youths marched in the state capital to demand the implementation of sharia; Muslims outnumber Christians in the northern part of the state, where the capital is. Christians, the majority in the southern part of the state, then organized a march in the state capital to protest sharia. Peaceful protesters, the majority women and youths, were quickly met with automatic weapons. My student Sunday Agang, who later became a seminary president in Nigeria, was panicked; some of his unarmed relatives were killed, and he hadn’t heard from his wife, whom he believed had been part of the march (happily, he was wrong about that). As we prayed together, I prayed for the God of vengeance to arise like a mighty warrior. I thought I prayed the language of the Psalms pretty well. After I finished, Sunday prayed. “God, please forgive our oppressors. If we die, we go to heaven, but they die without hope.”71
Both were biblical prayers, but Sunday prayed more faithfully than I did. Jesus teaches forgiveness (Matt. 6:12; Luke 11:4; Matt. 18:21–22, 35; Mark 11:25; Luke 17:3–4); Scripture also enjoins us to avoid vengeance (Lev. 19:18), leaving judgment to God (Deut. 32:35; 1 Sam. 24:12; 25:26; 2 Sam. 22:48; Ps. 18:47; Rom. 12:19). Forgiving those who hurt us is not an act of weakness; it requires great strength and trust in the God who has our back. Sunday embodied that spirit better that day than I.
Two Recent Students’ Testimonies
Yakubu Philemon, my PhD student, grew up near Gwoza in Borno State. After Boko Haram attacked the state capital, Maiduguri, Christians fled to the state’s villages, whereupon Boko Haram began systematically attacking the villages. Boko Haram had AK-47s; local Christians had sticks. Boko Haram intercepted Christians traveling on roads and killed them if, as usual, they refused to convert to Islam. (They killed some who did convert anyway, not trusting their loyalty.)
The military ordered all men in Yakubu’s area, which was predominantly Christian, to gather on June 3, 2014. Instead of Nigeria’s military, however, they found Boko Haram militants dressed in captured military uniforms. The militants gunned down the men from the area—Yakubu estimates tens of thousands. Muslims had been warned in advance not to come, so the men gunned down were Christians. Boko Haram then took the young women as sex slaves, as war plunder, and the children to be groomed as terrorists. Happily, Yakubu had left the area shortly before this happened. While most Christian men died for their faith, many discouraged survivors in the area compromised it, reverting to African traditional religions that promised charms to protect them from bullets.
Another student, Ayooluwa Olawole, a counseling major at Asbury Seminary, shared how her parents had been counseling children who had escaped from Gwoza and the rest of Borno. Traumatized, the children suffered from nightmares and flashbacks and experienced regression. Because Boko Haram likes to document its atrocities, Yakubu also showed me some of their video footage. Boko Haram leaders sent a warning to Christians not to return to Gwoza, and then axed to death the Christian prisoners on the video—men, women, and youths—as if they were simply cleaving meat. I could not finish the video.
The world usually ignores genocide, ethnic cleansing, and in this case religious cleansing. Our media accounts instead fill up with the lives of celebrities and comparatively trivial matters.
Persecution Elsewhere in Africa
I recount events from Nigeria because I have closer connections there, but similar events could be recounted from around the world. Elsewhere in Africa, for example, jihadists from Mali have slaughtered civilians, especially Christians, in Burkina Faso. Their raids have displaced more than two million people from their homes and work, and at one point jihadists controlled 40 percent of the country. They raped women in Pastor Soré’s village, then burned it, warning Christians that the time of Christianity was over and that they should convert to Islam or die.72 Keep in mind that Christians represent roughly a quarter of the population; the Assemblies of God, as the largest Protestant denomination there, has more than a million adherents.73
Those who know the history of the US abolitionist and civil rights movements, which were mostly motivated by Christian conviction, also understand that standing for justice can be costly. The International Fellowship of Evangelical Students had sixty Bible study leaders in the universities at the time of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. They were known for promoting ethnic reconciliation. Nearly all were murdered.74
In Mozambique, jihadists kill Christians and force non-Christians into their violent form of Islam. Already several years ago it was possible to document scores of attacks on churches and hundreds of Christians slaughtered.75 Global Christian Relief documented 262 more Christians killed for their faith there in 2024,76 and twelve thousand Christians displaced.77 Jihadists reportedly nailed pastors to church doors, boiled babies alive and force-fed them to their mothers, and hacked teenagers to death. Pastor Armando escaped with his life, but his four-year-old and seven-year-old children remain unaccounted for.78 Another pastor hid in the forest with his older sons; after the raid he returned to the ruins of his hut to find his four-year-old youngest son beheaded. His wife and other son remain missing.79
Some Christians have been crucified. More often, jihadists have hacked to death and beheaded Christians, including many children, while often sparing one relative to go spread word of what others should expect if they persist in their faith. In one largely Christian region, thousands have fled into the bush to evade being murdered. A report in Christianity Today notes that “boys as young as 10 are made to enlist as child soldiers and girls as young as 12 are forced into marriage as child brides—and anyone who does not comply is killed. There are also reports of sexual assault incidents involving women as old as 60.”80 Most Muslims in the region oppose these atrocities; but it is the extremists who are receiving foreign funding and automatic weapons. Nominal Muslims who cannot prove their orthodoxy are also the militants’ targets.
Eritrea’s totalitarian government has arrested thousands of Christians from banned churches, starting in the early 2000s; more than 350 remain in prison, with eighty more already arrested in the first five months of 2024.81 For example, Pastor Gebremedhin Gebregergis was imprisoned in November 2004. He has remained in prison, unable to care for his six children, even though his wife died in 2022.82 Youth minister Mussie Ezaz was detained without trial in 2007 and remains in a maximum security prison.83
Eritrea locked many prisoners in metal shipping containers, which are unbearably hot during the day and freezing at night, without access to sanitation or toilets. One of those so detained, gospel singer Helen Berhane, remained imprisoned from 2004 to 2006. The refrain of one of her songs runs, “Christianity costs you your life, but at the end, its outcome is victory.”84 Berhane was released in 2006 because she was severely sick and authorities did not want her to die in custody. An Eritrean government spokesman condemned Amnesty International for protesting her conditions. Denmark granted her asylum and medical treatment, however, and she continues to speak for justice today.85
Persecution and Genocide Globally
When ISIS invaded Mosul in northern Iraq in June 2014, they gave four choices to Christians: By July 19 they needed to convert to Islam, hand over money to demonstrate submission, leave, or die. Tens of thousands of Christians left, with ISIS soldiers stripping them of any resources they tried to take with them. They chose to lose all property, employment, and proof of education rather than renounce their faith.86
After three days inside their home during ISIS attacks in Syria, Samia’s husband ventured out to forage for food. After another day and a half Samia went outside to look for him, finally finding the remains of his corpse. She escaped to her family, but they soon discovered that in that place “Islamists had a list of Christians’ names to target for execution.” They fled to a neighboring country, where they have had to settle with other refugees in tents.87 Life can be difficult for refugees seeking safety, since not every location welcomes them. In the Nazi era, the United States turned away a ship carrying nine hundred Jewish refugees from Germany. Over 250 of them ended up dying in the Nazi Holocaust.88
Egypt (on the continent of Africa but usually associated culturally more with the Middle East today) was predominantly Christian before the rise of Islam, and a large percentage of Christians remain there.89 Many, however, are among impoverished outcasts, surviving by garbage collection.90 Under Hosni Mubarak (i.e., before the government current as of 2024), police arrested three Christian converts and tortured them for ten months “by methods that included electric shocks to the genitals, beatings, cigarette burns, sexual humiliation, and isolation in cells too small to enable detainees to lie down,” until they recanted their conversions.91 Another convert was tortured in custody, which included his captors extracting his toenails.92 When assailants began attacking a church, a Christian who ran to seek police help ended up detained himself.93 In another case, when captured monks refused “to spit on a cross, deny their faith and accept Islam, the monks were beaten, whipped, and had thorns stuck into the soles of their feet.”94
A court sentenced a Coptic priest to five years of prison for performing the marriage of a Coptic Christian man and a woman he did not know was a Muslim convert to Christianity. (The couple had used forged papers so they could marry.) While Muslim men may marry Christian women and raise children as Muslims, Muslim women may marry only Muslim men; because the woman’s background was Muslim, the court did not recognize her legally as Christian because conversion was legal only to and not from Islam.95
Precedents for Modern Genocides
Some earlier events assured the world’s aggressors that they could murder religious and ethnic minorities with relative impunity. One of these was the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916. Ottoman leaders forced 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians on death marches to the Syrian desert, raping, robbing, killing, and using concentration camps. As Rupert Shortt laments, “Women were gang-raped and horseshoes were nailed into men’s feet”; in a single province, “about half a million Christians were killed.”96 To this day, Turkish authorities deny that the mass murder was genocide. Indeed, despite thousands of death threats, one reporter there who affirmed the genocide was denied police protection. He was convicted of “insulting Turkishness” and was soon gunned down in the street.97
Unsurprisingly, a generation after 1915, Hitler assumed that Germany could get away with mass murder also. Germany had earlier gotten away with genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples in southwest Africa (in what is now Namibia) in 1904–1905. Turks got away with the Armenian genocide; the US government’s earlier detainment and forced march of Cherokees—many of them Christians—also served as a model for concentration camps. The scale of Hitler’s genocide was larger, but only Nazi Germany’s loss of World War II kept him from “getting away with” more murder of Jews, Roma people, and others. In the 1930s Stalin also killed, imprisoned, and starved millions—including many for their faith.
Despite Nazi death camps and persecution, though, many remained faithful to their callings. Most Christians know the stories of the ten Booms and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In Auschwitz, Father Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in place of another inmate. The commandant granted his request, sending him to starve in an underground cell. During his slow and painful death, the other inmates heard his prayers and songs to God.98
Blasphemy Charges in Pakistan
When atheists in Sweden burn Qur’ans, Islamists burn Christian homes in Pakistan in supposed reprisal.99 In Pakistan and elsewhere, Christians are often charged with blasphemy against Muhammad, and sometimes convicted solely on the testimony of accusers; under Islamic law, a Muslim’s testimony is worth more than a Christian’s.100 For example, after a false rumor that Christians desecrated a Qur’an, mobs burned forty Christian homes, in which “eight Christians, including a child,” were burned alive.101 When a Catholic official and a Muslim official protested the abuse of blasphemy laws, both were quickly assassinated.102 When business rivals charged a Christian and his Muslim colleague with blasphemy, the court exonerated the accused Muslim but sentenced the accused Christian to life imprisonment “on the basis of the same evidence.” The imprisoned Christian was often beaten, and he died under very suspicious circumstances.103 A few days after an examination showed that a blasphemy charge against one Christian minister was fabricated, he was “shot dead while in police custody.”104 (Obviously we need police, but police forces are not equally helpful everywhere for everything.) After some Christians filed a complaint that their pastor was assaulted, police retorted that “unrecognized” religions “were unwelcome.”105
A video shows, and local witnesses recount, the recent attack on a Christian businessman in Pakistan. Jealous of his business success, some neighbors falsely accused him of blasphemy, and for four hours a mob “kicked him, threw bricks and stones at him, and insulted him and his [Christian] religion.” They left him in a coma and burned down his business and his home. “Meanwhile, 200 Christian families fled for their lives during the onslaught and don’t know when they can safely return to their homes.”106
False blasphemy accusations are not a recent invention. Jesus’s detractors accused him of blasphemy (Mark 2:7; 14:64). The irony is that it was his accusers who were blaspheming him (15:29, using the same Greek term). Rejecting even the Spirit’s testimony to Jesus through his ministry, they risked eternal judgment (3:2–29). On the day of judgment, people will give account for every word they have spoken (Matt. 12:36–37).
Elsewhere in Pakistan, a brother named Kazim was beaten, tortured, and threatened with death in his village. He was falsely imprisoned and his property was confiscated.107 When a sister named Gulnaz rejected a Muslim man’s sexual harassment, the man burned much of the skin on the top of her body with acid.108 Young women, especially from minority Hindu and Christian backgrounds, are sometimes kidnapped and forced into Islamic marriages, bearing children to be raised in Islam.109
Other Examples
In the 1980s, Shining Path revolutionaries and a Peruvian army determined to crush them killed countless church members seeking to avoid the conflict. The Marxist guerrillas sometimes executed pastors for taking church offerings, which they viewed as exploiting the poor.110 Even in the midst of the tragedy, God protected some. When guerrillas blew up one church, only three women were unable to escape the collapse. Those three women, however, were safe inside an air pocket in the rubble and were quickly rescued.111
But God does not stop every incident of human depravity. When in 2018 jihadists targeted Surabaya Central Pentecostal Church in Indonesia, 85 percent of Fenny Suryawati’s skin was burned in the explosion. She lost her hearing, but unlike many, she survived.112 On October 29, 2005, Islamic militants in Indonesia beheaded “three teenage schoolgirls . . . as they walked to their Christian-run school”; the militants deposited one of the heads “on the steps of a local church.”113 Happily, the current government in Indonesia supports freedom of religion. However, whether due to laws or local sentiments, religious freedom is not equally available everywhere.
On October 31, 2010, ten al-Qaeda agents murdered more than fifty unarmed worshipers in a church in Baghdad. When one mother could not make her infant stop crying, a terrorist gunned down the infant and then the mother and the rest of that family. During the massacre, in an event I find too heartbreaking to shake off, “Three-year-old Adam Udai also begged one of the terrorists to ‘please stop.”’ He was immediately killed.114 One survivor, Samer, recounts his own experience. After he and others barricaded themselves in the sacristy, he heard his friend Raghda begging to enter and he let her in. Her husband had just been shot dead. Unable to force their way into the sacristy, the militants hurled weapons into the ventilation shaft. Raghda bled to death in Samer’s arms. Security forces took five hours to arrive.115
Shukri, a new believer in Iraq, shared Christ boldly with Muslims, as the Lord would lead him. One day he told his wife, “I felt like the Lord said to me that I am going to see Him today.”116 Later that day soldiers from ISIS captured, tortured, and executed him.117 Yet when his body was recovered, “he was smiling.”118 Also in Iraq, an imam and his family became secret Jesus followers; but some relatives caught some of them and exulted in torturing and burning them.119 Jesus began appearing to Rafia Abbar, a professor of sharia at an Islamic university in Saudi Arabia, helping bring her to himself.120 An uncle beat to death one of her students who became a Jesus follower. Two of Rafia’s uncles likewise tried to kill Rafia, but Jesus stood in front of her and stopped them.121
When a moderate Muslim cleric in Europe denied that Jews and Christians were infidels, a Saudi grand mufti declared the cleric an infidel, who could therefore be subject to assassination with impunity.122 In some countries, underage Christian girls are kidnapped and forced to “convert” to Islam, then made brides to sometimes polygamous Muslims to raise more children for Islam.123 Christian girls are sometimes raped and forced to marry the rapist or are punished themselves for having “unlawful intercourse.”124 In one school, a Muslim teacher egged on students as they beat to death a Christian boy who was part of the class.125
India
As the world’s largest democracy, India seems an unlikely location for persecution. Christian tradition in India traces its origins to the first century. Beyond dispute, a non-European, Middle Eastern form of Christianity was well established there in the first few centuries.
Many of the more extreme Hindu critics, however, denounce it as a Western religion. The original architects of the modern Hindutva nationalist ideology traded in the same sort of racial ideas as Hitler’s Aryan supremacy. In its purest form, Hindutva demands the subjugation of non-Hindus to Hinduism if they wish to remain in the nation; it offers particular advantage to the highest castes. Hinduism itself is a diverse faith with many forms, and most Hindus are tolerant, as exemplified by the late Mahatma Gandhi and his allies. Those pressing for Hindutva, however, seek to marginalize non-Hindus.126 While Hindus abroad send funds back to support Hinduism, the government increasingly restricts funds from other religious groups outside the country. Compassion International supported more children in India than in any other nation, but the government expelled the organization from the country.127 Global Christian Relief reports that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has revoked the licenses of “more than 19,000 NGOs . . . mostly Christian and Muslim groups.”128
As just suggested, Christians are not the only minority to face prejudices. Some Hindu extremists have lynched Muslims as “cow-murderers.”129 After the massacre of an estimated eight hundred Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, a Hindu extremist celebrated a “successful experiment.”130 Observers accused the state government of complicity; its top official, Narendra Modi, ordered police not to intervene in the killings. Although branded a criminal by the US government, Modi’s role in the riots fueled his political success. Modi is now India’s prime minister, and he is now welcome in Washington because of essential US interests in India.
Discrimination is widespread, and incidents of violence are increasing as Hindus marginalize the history of non-Hindus even in school curricula. Christians who help leprosy victims or Dalits (those at the bottom of the social pyramid) are often falsely accused of bribery, hence “forcing conversions” (more on this below) and offending local (i.e., Hindu) religion, and thus are subject to legal penalties.131 For thirty-four years, Australian Graham Staines served leprosy victims in India, but in 1999, a militant Hindu mob burned Staines and his two young sons alive, despite the attempts of more appreciative local Hindus to intervene. Staines’s widow, Gladys, and daughter, Esther, forgave the aggressors and continue to serve leprosy victims.
Unlike Staines, the vast majority of victims of Hindu extremism make less news—because they are Indian. Open Doors offers an example from 2024. Partly in connection with many healing miracles, Laxman’s church grew from a handful to hundreds. But Hindu extremists falsely accused Laxman of bribing converts; “anti-conversion” laws are often used in this way to depict any benefits offered—even divine healing in response to prayer—as tools for “forced conversion.” The police summoned a member of Laxman’s church and threatened to destroy his house unless he signed a blank piece of paper. After he signed it, they added above the signature a “confession” that Laxman had bribed him to convert. “Laxman was put in jail, where he was again beaten with wooden canes, kicked, abused and tortured mercilessly by the policemen.” When he was finally released, he saw that the extremists had also destroyed his church. The believers now had to meet in smaller groups, all under surveillance. Far from offering protection, his state’s Hindu nationalist government has closed hundreds of churches.132
In Orissa state, India, in 2008, Hindu militants killed at least ninety persons—both Christians and some tolerant Hindus who tried to protect them—and displaced some fifty thousand people.133 The state transferred a police superintendent who warned in advance that persecutors of Christians would be prosecuted.134 Although most camps for displaced victims closed by 2010, one reporter afterward found two to three thousand still living in tents.135
In 2023, members of the mostly Hindu Meitei people assaulted members of the mostly Christian Kuki-Zo people in the Indian state of Manipur. The death toll exceeded two hundred, the majority of deaths being Kuki. Although the Kuki tried to defend themselves and some retaliated, they were clearly unprepared and outgunned. While multiple factors played into the conflict, the national government’s rhetoric supporting Hindu militants amplifies the conflict’s religious dimension. Mobs destroyed some four hundred churches in Manipur. Global Christian Relief has reported some seventy thousand people “displaced—mostly believers.” Militants destroyed some seven thousand homes and more than a hundred villages.136
A subsequently viral video showed two Kuki women being forced into a mob of abusers, who stripped and gang-raped them. The younger woman, Glory, was traumatized both by rape and by witnessing the murder of her father and brother, both of whom had been beaten to death. Her mother recounts, “My husband was a church elder. He was soft spoken and kind. . . . My son was in the 12th grade, a gentle boy who never fought with anyone. . . . He was killed because he ran after them [the mob] to try to save his sister.”137 Some have alleged that police, far from protecting the women, abandoned them to the mob.138
Still more recently, after Pastor Praveen Pagadala received many death threats, his body was found covered with wounds on March 27, 2025. Blood-stained sticks lay nearby, and the autopsy confirms that he was tortured. Nevertheless, the government initially called it an accident and refused to investigate further. I leave my source anonymous, but he included a photograph of the bloodied body.
A Few Cases Closer to Home
While patterns of persecution are more prominent in some parts of the world than in others, individuals have also targeted churches in the US for various reasons—racial, marital, or religious.139 In examples from the news that are recent as I write this paragraph, God stopped attempted church shootings by the gun jamming (and a deacon’s fast action) near Pittsburgh on May 5, 2024,140 by the quick action of parishioners in Louisiana on May 11, 2024,141 and by on-site security in Houston on February 11, 2024. Parishioners or security also limited deaths at churches in White Settlement, Texas (December 29, 2019), and Laguna Woods, California (May 15, 2022).
Still, sometimes Christians die in church shootings, such as nine at a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015, or twenty-six (roughly a third of them children) in the shooting at First Baptist Church in Southerland Springs, Texas, on November 5, 2017. The former shooter was a white supremacist and the latter an anti-religious atheist.
Church shootings, however, are currently among the least common sufferings most Christians face in the US. There are of course venues in the US where one can be beaten or killed for sharing one’s faith; at the beginning of the book I gave one example of a beating I endured. On Flatbush Avenue in New York, a man threatened to shoot me for my witness for Christ. (He did apologize the next day, however, saying that he had been a bit drunk but that now he and his wife wanted to visit my church.)
And even in a small town in North Carolina, one Muslim told my friend and coauthor on a book, Pastor Glenn Usry, that it might be necessary for us to be killed. Nevertheless, what passes as persecution here is normally quite limited, and most of us have more to learn from brothers and sisters elsewhere. May we learn well, lest, like the disciples in Gethsemane, we be caught unprepared. Remembering the cost of our faith and committing to pass the daily tests of life is an important part of being prepared.
People in the US, however, are not immune to suffering, whether in this way or others. In all parts of the country they can face joblessness, floods, fires, prejudice, insensitive coworkers, abusive superiors, pharmaceutical addictions, family disputes, and the list could go on. I met a sweet, normal, inquisitive fourteen-year-old girl named Shonda whose mother (we later learned) sold drugs. Shonda ran away a number of times because her mom got hooked on the drugs she was selling. The mother owed her own dealers money, and Shonda knew what was coming. When Tammy, my friend who was her counselor, found out what was going on, she called social services. She would have taken Shonda into her own home, but she had been previously reprimanded for doing that. Social services was busy that day and then closed for the weekend. On Monday, Shonda and her mother were found in their apartment, both strangled to death.142 That was three decades ago. Shonda should have been in her forties now. Meanwhile, Tammy told me that many of the drug dealers’ clients were wealthy undergraduates at the university where I was doing my PhD.
But even if such stories do not resonate with some of my readers, eventually everyone faces death, and, if we live long enough, grief over other people’s deaths. In the US, my dad and my doctoral mentor both passed on the same day in May 2016; in Africa, my brother-in-law Emmanuel Moussounga, still young and at the height of his career as a scientist, passed suddenly and unexpectedly on August 31, 2020. We might try to avoid the subject of death, but only the eternal perspective offered by the eternal God offers true eternal hope.
Our hope cannot be in this temporary life; it must be in the apostolic promise:
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” . . . Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:54–55, 58 NIV modified)
Where we have resources, freedoms, and other blessings because of Christian forebears, we should use them for the kingdom. As a chemistry professor, my brother-in-law Emmanuel labored to provide better medicines and greater productivity for Congo-Brazzaville. Yet he labored under such greater pressure and with such fewer resources than I have available for my work in the US. Knowing his sacrifice and how hard others work with limited resources motivates me to work sacrificially with my resources to make up for what they did not have available.
After surviving torture and long imprisonment in Sudan, Mariam Ibraheem was able to relocate to the United States. Knowing that others still languish under such conditions, however, she uses her current advantages to serve others. “The message of Jesus Christ is not for me to live a comfortable life in a Christian country. It is for me to walk in the footsteps of the disciples and sacrifice for those who have never heard.”143 Alluding to Revelation’s Laodicean church, she aptly diagnoses many Western Christians’ spiritual condition. They are “fed spiritual sugar and artificially processed Scriptures that transform them into obese believers. Sick, untrained, comfort-seeking Christian soldiers are ineffective in the kingdom of God.”144 Instead of our spiritual immune system responding to real outside threats to the faith, we too often look inside Christ’s body and turn on one another.
The only two churches of Revelation’s seven that Jesus did not reprove at all were the persecuted ones. Today, as then, we have much to learn from suffering churches.
1 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64, 117–19; 20.200–201; Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Pliny, Epistles 10.96; compare also the expulsion from Rome occasioned by Jewish debates about Christ in Suetonius, Claudius 25.4. Post–New Testament early Christian works also emphasize it (e.g., 1 Clement 5.4–7; Ignatius, passim; Martyrdom of Polycarp).
2 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 51, 142; Wurmbrand, Wife, 296. Grounds for imprisonment were often fabricated (Wurmbrand, Wife, 309).
3 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 35.
4 Wurmbrand, Wife, 123, 146, noting that this torture was often applied all night after a full day of labor.
5 Wurmbrand, Wife, 109.
6 Wurmbrand, Wife, 182, 199, 232.
7 Wurmbrand, Wife, 177–80.
8 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 35.
9 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 34.
10 Wurmbrand, Wife, 162.
11 Wurmbrand, Wife, 183.
12 Wurmbrand, Wife, 35.
13 Wurmbrand, Wife, 36.
14 Wurmbrand, Wife, 36.
15 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 147. He also invites us to feel their pain (153). Apologetics that answered hostile propaganda was also a major part of witness (150). Compare partnership in Istrate, “Partnership.”
16 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), “Afterword,” 156.
17 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 311.
18 Shortt, Christianophobia, ix. Specifically in the US, by contrast, anti-Jewish attacks outnumber anti-Muslim and anti-Christian attacks.
19 Open Doors, “World Watch List 2024”; compare also Langham’s work in “Langham Trains Pastors.”
20 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 4.
21 See, e.g., Shortt, Christianophobia, 264, 270–71.
22 News briefs (2012), quoting Hillary Clinton.
23 GCR Red List, 10. Russian military operations have also severely damaged or destroyed 1,270 churches in Ukraine (GCR Red List, 24).
24 Global Christian Relief, “Persecution Trends.”
25 GCR Red List, 12. Given the difficulties of documentation in some countries, actual figures may vary (see especially 31–32).
26 See Doyle, Dreams, 244–45.
27 Shortt, Christianophobia, 121.
28 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 242, 286.
29 Cited in Global Christian Relief, “Persecution Reports: Nigeria.”
30 Chandler, “Hundreds Killed.”
31 Chimtom, “Christians Slaughtered.”
32 GCR Red List, 8, with a figure of 9,814. Open Doors’ “World Watch List 2025,” 5, 44, using a different method regarding what counted as martyrdom, estimated a much lower 3,100.
33 Shortt, Christianophobia, 111, citing sixty thousand from a source already in 2008.
34 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 169.
35 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 170.
36 Compass Direct, July 11, 2006.
37 Weber, “Cheeks,” who also notes that several days after the reporter visited, militants killed two hundred other people in the area.
38 Voice of the Martyrs mailing, January 1, 2025, 3.
39 Weber, “Cheeks,” notes that all the families in one service in Abuja had been touched by the conflict.
40 Voice of Martyrs March 24, 2024, email.
41 Weber, “Cheeks.” On another camp, see Nwachukwu, “Ripped Apart.”
42 Weber, “Cheeks.”
43 Similarly, several years ago Dachollom Datiri, president of the Church of Christ in Nations, an evangelical Nigerian denomination, noted that “more than 1,000 of his members in 50 communities have lost their homes and churches to Fulani attacks” (Weber, “Cheeks”).
44 Global Christian Relief email, April 14, 2024; GCR Red List, 38.
45 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 244–45.
46 Voice of Martyrs, “Nigerian Christian”; also Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 220–21.
47 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 65.
48 The same has been true in better-publicized cases elsewhere, such as Egypt (Shortt, Christianophobia, 24) and Nigeria (Shortt, Christianophobia, 119).
49 The attack also appears in Weber, “Cheeks.” For a video report, see “Jos Suicide Bombing.”
50 I discuss some of these matters in Keener, “Mayhem.” For more recent coverage, see Weber, “Cheeks”; more briefly, Chandler, “Hundreds Killed”; Casper, “Christmas Massacres.”
51 Kristof, Chasing Hope, 296–97. For more on Darfur, see Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur.
52 Shortt, Christianophobia, x, 147.
53 Shortt, Christianophobia, ix.
54 Weber, “Cheeks.”
55 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 55, 59–60. One Nigerian woman, Oby Ezekwesili, was raising significant awareness (62–63).
56 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 138–39.
57 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 1; they note especially a tweet from Hillary Clinton (Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 78–79).
58 Local Christians and Muslims in Chibok itself coexisted peacefully and even intermarried (Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 17).
59 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 106–7.
60 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 139.
61 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 140.
62 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 142.
63 Shortt, Christianophobia, 14, notes Egypt, where, conversely, Muslim converts to Christianity “have been arrested and sometimes tortured.”
64 Parkinson and Hinshaw, Bring Back Our Girls, 270–74.
65 GCR Red List, 17. Kidnapping is a risk elsewhere as well; my wife and I barely evaded being kidnapped during a visit to Congo-Brazzaville in summer 2008.
66 Compare, e.g., the killing of church leaders at a Sunday evening prayer meeting in News Briefs (1992).
67 Weber, “Cheeks” (noting more than 1,300 murdered in the first half of 2018, in some 314 villages).
68 See Usry and Keener, Black Man’s Religion, 89–90.
69 See, further, Turaki, “Legacy.”
70 Although others’ subsequent reports appear unaware of my own testimony, they have reported the presence of Arabic speakers in some other Islamist actions in Nigeria, as well as some Boko Haram soldiers being trained abroad (Shortt, Christianophobia, 122).
71 Also recounted in Keener, “Mayhem.” This appears to be the same incident in Kaduna mentioned in Shortt, Christianophobia, 111. On Kaduna persecution, see further Ozovehe, “Impacts.” Sunday Bobai Agang, who now has his PhD and leads a seminary, has become a significant leader in reconciliation and has published many books, such as Agang, Impact; Agang, Evil Strikes; Agang, Moral Values; he edited African Public Theology.
72 Open Doors, “He Is Always with Us.” Compare also Open Doors, “World Watch List 2025,” 29.
73 Mandryk, Operation World, 177.
74 Johnstone and Mandryk, Operation World (2001), 552; Mandryk, Operation World (2010), 722. At one local university, militants slaughtered some five hundred Tutsis and their Hutu defenders (Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 99).
75 McDade, “Cannot Burn Jesus.”
76 GCR Red List, 9.
77 GCR Red List, 15.
78 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 159–60.
79 McDade, “Cannot Burn Jesus,” also noting that beheading is a typical killing method for the group.
80 McDade, “Cannot Burn Jesus.” That assailants are often themselves victims can further complicate the ethics of war, although necessity limits options. For a Portuguese BBC report noting beheadings, see https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-54906823 (accessed Feb. 3, 2025; cited in Iacomini, “Unrest”).
81 Voice of the Martyrs update, May 23, 2024.
82 Voice of the Martyrs update, May 7, 2024.
83 Voice of the Martyrs update, May 21, 2024.
84 I take the quotation from “Prisoner’s Song.”
85 The song quoted above is also the title of her book: Berhane, Song. See also “Singer Released”; Scammel, “Helen Berhane.”
86 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 2, 14–15.
87 Voice of the Martyrs, June 25, 2024.
88 See Ogilvie and Miller, Refuge Denied; Thomas and Witts, Voyage of Damned.
89 Estimated percentages vary widely, from 6 to 20 percent (Miller, “Evangelicals,” 250).
90 Shortt, Christianophobia, 20.
91 Shortt, Christianophobia, 17.
92 Shortt, Christianophobia, 18.
93 Shortt, Christianophobia, 18.
94 Shortt, Christianophobia, 19.
95 Shortt, Christianophobia, 17. Influenced by Wahhabi ideology introduced from the 1970s onward, many Egyptian Muslims see Coptic Christians as inferior, immoral, idolatrous infidels (Shortt, Christianophobia, 3–4).
96 Shortt, Christianophobia, 104. More recently, nationalists have been systematically removing evidence of the historic Armenian presence.
97 Marshall, Gilbert and Shea, Persecuted, 130–33; Shortt, Christianophobia, 106. Compare also the long denials of some Japanese politicians regarding the genocidal rape of Nanjing (on which see Chang, “Rape of Nanking”; Chang, Rape of Nanking). Azerbaijan forced 120,001 Armenians to leave their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2024 (GCR Red List, 14).
98 Hefley and Hefley, Blood, 303.
99 As noted in Shortt, Christianophobia, 11, “Islamist demagogues frequently use events thousands of miles away as a means of scapegoating their Christian neighbors”; e.g., a pope quoted out of context as linking Islam and violence led to Christians being murdered in Africa and Asia.
100 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 287–88.
101 Shortt, Christianophobia, 64.
102 Shortt, Christianophobia, 66–67.
103 Shortt, Christianophobia, 76.
104 Shortt, Christianophobia, 77–78.
105 Shortt, Christianophobia, 256.
106 See Global Christian Relief update, May 30, 2024.
107 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 38–42.
108 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 128–29.
109 “Targets for Oppression.” Nevertheless, this action contravenes Pakistan’s Penal Code (364A; 365B). Muslim men can marry multiple wives.
110 Maust, Peace. See briefly Tapia, “Arrest.”
111 “Terror.”
112 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 230–33. Such violence was not new; for example, in 1996, as Muslim rioters were burning churches, they burned to death a Pentecostal pastor, along with “his wife, daughter, and niece” (Shortt, Christianophobia, 129).
113 Shortt, Christianophobia, 129.
114 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 227.
115 Shortt, Christianophobia, 32.
116 Doyle, Killing Christians, 97.
117 Doyle, Killing Christians, 99.
118 Doyle, Killing Christians, 101.
119 Doyle, Killing Christians, 112, 118–19.
120 Doyle, Killing Christians, 131, 135–36.
121 Doyle, Killing Christians, 144–45.
122 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 165–66, noting that the Saudi embassy distributed this fatwa in the US.
123 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 192, on scores of Egyptian girls; I supplement this with oral reports from Nigeria.
124 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 204–5, citing multiple instances in Pakistan.
125 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 193–94.
126 Here I draw from many sources, including Shortt, Christianophobia, 154–55.
127 For regulations cutting off funding for Christians, see, e.g., Kaur, “Regulation.” The Hindu nationalist government has cut off millions in funding that was helping the needy in India.
128 Global Christian Relief, “Persecution Trends.”
129 See, e.g., “Rakbar Khan”; Human Rights Watch, “Cow Protection Groups”; “Fresh Fears”; Jain, “Cow Vigilantes.”
130 E.g., “Revenge in Gujarat”; “Genocide in Gujarat.”
131 See, e.g., Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 101–9.
132 Open Doors report, May 6, 2024.
133 Shortt, Christianophobia, 149.
134 Wunderink, “Worse.”
135 Shortt, Christianophobia, 159.
136 Hart, “Believers Displaced.” Violence has since recurred (Global Christian Relief, “New Conflict”). GCR Red List, 15, claims “over 60,000” displaced.
137 Limaye, “Torture”; see also Arya, “Manipur Women.”
138 E.g., “Bombshell on Manipur Police.”
139 For an example of someone murdering his estranged wife in church, see “Gunman Kills Wife.”
140 Sarnoff and Hutchinson, “Miracle.” An AK-47 jamming allowed Farid, a believer in Afghanistan, to escape unharmed (Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 132–33).
141 Smith, “Parishioners.”
142 Tammy shared the account with me on December 17, 1991. In my journal I wrote, “Tammy thinks that maybe Shonda heard and believed the gospel. . . . For Shonda, now, we can never make a difference. I look at my dissertation and wonder if I make any difference . . . so meaningless; a 14-year old girl who should be alive and shouldn’t have had to have lived in terror was strangled by some drug dealer doing business.”
143 Ibraheem with Bach, Shackled, 273.
144 Ibraheem with Bach, Shackled, 280. For her military analogy, compare 2 Tim. 2:3–4.