Christianity Arguably the Most Persecuted Religion in the World

Over the weekend I found this article and I wanted to share it with you because as you know, Christians are being persecuted daily all over the world. 

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Earlier this month, Christians who are free to observe their faith gathered in churches around the world for the annual International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. They recited pre-written invocations for fellow Christians who face violence and oppression.

Maybe pew-bound Christians should instead heed the sentiments of escaped American slave Frederick Douglass: “I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

Christianity is arguably — and perhaps counter-intuitively — the most persecuted religion in the world. And the reason for the blissful obliviousness to that fact of well-fed Christians in the West is “ignorance,” says Michael Horowitz, a U.S. Jewish activist who has written on Christian persecution. Horowitz contends this lack of awareness “is fostered by preconceptions and conventional wisdoms that lead many in the West to dismiss anti-Christian persecution as improbable, untrue, impossible.”

Persecution of Christians just doesn't compute. After all, it's the faith of record in the world's richest and most powerful countries, where Christians have been ensconced for centuries.

And given Christianity's well-documented history of brutality, modern-day elites are more conditioned to think of Christian believers as the persecutors, not the victims, says Horowitz.

But the face of Christianity has changed drastically. “There's still the mindset that Christianity is white, Western and European,” says Paul Marshall, of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and a former senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom.

Today, he points out, two-thirds of the world's Christians live outside the West. “The average Christian, if one can use that term, is now a Nigerian woman,” Marshall says. And numbering 2 billion, there are plenty of Christians to oppress.

Virtually every human rights group and Western government agency that monitors the plight of Christians worldwide arrives at more or less the same conclusion: Between 200 million and 230 million of them face daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and torture, and a further 350 to 400 million encounter discrimination in areas such as jobs and housing. A conservative estimate of the number of Christians killed for their faith each year is somewhere around 150,000.