The Perilous State of Religious Freedom Worldwide

China is the world’s most active — though not yet most vicious — persecutor of religious believers. The plight of Muslim Uyghurs confined to reeducation camps has gained global attention. However, the Chinese Communist Party targets members of every faith, including Christians, Buddhists, and Taoists. Like Islam, Christianity is viewed as a foreign, and therefore dangerous, import.

Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia reported that the Chinese government is attempting to force believers to renounce their faith. RFA interviewed a Christian who was detained in a raid on a house church. He was held and mistreated for ten months in what he described as “a mobile facility, that could just set up in some basement somewhere.” His description of his treatment matched accounts from former Uyghur and Falun Gong prisoners.

This effort at “reprograming” is but one aspect of a multifaceted attempt to either eradicate or “Sinicize,” meaning communize, the Christian faith. Many churches have been closed. Those that remain open have been forced to display pictures of CCP chieftain Xi Jinping, display party propaganda, and install cameras.

Moreover, the Xi regime now bars children from services. In mid April, AsiaNews reported that the government shuttered a Catholic orphanage run by the Sisters of Zhaoxian in Hebei Province. The authorities gave no explanation, but the CCP likely wanted to end contact between the nuns and children, many of whom were disabled. The action also furthers the campaign to close faith organizations.

Unfortunately, Beijing is not alone in warring against religious believers. The Catholic organization Aid to the Church in Need tracks the systematic attack on faith around the world and recently released its latest assessment, Religious Freedom in the World: Report 2021. The organization explains that the volume “is ACN’s principal research project, and has evolved considerably over the years, from being a small booklet to becoming a publication of approximately 800 pages, produced by a world-wide team.”

The crime of persecution is global. ACN notes that “today discrimination and persecution on the grounds of religious belief is a growing global phenomenon. Behind the violent conflicts, whether in Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, the Central African Republic or Mozambique — to mention only a few countries — are those in the shadows who, manipulating the deepest convictions of humanity, have instrumentalised religion in the search for power.”

Although serious research like that embodied in Religious Freedom is vital to expose pervasive attacks on religious believers, the struggle is intensely personal and practical. Father Emmanuel Yousaf, national director of Pakistan’s National Commission for Justice and Peace, penned the report’s foreword. “I have worked in rural communities in which Christians were not respected due to their faith,” he writes. They

Religious Freedom explores the complexity of the issue. The study rates as “red” countries that engage in religious persecution. This group has an outsize impact, as it “includes 26 countries which are home to 3.9 billion people or just over half (51 percent) of the world’s population. This classification includes 12 African countries and two countries where investigations of possible genocide are ongoing, namely China and Myanmar (Burma).”

The People’s Republic of China is the most populous nation and largest persecutor. Its controls are not (yet, anyway) as totalitarian as those in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea. However, Beijing’s hostility to faith afflicts far more people. The death of Mao Zedong led to a long but significant relaxation in state control over religion. Unfortunately, in recent years that liberalization has been reversed.

The report details how the state presents

Xi appears to be determined to become the new Mao. According to the report, five years ago Xi explained to senior party leaders “that ‘religious groups . . . must adhere to the leadership of the Communist Party.’ Party members must be ‘unyielding Marxist atheists’ who ‘resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means.’ This followed a speech by the director of China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs, who told a seminar on the Sinicization of Christianity that ‘Chinese Christian theology should be compatible with the country’s path of socialism.’” That is, Xi wants to remake the faith into a Sino-Leninist variant.

Unfortunately, new technologies are expanding the opportunity for oppression, an issue addressed in a separate chapter:

The second-most populous nation, majority-Hindu India, also presents a serious problem that has worsened dramatically in the past few years, though Delhi’s offenses are of a different magnitude. ACN explains:

ACN rates as “orange” nations that practice discrimination (often simply a less virulent form of persecution). This offense afflicts more countries than in the red category though fewer people overall: “36 countries, home to 1.24 billion people. Slight improvements are identified in nine countries, while the situation in 20 countries is worsening.”

Among the problem states is Egypt, under a dictatorship worse than the long-lived Mubarak regime. “Although religious conversion is not prohibited by law, in practice the government does not recognize conversions from Islam,” ACN notes. “The law does not recognize the Baha’i faith or its religious laws and bans Baha’i institutions and community activities. Baha’is do not have recourse to civil law for personal status matters. The same applies to Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Nor have Christians prospered, despite attempts by the Sisi regime to appeal for their support. The report notes:

Cuba is a largely Christian nation in which Christians face pervasive restrictions. Neither law nor practice is friendly toward believers. The ACN explains that the “Cuban Penal Code says that anyone who ‘abuses freedom of worship as guaranteed by the Constitution’” faces prison. Cuban law “warns that anyone who belongs to or is affiliated with ‘an association that is not listed in the appropriate registry’ can be punished.” Anyone participating “in meetings or protests held by this type of association will be sanctioned.” Moreover, “the Office of Religious Affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party administers the different aspects of religious life: it approves or denies visits by foreigners to religious associations; authorises the construction, repair or acquisition of places of worship; grants permits to perform public religious services; oversees the importation of religious literature, etc.” The communist government also authorizes itself to “regulate and restrict the use of places of worship.”

Next come nations “under observation,” those “where newly emerging factors of concern have been observed which have the potential to cause a fundamental breakdown in freedom of religion.” Unfortunately, in countries in all categories, hate crimes occur “in the form of attacks with a bias against religious people and property.” Threats to religious liberty can occur in any country, even those not currently designated as a significant problem.

A number of factors have spurred persecution of religious believers worldwide. ACN emphasizes the following:

Although Asia, because of populous China and India, is the greatest fount of persecution, Africa joins the Middle East as the most important locations of violent, even murderous persecution. ACN explains:

The human and community cost has been huge. Americans have personal knowledge of the carnage in the Middle East, having been both victims and, tragically, triggers of religious conflict there. The violence in Africa is less well known, yet religious liberty is violated in 23 of 54 nations there. In a dozen states, persecution is severe. People are dying in religious wars little known in America or elsewhere in the West.

“The violence is horrific,” the ACN reports:

Perhaps the most harrowing presentation in the volume is the chart assessing movement since the last report in 2018. Most arrows point down. Among the 26 “red” countries, only Pakistan improved. Among the 36 “orange” malefactors, nine improved and four remained unchanged. Most persecutors are authoritarian. Those regimes with a religious focus are overwhelmingly Muslim. A few are avowedly ethnoreligious and nationalistic.

Religious Freedom in the World is a magnificent source of information about the persecuted. Alas, it offers fewer answers. But that reflects the complexity of the problem rather than any failure in the analysis.

Looking to Washington for answers is a mistake. Although designation of an ambassador for religious liberty was a positive step, as was the formation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. government has done much to contribute to the problem. American military power is more apt to destroy than to construct: The invasion of Iraq had catastrophic consequences for Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and well beyond. The impact of economic sanctions does not distinguish by religion. For instance, Washington’s perverse attempt to force regime change by starving Syria’s civilian population harms religious minorities alongside everyone else, irrespective of support for Bashar al-Assad. Washington’s tight political embrace of oppressive regimes such as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia limits America’s ability to promote human rights, including religious liberty. And the overwhelming importance typically placed on security and economic interests reduces every administration’s ability and even interest in addressing persecution by such l adversaries, and potential adversaries, as North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Washington’s failure puts a premium on people of good will of all faiths to support the persecuted and to press for change. There are organizations, such as Aid to the Church in Need, and many more — of different religious denominations and even no faith commitment — to support. There are criminal regimes to embarrass and shame. And there are victims, so many victims — the threatened, the terrorized, the imprisoned, the beaten, the murdered — to pray for, console, assist, and defend.

Surely that is the least that those of us living amid safety and plenty should do.

More from National Review

• Persecutors Pile on Jehovah’s Witnesses, in Russia and Worldwide

• The Problem of Islamic Religious Persecution

• Christians in Hong Kong, under the Thumb of the Chinese Communist Party