Their Blood Cries Out: The Growing Worldwide Persecution of Christians

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There are few more ironic sights than watching a Chinese leader standing under portraits of Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Stalin denouncing Christianity as a foreign import. At the time of the Crusades most of the population of the Middle East was Christian. At the turn of this century, about one-third of the population of the Middle East was Christian.

Their Blood Cries Out

Since then, many have been massacred, many gave up their faith, many fled—and that flight from the Middle East continues. The Real Center of World Christianity Most of us still assume that the center of world Christianity is in Europe and the United States and, as I said, that the situation of Christians in these countries is typical. But let me throw out a few statistics. On any given Sunday more people go to church in China than do in all of western Europe put together.

It is perhaps true of India, Nigeria, and Brazil. By that definition, there are probably to million Christians north of the Rio Grande. The continent with the next lowest number would be Asia, with about to million Christians.

Taking the world as a whole, a Christian is as likely to be a Chinese or Indonesian peasant or an Egyptian shopkeeper or an Indian untouchable as a white middle-class American. The Growing Persecution One effect of our thinking that the center of world Christianity is in the free countries of Europe and America is that we do not realize that much of the Church today is persecuted for its faith.

I have documented the suffering of Christians in approximately 65 countries. I try to limit the term persecution to those who face violence, imprisonment, torture, and death for their faith, not those who experience legal impediments to the exercise of their faith, as painful as these can be. Given this definition, we can say that million Christians live in situations of persecution and another million live in situations of legal discrimination and oppression, for a total of about million Christians who are suffering for their faith in Jesus Christ.

This does not include the hundreds of millions of other Christians who suffer from war, famine, and oppression. Sometimes we think that the persecution of Christians for their faith was largely a Communist phenomenon and that it has passed away with the demise of Communism. Two facts need to be pointed out. In fact, since and especially since the Chinese government has intensified its persecution of Christians.

The persecution grew even more intense in , at precisely the point the American government was saying that its human rights policies towards China were showing success.

One reason for this is that the Chinese government is aware of the role that the Church played in the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe, by providing an alternative allegiance to the Communist Party. Unlike many Westerners, the Chinese take religion seriously and recognize its influence. So the situation in China has been getting worse, for both the underground Protestant and underground Catholic churches.

The Roman Catholic Church itself is illegal in China, because no religious body is allowed to have an authority structure which crosses the border of the country. There are currently five Chinese Catholic Bishops in prison. Second, persecution is continuing and in fact increasing in other parts of the world, principally under radical Islamic regimes, though also in south Asian societies, Hindu and Buddhist.

Let me give some examples. Most news media have not covered the fact that many of the people who have been most oppressed in Chiapas are Protestants. Many of their leaders also have been assassinated. Throughout Mexico more generally there is sporadic violence against Protestants. To pick two towns you might recognize, Protestant churches were attacked and burned in Acapulco and Cancun.

The Indian government has a sort of affirmative action program for untouchables because they are so discriminated against in their society. There are university places and government jobs reserved for them. The rules apply to all untouchables: Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Sikh—except the Christians. If you are a Christian untouchable, you are at the bottom of the heap even amongst untouchables. And still there are about 28 million Christians in India.

If a Saudi professes to be another religion, it is assumed that he or she must have left Islam, that is, has become an apostate. And apostasy carries the death penalty. Expatriate Christians from powerful countries like the U. However, if you happen to be a Christian from Egypt or the Philippines, even a prayer meeting in a private house is likely to be broken up by the Matowa, the religious police.

If you speak about your faith openly, you may face the death sentence in Saudi Arabia. By the way, I should note that often the best missionaries in countries like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates are the Filipinos who are imported to work as servants. Christians who work in these countries are often trained in the background of Islam and cross-cultural sensitivity, both of which are vitally necessary if you are going to work there.

Yet it turns out that some of the best evangelists in these countries are not those who have been carefully trained. They are the largely charismatic, Catholic Filipinos, who simply have an unabashed open faith, and talk about and sometimes pay the penalty for it. Nobody has taught them about cross-cultural sensitivity. I pray to the Lord Jesus. I love my Lord Jesus. Its leaders, and particularly anybody who engages in evangelism, is marked for assassination.

Many Christians have fled the country and made their way to Turkey. The Turks are usually not very sympathetic to Christian refugees, and as you may know, the Turks massacred about 2 million Armenian Christians between and That is one reason the number of Christians in the Middle East has dropped so dramatically in this century. In some countries, in Qatar, in Sudan, in Mauritania, the death penalty for apostasy is part of the legal system, that is, the state will kill you for becoming a Christian.

Their Blood Cries Out (Paul Marshall, ) – Ransom Fellowship

In many other countries the death penalty is not required by law but it is the practical effect of apostasy, because the community will kill you for becoming a Christian. Much of the oppression of Christians, particularly in the Islamic world, is not necessarily done by the governments, but by neighbors, by guerrillas opposing the government, by mob violence. In Sudan the government is a radical Islamic government, seeking to impose Sharia, the Islamic law, on the entire country. To do this, it is engaging in a religious war or jihad.

The principle object of that war are the people in the south of Sudan who are largely black African—the north is largely Arab —and largely Christian, with some animists. That war has now been going on for at least thirty years, but within the last ten years it has been more intense. On a world scale, the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, while terrible, are two of the smaller conflicts. The war in Rwanda is one of the larger ones, as are the wars in Sudan and Myanmar. She is quoting Akuac Amet, who recalled the day of the raid on her village:.

The enemy came early on March This woman was too old to run; so they caught her and beat her so badly it was impossible to know if she was alive or dead. The enemy returned and killed her four sons and kidnaped her daughter.

New PDF release: Their Blood Cries Out: The Growing Worldwide Persecution of

Her daughter can be returned, if the money can be found—but there is no one to pay the money. I came and took care of this old lady and have looked after her. About three hundred people were killed. The enemy divided into two groups—some on horseback, some on foot. We ran with the children to try to hide them in the long grass, but they found us and drove the older children away.

Any who refused to go, they killed them. Those who were taken away were tied with rope and pulled like cows behind horses.

Some children were as little as seven years old. Some died of thirst, and they were not given any water. The families of those who were captured are still trying to find the money to pay for their children. If they have no money, they can be told that their children are still alive, but are unable to buy them back.

We are happy you have come to meet us to see how we are suffering, and how our children have been taken away by the enemy. There are at best estimates about , Christian slaves in Sudan. There are thriving slave markets in Sudan—I have seen them. Depending on the laws of supply and demand the price for slaves varies between about 5 and 15 cows.

Many of the slave traders can get better prices for the children by selling them back to their parents rather than to someone else, because the parents will presumably pay more. And, overwhelmingly, they are people who, given a moments time, space, and freedom, live life with joy, enthusiasm, and gratitude.

It is futile to equate Christianity with clear-cut national, political, and ethnic boundaries. Human life always presents itself, not the least in the religious field, in a complex, intertwined, pluriform, and shaded combination of factors that is at once exhilaration, frightening, and bewildering. But one thing we can say is that the assault on Christians is a fundamental part of the assault on human freedom itself.

Many Christians are leading democracy and human-rights activists. They are also in forefront of economic development. But perhaps more important than what they do is who they are. While usually loyal citizens, they embody an attachment to another King, a loyalty to a standard of spiritual allegiance apart from the political order. This fact itself denies that the state is the all-encompassing or ultimate arbiter of human life.

Regardless of how the relation between God and Caesar has been expressed, it now at least means that, contra the Romans and modern totalitarians, Caesar is not God. This confession, however mute, sticks in the craw of every authoritarian regime and draws their angry and bloody response. Many Christians are therefore persecuted simply because they are Christians. Their usually peaceful and quiet beliefs stand as a rebuke to those who are corrupt, to those who cannot tolerate the presence of any view but their own, and to those who want to make their own political regime the only focus of loyalty.

Their very existence is a silent witness to a claim beyond human control. Samuel Huntington maintains that the third wave of democracy in the s and 80s encompassing Iberia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines stemmed in large part from the renewed commitment to democracy and human rights in the Catholic Church.

George Weigel has pointed out the role of the church, and especially the Pope, in the erosion of Communism in Eastern Europe. In , on the thousandth anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed churches to ring out their bells for the first time in seventy years.

Russians have described the wonder and elation they felt as a new spiritual presence resounded through the streets and squares a presence that reached beyond Communism and hastened the loosening of totalitarianisms grip on human minds and souls. I am not making the absurd suggestion that religious renewal, apart from any other social, economic, political, or strategic factors, brought the end of these authoritarian regimes.

But I am saying that it is equally absurd to discuss political freedom without attending to the role of religion. Czech President, and former prisoner, Vaclav Havel knows this well. With his customary clarity and prescience, he described the Soviet expulsion of author and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn as:. If this connection has not been clear to western observers afflicted with secular myopia it has been all too clear to the Communist authorities in China and Vietnam.

As brutal practitioners of power they are perversely aware of the power of human spirituality and so take religion with deadly seriousness. In the Chinese state-run press noted that the church played an important role in the change in Eastern Europe and warned, if China does not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.

With this evil biblical allusion, the Chinese leadership adopted Herod as its role model. On the assumption that Communists know the Bible better and therefore see its power more than many secular westerners, perhaps it is worth outlining the texts to which the Chinese authorities refer:. A voice is heard in Ramah, lamenting and weeping bitterly: And Rachel weeps still, in China and elsewhere.

Because Christians are spread throughout the world in many thousand different ethnic and cultural groups, their suffering provides a touchstone for how regimes treat human rights in general. In country after country, region after region, town after town, the persecution of Christians is a harbinger of the repression of other human rights of political dissidents, of intellectuals, of unionists, of women, of children, of homosexuals.

Those who desire to control Christians desire to control everything. Just as anti-Semitism, even apart from its own inherent evil, is a reliable indicator of the growth of other forms of repression in society, so Christians now function as the canary in the mine shaft: When they collapse, other deaths are sure to follow.

In the same way, those who ignore the plight of Christians throughout the world bear an awkward resemblance to those who turned a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews throughout this century. If we are concerned about human rights of any kind, we need to pay attention to Christians who they are, how they live, why they suffer. Cuban Poet Armando Valladares account of his twenty-two years in Castros prisons includes the description of one particular Christian. All of us called Gerardo the Brother of the Faith His sermons had a primitive beauty; he himself had an extraordinary magnetism.

From a pulpit improvised from old salt-codfish boxes covered with a sheet, behind a cross, the thundering voice of the Brother of the Faith would preach his daily sermons. Then we would all sing hymns he wrote out on cigarette packages and passed out to those of us at the meeting. Many times the garrison broke up those minutes of prayer with blows and kicks, but they never managed to intimidate him. When they took him off to the forced labor fields of Isla de Piftos, he organized Bible readings and choirs.

Having a Bible was a subversive act, but he had, we never knew how, a little one which he always carried with him. If some exhausted or sick prisoner fell behind in the furrows or hadnt piled up the amount of rock he had been ordered to break, the Brother of the faith would turn up. He was thin and wiry, with incredible stamina for physical labor, He would catch the other man up in his work, save him from brutal beatings.

When one of the guards would walk up behind him and hit him, the Brother of the Faith would spring erect, look into the guards eyes, and say to him, May God pardon you. In the midst of that apocalyptic vision of the most dreadful and horrifying moments in my life, in the midst of the gray, ashy dust and the orgy of beatings and blood, prisoners beaten to the ground, a man emerged, the skeletal figure of a man wasted by hunger, with white hair, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with love, raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading for mercy for his executioners.

Forgive them, Father for they know not what they do. And a burst of machine-gun fire ripping open his breast. The suffering of Christians, like the pain of any human being, cries out for our attention, our sympathy, and our action. As Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in the Washington Post, Politically as citizens and objectively in terms of the pain of foreign brothers, the Christian community has right and reason to be heard.

The efforts will save lives. Maybe my defensiveness is not needed! If it is, I hope all that follows will make it superfluous. In China, in March They were singled out because the authorities suspected them of contact with foreigners. According to a eyewitness account

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