Every day on the calendar has those “special days” — commemorations or observations of one thing or another. Most of them are silly, like International Sweatpants Day (Jan. 21) and National Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day (Jan. 22), but some have actual significance.
Last week, one of those days probably passed most of us by. Every Jan. 16 has been National Religious Freedom Day since 1993, but that probably didn’t cross the minds of many Americans. That day is significant because it marks the anniversary of the passing of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was the genesis of the religious freedom protections in the 1st Amendment.
Joe Biden issued a proclamation for this year’s National Religious Freedom Day, which read in part:
On this day, we recognize that the work of protecting religious freedom is never finished. In our quest to build a more perfect Union, may our faiths and beliefs help us heal divisions and bring us together to safeguard this fundamental freedom guaranteed by our Constitution and to ensure that people of all religions or no religion are treated with dignity and respect.
Those are pretty rich words coming from the leader of an administration that has gone after people of faith for three years now. The proclamation reflected the Biden administration’s view of people of faith, an outlook that rings hollow when it comes to genuine religious liberty.
Any mention of antisemitism had an almost reflexive mention of “Islamophobia” following it, and the proclamation drips with the modern left’s assumption that “religious freedom” doesn’t include expressing one’s faith in the public square: "Everyone must be free to practice their faith without fear, whether they are gathering for worship, attending a religious school, participating in the activities of other faith-based organizations, or simply walking down the street wearing the symbols of their faith.”
Biden’s writers (because we don’t dare assume that he wrote this himself) even got the true meaning of religious faith wrong when they had Biden saying that “faith has sustained me throughout my life — serving as a reminder of both our collective purpose and our responsibilities to one another.” That may be part of it, but faith is primarily about the relationship between a person and God in whatever way he or she chooses to worship.
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The White House’s shortsighted view of religious freedom notwithstanding, people of faith are dealing with persecution all over the world. We’ve seen how rampant antisemitism has been since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and PJ Media’s own Catherine Salgado wrote last week about how horrific 2023 was for the persecution of Christians.
Global Christian Relief released a report in the run-up to National Religious Freedom Day about the trends we can expect in persecution in 2024. The report came just a few days after the announcement of the agency’s Violent Incidents Database (VID). With a searchable database containing plenty of options, the VID is going to be an invaluable tool to track religious persecution all over the world.
The report reveals specific factors that will play into religious persecution in the new year. The first trend is that China will continue to crack down on people of faith and use technology as a weapon against religious Chinese people.
Global Christian Relief reports that “the Chinese government treats religion — including Christianity — as a security threat. Bible apps and thousands of Christian websites have been blocked; one cannot even access a single hymn on the Internet in China.” The Communist government there will continue to crack down on churches and weaponize its surveillance state against Christians and other people of faith.
The next trend is the growth of Hindu extremism in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has targeted Christians and Muslims for violence, and because two of Modi’s friends control 82% of the media in India, the stories of persecution don’t make their way into the public. The missionary our church supports in India has had to go into hiding because of threats against him from militant Hindus, including trumped-up legal charges.
“More than 19,000 NGOs and counting have lost licenses — mostly Christian and Muslim groups — shutting down social and educational work and effectively preventing the global church [from] rendering aid to the Indian church,” reports Global Christian Relief. “The BJP also sold media and education sectors to business elites who promote its Hindu nationalist agenda.”
It wouldn’t surprise anybody to hear that Islamic extremism is on Global Christian Relief’s radar for 2024, but it might shock some that “propaganda and disinformation” are on the list. It’s not the kind of “disinformation” that the left warns us about:
According to GCR’s Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, there are four types of common lies told in countries opposed to Christianity. One involves nationalistic lies, for example, “You are not Indian if you are Christian.” Another is a familial lie often heard in places like the Middle East, such as “You dishonor your Muslim parents if you follow Christ.” Criminal lies often ensue in places like Pakistan, where believers are falsely accused of blasphemy: “Christians are guilty of terrible crimes.” And lastly, there are extremist lies, for example, “Christians are violent and evil, so we must kill them first.”
Other factors that Global Christian Relief says we should be concerned about are the weaponization of religion — think of Vladimir Putin using the Russian Orthodox Church as a propaganda arm — and cartels in the Americas targeting religious leaders who speak out against them. Governments that target people of faith are growing increasingly resistant to calls to treat religious people more fairly, although the story is different in the West, where “significant new government and civil society coalitions have formed” to hold up the banner for religious liberty.
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Global Christian Relief points out that Christian persecution is on the rise, and it promises to “speak up for the suffering, so the whole church may know their stories and walk with them in faith and prayer.” At the same time, the persecuted church is demonstrating great resilience:
A pastor in Iran once remarked, “Christians may be the victims of persecution, but the Gospel rarely is.” To exhibit his point, the church in sub-Saharan Africa is set to double in size up to 1.1 billion by 2050, according to the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, keeping Christianity at roughly 33% of the world population. In India, there is a remarkable movement of Hindus following Jesus: those who consider themselves culturally Hindu even though they follow Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
The population of former Muslims coming to Christ is rapidly growing from the Middle East to the Far East, especially in Iran and Indonesia. Even in China, a Christian social scientist remarks that, “The more the Communist Party seeks to give the people material security, the more they crave spiritual experience … and that leads them to God, if not to church.”
However, Christians in the Middle East are seeking to escape the region, even though, as one leader put it, “In the Middle East today, the Christian more and more needs a clear sense of call to remain.”
There’s much to be concerned about and even more to pray for. We should remember persecuted Christians and Jews and people of other faiths in our prayers. Now that we have more tools at our fingertips to report their stories, including the VID, we can hopefully draw more attention to the plight of people who are suffering for their faith.
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