Christianity is, by an order of magnitude, the most persecuted religion in the world today. Between 360 million and 380 million Christians face high degrees of hostility.
Conservative estimates are that more than five thousand Christians are killed annually for their faith, especially in places such as Nigeria and Burkina Faso. But the killing, torture, and imprisonment are taking place across the globe. In many Western countries, a less lethal but still severe form of persecution is visited upon Christians by ideological secularists, who see Christianity as their principal intellectual and cultural opponent.
In many ways, contemporary attacks on Christianity are a continuation of the anti-Christian violence of the twentieth century, which produced more Christian martyrs than all of the previous centuries combined.However, the source of the animosity has shifted considerably.
Whereas in the last century, hostility to Christianity came primarily from depraved totalitarianisms, largely secularist and materialist in orientation, today’s opposition comes, to a considerable degree, from militant forms of Islam in the Middle East, in Asia, and especially in Africa.
In chapter 2, I will explore some of the theological reasons why Christianity has been so put upon throughout its history, but in this opening chapter, I want to tell some stories. I realize that statistics, however impressive, can be rather mind-numbing and antiseptically abstract. I want you to know about real people all over the planet who have been attacked for their Christian faith.
Saint John Henry Newman distinguished between what he called “notional assent” and “real assent.” The former is the intellectual consent we give to propositions, and the latter is the visceral affirmation that we give to matters concretely observed and deeply felt.
A good example of this difference is the somewhat bland conviction many in nineteenth-century America had that slavery is morally objectionable (notional assent) and the passionate conviction that something had to be done about it (real assent). Many have argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which brought before the imagination of many Americans the horror of slavery, actually led to real change.
Though it might be legendary, the tale is told that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he said, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?” I have no interest in starting a war! But l do want to help people experience the truth of Christian persecution so vividly that they are moved to do something about it. I do indeed want to shake people-especially my fellow Christians-out of complacency in the face of an unconscionable violation of human rights.
THE COPTIC MARTYRS OF LIBYA
I will confess that the horror of anti-Christian persecution in its peculiarly contemporary form first came on my radar with the reports of the Libyan martyrs of 2015. Perhaps many now in the West know the story in its basic outlines, but it is worthwhile to rehearse it in some detail.
In late 2014 and early 2015, the militant Islamic group ISIS kidnapped twenty-one construction workers-most of them from Egypt and members of the Coptic Orthodox Church-who were living in the Libyan beach town of Sirte.
On February 15, 2015, the media service of the Islamic State published an appalling video. Bearing the description “a message signed in blood to the nation of the cross,” it showed the twenty-one captives, all dressed in orange jumpsuits, being paraded out to a beach and then forced to their knees. It subsequently showed the grisly beheading of the men.
An account of the ordeal by the German journalist Martin Mosebach is worth citing at length: “The camera lingers on individual faces. On the left you can clearly see twenty-three-year-old Kiryollos with his questioning, almost absent-looking expression. Then comes the face of twenty-two-year-old Gaber, whose brow is furrowed and whose eyes stay closed as his lips move in whispered prayer .. . .
Then, in a synchronized wave, the captors push their bound prisoners forward, faces down in the sand. They loom over them, kneel atop their backs, grab their hair, pull their heads up, unsheathe their knives, and hold the blades to their throats.”
An edited audio clip accompanying the video allows us to hear the agonized shouts and cries of the men as they are being killed. It also reveals many of them shouting in Arabic “Ya Rabb ]esua” (Lord Jesus), indicating that they were professing their faith in the face of death. At the conclusion of the video, the organizer of the murder speaks directly to the camera: “And we will conquer Rome by Allah’s permission, the promise of our Prophet, peace be upon him.” As he speaks, one can see the blood of the martyrs pooling on the ground behind him.
Just six days after their deaths, Pope Tawadros II, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, canonized the twenty-one victims and declared them martyrs. And in May of 2023, in an extraordinary move, Pope Francis added these non-Catholic men to The Roman Martyrology. Here, in part, is what he said on the occasion: “These martyrs were baptized not only in water and the Spirit, but also in blood, with a blood that is a seed of unity for all followers of Christ.” What the rhetoric of the killers and the reverential language of the two Christian leaders made plain is that the struggle here was not primarily political or cultural. It was religious. It involved a conscious and vicious attack on Christians because of their Christianity.
I find particularly moving the words of confession on the lips of some of the dying men. I don’t mean, of course, confession of sins, but rather profession of faith in the lordship of Jesus. From the time of Peter and Paul, through that of Thomas More, right down to the present day, the challenge has been fundamentally the same: proclaiming the distinctive lordship of Jesus in the face of sometimes ferocious opposition.
FATHER JACQUES HAMEL
In the summer of 2016, I was in Krakow to speak at the World Youth Day gathering in that wonderful Polish city. I had prepared a homily on the Eucharist for a celebration of benediction in a sports stadium filled with tens of thousands of young people. But just before the presentation, I received word of the shocking murder of French priest Father Jacques Hamel, and I decided, spontaneously, to change the subject of my sermon. I spoke to the Catholic youth from all over the world about witnessing, even with our blood, to Christ the Lord. I told them about Father Hamel and about the way his life had ended.
Jacques Hamel was a parish priest who, at the time of his death, was eighty-five years old. Ordained in 1958, he served in a number of parishes in northwest France. His final assignment was to the church in Saint-Etiennedu-Rouvray, from which he retired in 2005. However, he continued to work in the final decade of his life, making himself available to the people for confession and celebrating Mass. He also, during this time, served on an interfaith committee in Normandy with representatives of the Muslim faith. He was a good man and a good priest, not flashy, but beloved for his simplicity and dedication to his people.
While he was saying Mass in Saint-Etienne, two young men, both nineteen, both professing allegiance to the Islamic State, kidnapped him along with four others, holding them captive for a short time. During the struggle, Father Jacques was heard to say to the men, “Va-t’en Satan!” (Get away, Satan!). In short order, they slit his throat. The murdered priest’s last words show that he had a keen sense of the contours of the struggle in which he was engaged. His young killers were but minions of a far greater and more dangerous spiritual authority that has long dogged Jesus and his mystical body.
NIGERIA
Perhaps the most striking examples of anti-Christian persecution are on the African continent. Part of the reason for this is that ISIS, once its power was neutralized in the Middle East, gained ground in Africa. Another reason for anti-Christian militancy in Africa is the very success of Christianity on that continent. There are approximately 2.3 billion Christians in the world, and about 700 million of them-which is to say, 31 percent of the total-are found in Africa. This helps to explain why militant Muslims in the region would be particularly vexed and spurred to action.
Hotspots of violence against Christians in Africa include countries like Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and, perhaps most prominently, Nigeria. In 2020, a Catholic seminarian in Nigeria named Michael Nnadi, only eighteen years old, was kidnapped by Muslim gunmen, along with three of his classmates. While the other students were freed days later, Nnadi remained in custody, apparently because he consistently proclaimed his faith and even upbraided his captors for their actions, encouraging them to repent. These same brutal kidnappers also apprehended a Catholic woman, Bolanle Ataga, and her two daughters. When the barbarians tried to rape Ataga, she resisted and was immediately murdered. In time, the leader of the marauders, Mustapha Mohammed, killed Michael Nnadi and later, upon his capture, confessed that he respected the young man for his “outstanding bravery.”
The Nigerian atrocity that first served to bring anti-Christian persecution vividly to the attention of the West was the 2014 abduction of 276 girls, mostly Christian, by Boko Haram militants in the town of Chibok in Barno State. Though the school had been closed for four weeks due to security concerns, hundreds of students had returned for their final exams. The kidnappers arrived disguised as Nigerian military, and they loaded hundreds of the girls onto trucks and drove them into the jungle. Around 50 of the young women managed to escape, but the rest were taken to a variety of Boko Haram camps. Most were forced to convert to Islam, and some were used as sex slaves. In a video taking responsibility for the kidnapping, the Boko Haram leader defended the practice: “Slavery is allowed in my religion, and I shall capture people and make them slaves.”
A later video revealed a number of the Christian girls dressed in hijabs and long Islamic chadors. This brutality raised the ire of many in the West, but frankly, little of consequence was accomplished besides public protests. And to this day, many of the girls are missing and unaccounted for.
A characteristic feature of the persecution of the churches in Nigeria is the kidnapping, torture, and in many cases, murder of Catholic priests. The story of Father Stephen Ojapah is typical. In May of 2022, two gunmen entered Father Ojapah’s rectory at night while he was sleeping. They seized him and three others and forced them to march for two days to a primitive campsite. There they were “welcomed with a heavy round of beating.” Chained together so that they wouldn’t escape, they were tormented both physically and mentally week after week. The group was eventually released thanks to the negotiations of another priest from the diocese, but in the months that followed, Father Ojapah had to undergo intensive therapy due to the trauma that he had experienced.
Not every priest was as fortunate as Father Ojapah. In 2023, Father Isaac Achi was burned alive by bandits attacking his presbytery in Kafin-Koro, Niger State, and Father Charles Igechi, only thirty-three years of age and in his first year of priesthood, was killed in the midst of his pastoral work in Benin City.
On Christmas Eve, 2023, an army of Fulani terrorists stormed dozens of Christian villages in coordinated attacks near Bokkos in North-Central Nigeria. Three hundred people died in these assaults and hundreds more were injured. The invaders shot at their victims indiscriminately with machine guns and chopped at them with machetes. Some of the men tried to fight back, but they were overwhelmed by the number of terrorists and the sophistication of their weapons.
That the onslaught occurred on Christmas Eve, just when the people would be gathering for dinner after Mass, shows unambiguously the anti-Christian character of the violence. And more recently, in April of 2024, the same militant group attacked three villages in the vicinity of Bokkos, killing ten Christians, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child. The following week, Fulani raiders unleashed heinous violence in the region for three days straight, burning down homes and churches and killing another twenty-nine Christians.
These are, of course, but a few instances, taken from just one country, of a general anti-Christian mayhem that has afflicted Africa for decades.
This excerpt is from Chapter One of What Do Their Deaths Demand? By Bishop Robert Barron, published by Word on Fire, Elk Grove Village, IL, USA, © 2026 by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
The 70 page booklet is available for purchase at Word on Fire and at Amazon.com.
Top image credit: A conceptual illustration of Christ’s victory on the cross bringing salvation to all who believe in him, from Bigstockphoto.com, © by Hasenonkel, stock photo ID: 3956609. Used with permission.
Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a noted author, speaker, and theologian, and founder of the global media ministry Word on Fire.