The worldwide repression, persecution and murder of Christians has gotten the attention of Congressman August Pfluger, who says he will use his position as chairman of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Intelligence and Law Enforcement to address the crisis.
“The persecution of Christians around the world continues to be appalling,” Pfluger said from Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, corrupt countries have taken to a mission of persecuting, repressing and punishing those with differing values.
“As the chair of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement, I have spent much of my time this Congress addressing transnational repression and its effect on people seeking a better life. We must hold these countries accountable and protect religious rights.”
Pfluger, a San Angelo Republican, represents the Permian Basin in the 11th Congressional District.
Pastor Nicolas Carraway of Belmont Baptist Church, who has worked extensively as a missionary in Eastern Europe, said the conditions keep worsening largely because the United States has been diplomatically indifferent.
“Christians’ persecution is a perpetual and ongoing issue globally,” Pastor Carraway said. “Even a casual acquaintance with the history of Christianity all the way back to the Biblical period reveals that those attempting to follow Christ with their lives often pay a heavy price.
“As someone who has worked in missions and seen firsthand the expansion of God’s Kingdom on earth and the reciprocal hostile response to it, I am surprised when so many American Christians seem to be oblivious to the daily reality that their brothers and sisters experience overseas.”
Carraway said recently that “squeeze persecution” involves men getting fired from their jobs, their children being expelled from school, their pets being poisoned, their drivers licenses being revoked and their electricity being cut off in Laos, Vietnam, China and other nations.
He said “smash persecution” in Colombia, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Nigeria includes imprisonments, murders and sexual assaults.
“Nigeria is the global hotspot,” he said. “An average of 17 Christians was killed every day there in 2022.”
Carraway said another reason the situation continues to deteriorate is that Christianity often enters a country through acceptance by people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
“To use a Biblical term, these people are the ‘least of these’ and the humility of their circumstances helps them to embrace the Good News of the Gospel more readily than their wealthy countrymen,” he said.
For example, Carraway said, in India the Gospel has been well-received among the Dalits, who are the “untouchables” at the bottom of India’s caste system.
“These poor people, who are looked down upon by everyone else, often find that the message of God’s love for them despite their poverty has an irresistible draw,” he said. “The marginalized status of these people before they even become Christians opens them up to suffer persecution for their new faith in anonymity with complete disinterest from local law enforcement and the media.
“A third reason that the persecution of Christians is not widely known in the U.S. is that foreign governments do their best to hide it,” Carraway said. “Governments that actively persecute Christians, like China, rarely arrest a Christian ‘because they are Christian.’ This would be far too obvious and would expose the country to negative publicity, endangering valuable economic ties with the U.S.
“Instead, charges like ‘disturbing public order’ or unproved claims of financial fraud or association with foreigners are typically utilized to explain why a pastor or a Christian teacher was imprisoned.”
He said those phony charges mean the persecuted Christian is not seen as a prisoner of conscience but rather as a mere criminal.
Carraway said a final reason that the persecution of Christians often goes unnoticed is that the media are unfamiliar or unconcerned with it.
“When compared to many other peoples globally, Americans are profoundly irreligious,” he said. “When American journalists report on, for example, the slaughter of a village in Nigeria, they typically focus on an ethnic difference between the village and its attackers or upon economic factors.
“But shockingly often, the village being destroyed is full of Christians and the men doing the killing, raping and burning are radical Muslims. Yet when attacks like these are reported, it will be under a banal headline like ‘Inter-Ethnic Tension Leads to Clashes.’
“These ‘clashes’ are often more inter-religious than secular journalists realize or care to admit and the bloody results are decidedly one way.”
According to the Bible, Carraway said, the persecution of Christians will not stop until Jesus Christ returns.
“Even though Christians continue to suffer and die all over the world, often in anonymity, they are not forgotten,” he said, citing Psalm 116:15. “For precious in the sight of the Lord is the blood of his saints.”
