Persecution of Christians in the Post–Cold War Era

Religious persecution is commonly defined as persistent suffering inflicted on people because of their beliefs.[1] The concept therefore covers more than a single type of assault or policy. The 1998 U.S. Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad listed physical attacks and killings, detention and imprisonment for religious adherence, restrictions on worship and expression, destruction or restriction of places of worship, employment and education discrimination, limits on religious membership and observance, and forced exile or expulsion.[2] It also described religious discrimination as a religion-based distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference that impairs equal enjoyment of human rights.[2]

For Christians in the post–Cold War era, the documented cases show several overlapping settings. Governments have restricted religious activity through registration systems, surveillance, censorship, and punishment of unauthorized worship; armed groups have attacked churches and imposed conversion, taxation, or flight; and private actors have assaulted Christian communities where state protection or accountability was inadequate.[3][5] These forms should not be collapsed into one uniform global campaign: they differ in perpetrators, scale, motive, legal context, and the quality of available evidence.[8]

The evidence in this article is strongest for a selected group of countries and episodes, particularly in the Middle East, and does not constitute a comprehensive history of every Christian community or country since the Cold War. It includes official reports, academic research, reference works, and advocacy or commentary sources. Their figures should be read according to what they measure: an incident count, a population estimate, a report of a particular attack, or an allegation attributed to a community or organization—not as interchangeable evidence.

The late twentieth century combined new openings with persistent repression. In 1998, the U.S. Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad observed that people in former totalitarian countries were seeking new opportunities for spiritual life while religious intolerance and persecution continued worldwide. It said accurate global totals of people denied religious freedom or persecuted for faith could not be determined.[2] The report emphasized that violations affected followers of all major religions, Christians among them, and could cause suffering, instability, and violence.[2]

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 made the promotion of religious freedom a basic aim of U.S. foreign policy and created a State Department office and ambassador-at-large position focused on the issue. It mandated annual State Department reports on religious freedom in every country and assigned the ambassador a role in recommending diplomatic responses.[9] A Pew account says the campaign initially focused on the persecution of Christians but expanded to cover all religious communities, especially religious minorities persecuted for their faith.[9]

A 2014 interpretation by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described religious freedom as “the casualty of the new global disorder,” pointing to violence in the Middle East and threats in sub-Saharan Africa, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia.[10] Sacks also cited a 2014 Aid to the Church in Need report as finding deterioration in religious freedom in almost half the world’s countries and sectarian violence at a six-year high, although his commentary did not provide the underlying country-level data or methodology.[10] In 2016, he wrote that Christians were persecuted in “some 50 countries,” without explaining how that count was compiled.[11] These are attributed assessments rather than independently established global totals.

Persecution can be carried out by states, nonstate organizations, or private individuals, and a single country may exhibit more than one pattern. State restrictions can operate through licensing of religious groups and buildings, limits on teaching or online activity, raids, detention, or punishment of converts and unregistered congregations. Nonstate attacks may include bombings, killings, kidnappings, property seizure, and coercive demands to convert, pay a tax, or leave. In Egypt, for example, sources describe attacks on Copts by private individuals as well as failures by authorities to protect them or punish perpetrators.[12]

Counts of countries where Christians experience harassment are not counts of persecuted individuals. Pew Research Center’s country-by-country tracking recorded harassment of Christians by governments or private actors in 107 countries in 2007 and 165 in 2023; its 2023 total was slightly below the 166 countries recorded in 2022.[6] Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident and expressly does not treat the total as a measure of frequency, severity, or which religion is most persecuted.[6] Its definition of physical harassment includes property damage, detention, assaults, displacement, and killings, while nonphysical harassment includes biased remarks and policies that make religious practice more difficult.[6]

A table drawing on Pew’s reporting counted Christians as harassed in 105 countries in 2011, 128 in 2015, and 155 in 2020.[13] A Ynet account of an earlier Pew study reported harassment in 111 countries between mid-2009 and mid-2010, alongside figures of 90 countries for Muslims and 68 for Jews.[14] These totals describe the geographic reach of reported incidents, not victim totals, and should not be directly compared without considering differences in time period and method.[6][14]

Pew’s review of restrictions affecting religious groups more broadly found increases over 2007–2017 in both government restrictions and the highest levels of social hostilities. Countries with high or very high government restrictions rose from 40 to 52, while countries with the highest levels of social hostilities rose from 39 to 56.[15] The review also recorded a decline in the number of countries with interreligious tension and violence, from 91 in 2007 to 57 in 2017.[15] These indices are not Christian-specific and do not establish a common trajectory across all religious communities.

Motives also require care. Attacks may be explicitly directed at Christians, while other violence occurs amid conflict, criminality, ethnic divisions, or competition over land and resources. In Nigeria, the State Department warned that these factors were often intertwined and that available incident data did not always establish deliberate religious targeting.[8]

In North Korea, religious activity outside state control is described as especially dangerous for Christians. Although the constitution formally confirms freedom of religion, reference accounts say religious practice remained under government control; churches and Buddhist temples were confiscated and looted after the Korean War, and many were put to other uses.[16] USCIRF’s 2023 report says the ruling ideology treats religion as an existential threat and that authorities monitor and control religious activity despite the constitutional language. It describes Christianity as treated as a political crime and Christians as disproportionately represented among detainees, with punishment including torture and killing.[3]

The State Department’s 2023 North Korea report summarized a Korea Future study based on accounts from 244 victims, 91 of whom were Christian. Reported abuses included arrest, detention, forced labor, torture, denial of fair trial, and sexual violence.[7] The report also cited an Open Doors USA estimate of 50,000 to 70,000 people imprisoned for being Christian; this is an attributed NGO estimate, not an independently verified count.[7] Sources also give differing Christian-population estimates: an Encyclopedia.com entry cites a government-attributed figure of about 14,000 and less than 1 percent, while USCIRF cites a higher estimate and cautions that religious-demographic information is difficult to confirm and often outdated.[17][3]

The limits of access affect documentation of North Korean abuses. The State Department said the scale of underground religious activity was difficult to quantify because of the country’s inaccessibility, fewer defectors, and limited ability to verify individual cases.[7] It cited an NKDB aggregation of 1,411 reported religious-freedom abuse cases from 2007 to 2020, including killings, disappearances, detentions, and other punishments, and relayed a 2023 account of five family members arrested after gathering for secret prayer and Bible study.[7] The American Jewish Committee separately relayed a UN Commission of Inquiry finding that people attempting to practice religious beliefs had been severely punished, in some cases unto death.[12]

China’s system combines formal permission for “normal” religious activity with state control over which activity is permissible. An account of Chinese Christianity says tighter controls introduced in 1989 included registration of places of worship; following the 1999 ban on Falun Gong, arrests of Protestants and Catholics meeting without official permission increased.[18] Unregistered Christian groups faced fines, arrests, and demolition of meeting places, while pressure on unregistered Catholic communities also increased.[18] USCIRF reported that in 2022 authorities intensified pressure on Protestant house churches, targeting Protestants who would not join the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and detained or forcibly disappeared Catholic clergy who refused to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.[3]

Pew has ranked China among the world’s most restrictive governments on religion in every year of its tracking since 2007.[19] Christians may worship in officially registered churches, while many others gather in unregistered congregations. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, Pew reports, the government has banned online evangelization, tightened controls on Christian activity outside registered venues, shut churches that refused registration, and arrested prominent church leaders; it also reported that some Christians were reportedly held in internment camps.[19]

Reports concerning 2019 describe raids or closures of hundreds of Protestant house churches, cash offers for information about underground congregations, the burning of unauthorized Bibles, removal of crucifixes, and replacement of Christian images with images of President Xi Jinping.[20] MEMRI frames related measures as “Sinicization” campaigns intended to bring religious communities into conformity with the party-state’s ideology and limit their capacity to sustain distinct traditions.[21] A 2018 account also described rules prohibiting live-streamed prayers and sermons and requiring approval for religious teachers seeking to give online lessons, including assessments of political reliability.[22]

In Iran, pressure has particularly affected evangelicals, converts from Islam, and house-church participants. USCIRF’s 2013 report described raids on Christian services, harassment of church members, and arrests and imprisonment of worshippers and leaders. It reported at least 300 Christians arbitrarily arrested and detained since June 2010 and at least a dozen still imprisoned at the end of its reporting period.[23] A report summarizing the State Department’s 2018 findings said Christians, particularly evangelicals and converts, faced disproportionate arrest and detention, harassment, and surveillance.[24]

The same report said 10-year prison sentences were upheld for Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, Yasser Mossayebzadeh, Saheb Fadaie, and Mohammad Reza Omidi for acting against national security through “promoting Zionist Christianity” and operating house churches.[24] It also reported that three of the men awaited appeal of an 80-lash sentence for consuming communion wine. Estimates of Iran’s Christian population in that article ranged from 117,700 to approximately 547,000, with another estimate of 300,000 to one million; these were figures attributed to separate institutions rather than a single agreed count.[24]

Eritrea’s government has restricted both unregistered communities and recognized religious bodies. USCIRF’s 2013 report described thousands of religious prisoners, arbitrary arrests of members of unregistered groups, a prolonged ban on public religious activities, and government interference in recognized communities.[23] Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians were among the disfavored groups facing particularly serious conditions, while the government also dominated the internal affairs of the Eritrean Orthodox Church.[23] In its account of 2022, USCIRF said only four religious communities had been permitted to operate since 2002 and that even recognized communities faced restrictions, including the detention of three Catholic leaders after they raised human-rights violations in sermons.[3]

In Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, an account of the Catholic Church describes a legal and administrative environment in which Islam had special status and the 1999 constitution named Sharia and Islamic custom as sources of legislation.[25] It reports police harassment and occasional false arrests of Catholic priests, authorities razing Christian churches and schools, confiscation of church property, and refusal of building permits.[25] The same account estimates that at least 1.5 million southern Sudanese died and 4.5 million more became refugees or displaced between 1983 and 1994, attributing displacement to the combined effects of civil war and recurrent drought rather than religious persecution alone.[25]

The 1998 Advisory Committee also described restrictions in other countries. It said Pakistan’s blasphemy law carried a death penalty for acts considered to defame the Prophet, independent Christians in Vietnam faced arrest and harassment, and intimidation in Iran affected Christian communities whose members had experienced harassment, persecution, and extrajudicial killing.[2]

The Islamic State’s 2014 campaign against Christians in Iraq combined threats, forced displacement, property seizure, and attacks on religious institutions. The Counter Extremism Project reports that after capturing Mosul on June 10, 2014, ISIS initially demanded that Christians pay jizya; two days later, it threatened death or forced conversion unless they left by the following week.[4] The State Department described the ultimatum as a choice to convert, pay a special tax, leave Mosul by July 19, or face execution, and said Christians in Raqqa had previously received a similar ultimatum.[5] ISIL also barred Christians in Mosul from public-sector work and wage stipends and looted or occupied Christian churches and offices.[5]

The State Department’s 2014 Iraq report said killings, sexual slavery, forced conversion, ransom demands, property seizures, and forced business closures accompanied ISIL’s targeting of Christians and other religious minorities.[26] It reported that about 400 Christian families who remained in Mosul departed by July 20, adding to nearly 50,000 Christians who had already fled Mosul and the surrounding region. By late July, 45 Christian institutions had reportedly been occupied or destroyed.[26]

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum classifies Islamic State crimes against Christian, Yezidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Sabaean-Mandaean, and Kaka’i communities in Ninewa Province between June and August 2014 as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes.[27] The Museum distinguishes this classification from its genocide finding, which concerns the Yezidi people.[27] Its account of a Christian shopkeeper named Ibrahim describes how he initially remained in Mosul and agreed to pay jizya, but IS refused the payment. He left on July 19 with most of the city’s remaining Christians and fled again when IS entered Qaraqosh in August.[28]

Estimates of Iraq’s Christian population vary by source and date. The Counter Extremism Project gives estimates of 1.4 million in 2003 and between 150,000 and 275,000 in 2016, while the State Department’s 2023 report cites estimates that fewer than 150,000 Christians remained, compared with approximately 1.5 million before 2003.[4][29] The 2014 State Department report instead relayed Christian leaders’ estimate of 400,000 to 500,000, down from a pre-2002 estimate of 800,000 to 1.4 million.[26] These figures should not be treated as a single consistent series or as proof that persecution alone caused the decline.

The State Department’s 2023 Iraq report also recorded allegations and reported experiences after the major ISIS advance. Christian families formally registered as Muslim were reportedly required to register their children as Muslim or leave them undocumented, while Christian families reported verbal harassment and physical abuse by Popular Mobilization Forces members.[29] The report relayed allegations that PMF brigades facilitated land sales intended to reduce the Christian population in the Ninewa Plain and supported the seizure of Christian properties. It presented these as attributed allegations and experiences rather than independently adjudicated findings.[29]

In Syria, Christian communities experienced both the civil war’s general violence and threats directed at religious groups. The Counter Extremism Project estimates that Syria’s Christian population declined from 1.25 million in 2011 to 500,000 in 2016.[4] A 2016 Ynet account instead reported estimates of 600,000 to 700,000 Christians before the uprising and civil war and 200,000 to 300,000 at the time of publication; it cautioned that many Christians died in bombings and shelling unconnected to their religion.[30] A commentary article reported that by December 2013, 450,000 Syrian Christians had fled their homes and that 1,200 murders of Christians had been documented, while also reporting 45 Christians killed and 14 churches destroyed in Saddad in October 2013.[31] These are reported estimates rather than a comprehensive independently verified count.

A Tel Aviv University conference page describes Christian population declines across the Middle East in the twenty-first century, linking departures from ancestral communities in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories to political crises, instability, and a resurgence of extremism.[32] The page provides no country-by-country figures or causal breakdown.

In Nigeria, a 2012 analysis by David Cook says Boko Haram’s violence against Christians became more deliberate in late 2011, contrasting the shift with earlier attacks in which Christians were targeted more randomly and did not appear to be a priority.[33] It identifies attacks on local Christians in Borno, Yobe, and Bauchi; bombings of prominent churches in Jos and Abuja; and attacks on church or parachurch personnel in northern Nigeria and the Middle Belt.[33] A reference account says Boko Haram was founded in northeastern Nigeria in 2002, intensified violence after 2009, and attacked government and security sites as well as Christian churches and schools.[34]

Cook reports that attacks beginning in Damaturu on November 4, 2011, and subsequent operations through spring 2012 killed at least 100 people. He characterizes the operations as intended to drive Christians from northern towns, while describing claims about the flight of the remaining Christian population as anecdotal.[33] Suicide attacks on churches in Jos and Abuja on Christmas Day 2011 killed at least 25 people, and further attacks on Christian targets were recorded during January and February 2012.[33]

The State Department’s 2023 Nigeria report says Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa attacked both Christians and Muslims, including churches and mosques, and stresses that religion, ethnicity, land and resource competition, and criminality often overlap.[8] An analysis cited in the report counted 12,793 Christians and 4,497 Muslims killed by entities it designated “terror groups” from October 2019 through September 2022 but did not determine whether Christians were deliberately targeted because of their religious identity.[8] The report also relayed Open Doors’ figures for October 2022 to September 2023: 4,118 Christians killed, 3,300 abducted, and 100,000 internally displaced.[8]

USCIRF’s account of Nigeria in 2022 said ISIS-West Africa claimed attacks against Christian communities, including an attack during Pentecost Sunday services at a Catholic church in Ondo State in which investigations alleged at least 40 people were killed.[3] A separate 2012 report on a suicide bombing at St. Rita’s Catholic Church in Kaduna said at least eight people were killed and 145 injured in the bombing and retaliatory attacks. No group had claimed responsibility at the time, although the report noted Boko Haram’s previous similar attacks.[35]

In Egypt, Coptic Christians have faced both attacks by private individuals and official discrimination. Christianity is legally permitted, but the American Jewish Committee says Copts have often been attacked and that the government has failed adequately to protect them or ensure perpetrators are punished; it also identifies restrictions on building and maintaining churches.[12] The State Department’s 2011 report said the government had failed to curb rising violence and had itself been involved in violent attacks. On October 9, 2011, security forces attacked demonstrators outside Cairo’s radio and television building; 25 people were killed and 350 injured, most of them Coptic Christians.[36]

The Counter Extremism Project records several ISIS-claimed attacks on Egyptian Christians: a December 2016 bombing at Cairo’s Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church that killed 29 people; the Palm Sunday 2017 bombings in Tanta and Alexandria, which together killed at least 45; and a May 2017 attack on a bus of Coptic Christians near Minya that killed at least 29 and wounded 25.[4] A contemporaneous Ynet account reported at least 27 killed and 71 injured at St. George’s Church in Tanta and 18 killed and 40 injured in Alexandria, with ISIS claiming responsibility.[37] It also reported that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared a three-month state of emergency.[37]

A 2016 account estimated Egypt’s Coptic community at eight million, or less than 10 percent of the population, and described relations between the Coptic Church and the government as having fluctuated.[30] Another article reported that gunmen attacked a Coptic wedding party near Cairo in October 2013, killing four people and injuring 24; it also cited a human-rights group’s report that 207 churches were attacked in Egypt in 2013 and 43 completely destroyed.[31]

Other cases show additional forms of threat and coercion. A Jerusalem Center article reported that 51 worshippers and seven Iraqi troops were killed in the October 2010 attack on Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation church, and that 37 people were murdered in attacks on Christians on Christmas Day 2013.[31] For Pakistan, it reported that the September 2013 bombing of All Saints Church in Peshawar killed 78 people and injured more than 100, and discussed the use of blasphemy laws against Christians and other non-Muslims.[31] On the Palestinian territories, the same article cited the 2007 abduction and murder of Gaza bookstore owner Rami Ayad and attacks on a Gaza YMCA library in 2008, while also recounting allegations of intimidation and property theft.[31]

The cases document how restrictions on Christian life can affect more than formal worship. Registration requirements and state-controlled religious bodies can constrain which communities may gather; surveillance, online controls, and raids can reach teaching, evangelism, and private prayer; punishment of converts and house-church leaders can make ordinary religious practice a security risk.[3][19] In other settings, attacks on churches, clergy, families, businesses, and property can displace communities and erode the institutions that sustain communal life.[5][26]

The Mosul episode demonstrates the extreme consequences of coercive religious policy by a terrorist organization: Christians were ordered to pay a special tax, convert, depart, or face death, while churches and other institutions were occupied or destroyed.[5][26] The flight of Christian families from Mosul and surrounding areas became part of a broader demographic decline, although the available estimates cannot isolate persecution from conflict and other causes.[4][29] Ibrahim’s experience further shows how displacement could recur as armed control spread from Mosul to Qaraqosh.[28]

The broader record cautions against reducing persecution to spectacular violence alone. The sources describe legal discrimination, limits on building churches, restrictions on religious literature and online teaching, detention, forced labor, property loss, and threats to the ability to pass religious identity to children.[12][7] The 1998 Advisory Committee’s framework likewise includes employment, education, worship, membership, and forced exile among the forms religious-freedom violations can take.[2]

At the same time, the material does not establish one single global cause or uniform trajectory. It records new religious opportunities in some post-totalitarian settings alongside continued or intensified restrictions elsewhere, and Pew’s broader global indicators show increases in some measures but declines in others.[2][15] The most defensible synthesis is therefore country-specific: identify the actor and conduct, distinguish religious targeting from other conflict dynamics where evidence allows, and retain the limits of population estimates and incident counts.

Public advocacy has sometimes framed the period in broad terms. Rabbi Sacks argued in 2014 that religious freedom had become a casualty of a new global disorder and in 2016 described an unprecedented age of terror and persecution of Christians in roughly 50 countries.[10][11] These are interpretations and estimates from opinion commentary, not conclusions established by a single global dataset. The country-specific record is substantial, but its unequal geographic and chronological coverage does not support treating it as a comprehensive survey of the entire post–Cold War era.

A central debate concerns the boundary between harassment, discrimination, and persecution. Under the broad definition of persistent suffering because of belief, a single incident of harassment may not by itself establish persistent persecution.[1] Conversely, patterns of restrictions, threats, imprisonment, and attacks may cumulatively document serious repression even where no comprehensive victim count exists. Pew’s country totals record any reported incident and are useful for tracking geographic reach, but not severity or victim numbers.[6]

Causal interpretation is also important. In Iraq and Syria, Christian population decline occurred amid war, displacement, and ISIS’s targeted coercion; the estimates available here do not establish the share attributable to religious persecution alone.[4][30] In Nigeria, official reporting warns that attacks can reflect interwoven religious, ethnic, criminal, and resource factors and that datasets may not establish deliberate targeting of Christians as Christians.[8] In Egypt, sources describe targeted anti-Christian violence alongside broader political and security conditions, state failures, and some official responses.[12][36]

The credibility and comparability of numbers remain contested. Estimates of Christian populations in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea differ by source, period, and method; North Korea’s inaccessibility is a particularly explicit obstacle to verification.[7][4] Advocacy and policy sources provide important reported cases, but some claims are attributed allegations or estimates rather than independently adjudicated findings. Accordingly, the strongest account distinguishes confirmed events and official descriptions from attributed figures, commentary, and claims whose underlying methods are not supplied.