Category: Religious Freedom

Amid the persecution of Christians in Pakistan, a 22-year-old man was “brutally attacked” on March 22 by his supervisor after refusing to convert to Islam.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is urging President Donald Trump to ensure that religious freedom violations by foreign governments result in severe consequences, such as sanctions, for the aggressors.

The state permits exemptions for organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes,” yet the Commission ultimately determined that Catholic Charities serves no “religious purpose” when it ministers to the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. Ignoring common sense, the Commission decided that Catholic Charities’ work is secular (and thus, non-exempt) because its activities resemble those of secular charities.

With dire reports of mass killings coming out of Syria, one expert is sounding the alarm about the dangerous situation on the ground. Joel Veldkamp, head of international communications at Christian Solidarity International, told CBN News he believes at least hundreds of people might have been killed in recent days amid murderous unrest in the region.

The gruesome beheading of seventy Christians in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo by an Islamist terrorist group in February and the murder of up to 3,000 people—some sources say 7,000—in Syria this month by Islamist militants have briefly focused the world’s scattered attention on the global persecution of Christians. Most of the Syrian victims were members of the Muslim Alawite minority, but a number of Christians were also killed, and as Benedict Kiely noted in the Spectator: “the old Syrian phrase has it, ‘first the Alawites, then the Christians.’”

Syrian Christians continue to live out their faith with resilience, sharing the hope of Jesus Christ amid ongoing political turmoil and violence. A report from a Syrian Christian, shared with Christian Daily International, states that the future remains uncertain for many. The government is more focused on “whitewashing its brutal history in the eyes of the international community, mainly Western nations, rather than addressing the dire realities faced by Syrians within the country,” the report laments.

A few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released the results of its most recent Religious Landscape Survey. The most prominent finding was that the share of Americans who identify as Christian has stopped declining the last several years, and the percentage of adults who have no religious affiliation has plateaued right around 30 percent. What we can expect to see in the next several decades is that the non-religious share of the public will continue to creep upward, albeit at a more modest rate than the prior few decades.

Four former police officers have taken legal action against the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) for anti-Catholic discrimination. The PSNI is the third-largest police force in the United Kingdom.

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), along with the Anglican Communion, the World Council of Churches, Open Doors International, and Stefanus Alliance, organised a side event on “Registration & legal status of places of worship: Negative impacts on religious minorities”, during the Human Rights Council 58th session in Geneva. “Freedom of religion includes the ability to have a legally recognized place of worship. When Christians cannot rent, buy or build a place to hold a legal worship service, we see pastors fined or arrested for holding informal meetings because these are considered illegal meetings by government officials”, stresses the WEA.