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A report from the Center for Studies on New Religions says 90,000 Christians were killed for their faith last year, and that as many as 600 million were prevented from practicing their religion through intimidation, forced conversions, bodily harm or even death.

Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project, an advocacy group for Middle East Christians, said recently that “There are many places on Earth where being a Christian is the most dangerous thing you can be. Those who think of Christianity as a religion of the powerful need to see that in many places it’s a religion of the powerless.”

Curry said that Open Doors has seen an increase in persecution in various countries throughout Asia. Nationalist religious movements — Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist — have turned against Christians in India, Myanmar and Pakistan. These zealots now tend to see Christianity as a foreign belief, colonial in its history, ready to import the rules of the West.

Other countries, while offering Christians a certain degree of freedom, develop bureaucratic methods of keeping them in their place

Other countries, while offering Christians a certain degree of freedom, develop bureaucratic methods of keeping them in their place. In China church steeples are limited in height, less anyone assume that Christianity is the dominant belief of the citizens.

That particular issue may sound trivial but Curry suggested that he hopes the Open Doors report will arouse public attention to what he sees as a global epidemic: “This is one of those issues that really are about life and death. It is time we took a stand and said that we will not allow this to happen anymore.”

Farahnaz Ispahani, the Pakistani author of Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities, sees this as a long-range disaster: “I call it a ‘drip drip genocide.’ It’s a wiping out of religious communities. It doesn’t happen in one day. It doesn’t happen over a few months. Little by little by little, laws and institutions and bureaucracies and penal codes, textbooks that malign other communities, until you come to the point of having this sort of jihadi culture that is running rampant.”

National Post

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca