- Middle East
- International Affairs
- Determining America's Role in the World
Since the founding of the republic, religious freedom has been a core American principle. It is central to the first amendment. Congress has paid special attention to it by establishing the Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department which publishes annual evaluations of the state of religious freedom in every country in the world. Religious freedom evidently has a special place in the American creed. Therefore, opposing religious persecution has understandably become a goal of American foreign policy.
Of course, we should not sugarcoat the flaws in American history on this point, when the country has fallen short of its ideals: for example, the persecution of Mormons in the nineteenth century or the anti-Catholic laws dubbed the Blaine Acts. Yet in recent decades, America has repeatedly provided clear leadership in opposing religious oppression. During the darkest days of the Cold War, the Roman Catholic Prelate of Hungary, Cardinal József Mindszenty, fled Communist adversaries by finding asylum in the American embassy in Budapest; President Eisenhower commented: “Despite the constraints of person and silence imposed on Cardinal Mindszenty and other church leaders by their persecutors, the spirit of these men has defied confinement by the totalitarian State. It has become, indeed, a symbol of faith and freedom for our times.” Three decades later President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz consistently pushed for the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union where they faced systemic oppression, masked ideologically by the same anti-Zionism that has taken over today’s college campuses.
Sadly, religious intolerance is making a comeback today, including in the U.S. One need only recall the shootings at places of worship: 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, 2025 at the Church of the Annunciation Minneapolis, and at the Chapel of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Add to this the aggressive protests outside the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan this November. Meanwhile overseas, animosity to faith continues with the Chinese campaign against the Uighur Muslims, Iran’s hostility toward Christians, Zoroastrians and Bahai adherents, and conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India, including the cold-blooded attacks of April 22, 2025, in the Baisaran Valley in Kashmir when Islamists killed 22 tourists, mainly Hindus.
While religious persecution has become widespread globally, the Middle East and the Islamic World have a sadly distinctive track record. Christians are under assault in multiple ways across the region. It is hardly a relief to note that this religious persecution is not restricted to Christians alone–recall the ISIS attacks on the Yezidis of Iraq in 2014, when thousands were killed or enslaved, or the Islamist attacks against the Alawites on the Syrian coast in March of this year which left at least 1,700 dead, anticipating the April assault on the Druze minority in Suweida in southern Syria with nearly 2,000 casualties. The number of casualties in these Syrian tragedies make them comparable to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel of October 7, 2023, which led to 1,200 deaths and sparked the Gaza War. In all these cases explicitly Islamist forces attacked members of other faith communities. It would be foolish to be blind to the role of religion in motivating these crimes.
While victims of religious persecution come from multiple religions, across the Middle East the persecution of Christians has a particular saliency. Christians are under assault more widely than others. One reason for the broad scope of this persecution is simple geography: while there are few Druze outside of their homelands in the Levant, the Alawites reside nearly only in Syria, Jews in Israel (having been expelled from many countries across the Middle East) and Yezidis in northern Mesopotamia (excepting diaspora communities outside the region), there are established Christian communities across the region, from Nigeria to Indonesia, from the Atlantic to the South China Sea. Furthermore, the countries of this region generally include Muslim majorities and, within these majorities, activist Islamist minorities who are prepared to use violence against believers in other religions. Christians are the most likely target, which is why they are a primary victim of Islamist radicalism.
In addition, the Muslim majority states typically understand themselves as custodians of Islam, and they therefore provide institutional support to Islamic practice. Even where there is a formal commitment to religious freedom, non-Muslims encounter bureaucratic disadvantages or informal, social discrimination. Therefore, depending on the specific conditions in each country, Christians face an array of challenges, ranging from formal discrimination, to informal suspicion and animosity, to violent assaults, including mob attacks, bombings, and murderous targeting by terrorists.
In the scholarly literature on this animosity toward Christian communities as well as in some of the journalism, one sadly encounters efforts to minimize or even deny it. The observation that other groups, such as the Druze, face attacks by Islamists is illogically taken as proof that Christians are not under assault. There is a strange apologetics that points to the fact that Christians are not the only victims in order to minimize the real victimization of Christians. Alternatively, another discourse tries to separate the motivation for the campaign against Christians from Islam, attributing the violence to other causes not associated with religion at all–such as land disputes, climate change, or poor governance–as if ideology and politicized religion played no role. That argument derives from the common secularist bias that religion never matters. It is also evidence of the left-progressive inclination to make excuses for Islamism, odd political alliance between western progressives and the most regressive forms of politicized Islam.
Finally, the debate around the attacks on Christians is sometimes framed with reference to the question of genocide. “Genocide” is a term with a specific meaning and distinct criteria in international law which involve a “high bar” to meet. Somehow, for the apologists the claim that the violence might not rise to the level of genocide makes the very real violence against Christians less significant. More generally, there are some devious rhetorical games currently being played with the term. When it is a matter of anti-Christian violence, apologists treat the term "genocide" very strictly in order to find the Islamists innocent, since the violence is not viewed as meeting the "high bar" criteria. However, in a case before the International Court of Justice concerning the war in Gaza, there is an alternative effort to lower the threshold of "genocide" in order to make convicting Israel easier. Despite this terminological push and pull, it is clear that Islamists have been attacking, kidnapping and murdering Christians--whether or not it is genocide in the eyes of international lawyers.
As Sam Tadros wrote in an earlier issue: of the Caravan “Figures are hard to determine, but the region from Egypt to Turkey was estimated to be twenty percent Christian by the beginning of the twentieth century. Today? Around three and a half percent. Very few today would argue that Middle East Christianity is not facing an existential crisis. What the post-colonial state did not do, the Islamists delivered. The savagery of the Islamic State left no room for Christian existence, but the slow process of persecution in Egypt, while less brutal, has achieved the desired result.” The Christian communities in Muslim-majority countries are shrinking in the face of violent attacks and state discrimination. Tadros comments here only on the core Middle East, from Egypt to Turkey, but this issue of the Caravan looks further afield. However, before turning to some specific cases, let us ask about the Islamists’ motivation: why do Islamists want to persecute Christians?
Islamist animosity toward Jews is sometimes explained with references to episodes in early Islamic history, when Mohammed waged war against Jewish tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. In the current wave of anti-Israel demonstrations, precisely that distant history is invoked by protestors who point to the seventh-century battle of Khaybar while promising that “Mohammed’s army” is returning to fight against the Jews. For today’s Islamist hostility to Christianity, the key reference point is the history of the Crusades. There is therefore a parallel between Islamist opposition to Judaism and to Christianity: the former invokes the battle of Khaybar of 628, and the latter points to the Crusader’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Despite the specific difference, very distant history in both cases casts a long shadow on today's conflicts.
This historical framing is compounded by a doctrinal hostility to Christianity. Some Quranic verses are understood to condemn Christian dogma, for example, rejecting the trinity (4:171) or the crucifixion (4:157). Radical currents, including Al-Qaeda, ISIS and parts of the Muslim Brotherhood, politicize this criticism of Christianity, treating it as the direct continuation of the Crusades, which in turn are understood as indistinguishable from modern colonialism and westernization. In this view, Christianity is merely a piece of Western imperialism, missionaries are therefore seen as engaged in aggression, and local Christian communities are judged to be crucibles of sedition and treason. Sayyid Qutb, the foundational thinker of modern Islamism, declared that “The Crusader spirit has never died in Europe. It reappears again and again…” (In the Shade of the Qu’ran, comment on 5:51). Similarly, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, proclaimed that: “Missionary societies are the spearhead of the Western assault. They seek to destroy Islam and replace it with the corrupt creed of the Christians” (Risālat al-Jihād). Given these premises, violent attacks on Christians, their communities and their institutions follow inevitably.
In Europe, large scale attacks have taken place, such as the November 13, 2015, shootings and bombings in Paris at the Bataclan Theater and the Stade de France, leaving 130 dead, or the July 14, 2016 truck attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, with 86 dead and 450 injured. More recently however many attacks in Europe involve single terrorists, either in vehicles or using knives to stab random victims. For example, on February 21, 2025, a Syrian refugee stabbed a Spanish tourist at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The perpetrator had acted alone, reportedly without connections to terrorist organizations. A second example: in Lyon, an Iraqi Christian in a wheelchair, a refugee, was assassinated on September 10, 2025 by an Islamist from Algeria. In both cases: lone wolves and single victims.
In contrast, in the band of countries with large Muslim populations, from West Africa to Southeast Asia, violence against Christians takes a different shape. In these contexts, it is possible to mobilize a greater number of participants--whether an organized force or an agitated mob--to target the Christian minorities. Each country in the region is defined by distinct circumstances, and the contributions that follow in this Caravan probe particular cases. For now, however, it is important to compare several examples to highlight some of the differences among them: Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. They represent five different models, nonetheless, sharing the common denominator: Islamist attacks on Christians and Christian communities.
Nigeria
President Trump has recently pointed to the campaign against Christians in Nigeria, labelling it an existential threat. As noted above, there is dispute about the term "genocide," but there is no doubt that Islamists have been murdering Christians in Nigeria, a country which is split approximately equally between the two religions. According to Ebenezer Obadare, Senior Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, Trump’s statement was long overdue, given the dire circumstances: “Since 2009, a militant Islamist terrorist group called Boko Haram has killed more than 52,000 Nigerian Christians, displaced over 2 million people within the country, and destroyed more than 19,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools.” While the BBC has raised doubts about the precise numbers, the State Department’s 2023 Religious Freedom Report stated: “Terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and ISIS-WA, continued to attack population centers and religious targets, including churches and mosques, and maintained an ability to stage forces in rural areas and launch attacks against civilian and military targets across the North East and elsewhere in the country, according to observers. In February, ORFA [Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa] published a report on killings and abductions in the country; ORFA concluded that terror groups killed Christians proportionately in much greater numbers than Muslims.” It is true that Islamist forces also target non-Islamist Muslims; this however does not obscure the fact that there is an intentional and more extensive war against Christians. Nigeria presents us with the case of organized terrorist forces targeting Christian civilians.
Egypt
Egypt formally guarantees freedom of religion to Christians, but the Coptic minority faces violent assaults, sometimes from ISIS-linked Islamists. Beyond terrorist attacks, Egypt's Christians can also encounter social hostility and discrimination. In Tadros’s words, “When a mosque preacher in a village in southern Egypt insists no church should be allowed in the land because it is the land of Islam, when the mob attacking Christians insists that their place of worship should have no bell, dome, tower, or cross, they are only enforcing a long historical record.” The net effect is a dwindling of the size of the community through emigration.
In August 2013, members of the Muslim Brotherhood accused Copts of being complicit in the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, current President Sisi’s predecessor. According to Human Rights Watch, “Immediately following the violent dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo on August 14, crowds of men attacked at least 42 churches, burning or damaging 37, as well as dozens of other Christian religious institutions” across the country. In many cases, police refrained from intervening and failed to provide protection to the Christian communities under assault. “Residents in Minya city told Human Rights Watch that in the week following Morsi’s removal from the presidency on July 3, someone had spray-painted Coptic-owned store fronts in Minya’s city center with a black ‘X’ to distinguish them from Muslim-owned buildings. Those marked subsequently came under attack.”
Four years later, on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017, ISIS carried out two suicide bombings in churches in Tanta and Alexandria, “the worst day of violence targeting Christians in Egypt’s modern history.” In this case, President Sisi declared a State of Emergency. Copts face Islamist violence against church buildings as well as against the believers themselves. German author Martin Mosebach authored an account of the 2015 execution of 21 Egyptian Christians by ISIS militants, published in English as A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs. In the foreword, the Coptic Archbishop of London writes that the book “will shed light on the contemporary meaning of martyrdom and what it truly entails to live out one’s Christian faith regardless of the consequences. After all, the sacrifices presented by these simple workingmen by no means occurred in isolation but is part of a global phenomenon of increased persecution of Christian women, men, and children, as well as of other religious communities.”[1] The problem continues. In October 2025, riots broke out in a village in Minya Province, when the homes of Copts were attacked after rumors circulated concerning a relationship between a Christian boy and a Muslim girl. In contrast to Nigeria where anti-Christian violence is carried out by organized militia, Egypt presents the different case of strong religious feelings in the civilian population which can be incited to mob violence by Islamist activists.
Turkey
According to its Constitution, Turkey is a secular state, a legacy of the Ataturk founding of the Turkish republic. However, in the era of Recep Erdogan, Islamist paradigms have gained traction, eroding the secularist principles. However, in contrast to the armed militia in Nigeria or the riots and terrorism in Egypt, Turkey presents the case of an administrative state accused of systematically disadvantaging Christians in the practice of their religion. According to the State Department Report: “Multiple Protestant Church representatives continued to report bureaucratic difficulties in registering places of worship. Church representatives said they were obliged to continue meeting in unregistered locations for worship services because local officials did not approve registration applications.” Stricter codes are reportedly applied to proposals for new Churches than for Mosques, making it harder for Christian communities to build. In fact, “Sunni Muslim congregations [were] permitted to build worship facilities in malls, airports, and other smaller spaces,” while Churches were not granted equal permission. Moreover, “some Protestant churches reported local authorities did not allow them to display crosses on the exterior of their buildings.”
Christians face other hurdles beyond building codes. Foreign clergy or other foreign Christians face deportations or entry bans. Christians–foreign or not–may encounter discrimination in employment. Converts from Islam to Christianity may face ostracism and even loss of inheritance rights. Despite these reports, the Turkish government insists that there is no discrimination and that religious minorities have equal rights. Thus Erdogan in 2019: ““All our citizens, regardless of religion or ethnic origin, are equal.” Nonetheless, he has led Turkey onto a path of Islamization, conjuring up enemy images of Crusaders to express hostility to the West and with deleterious consequences for Turkish Christians. Turkey is marked by this ideological amplification of Islamist rhetoric, against the backdrop of allegations of programmatic discrimination by the state.
Pakistan
Pakistan is constitutionally a Muslim country, although it formally recognizes some religious freedom. It is estimated that Christians make up 2% of the population, and officially they may practice their faith. However, Pakistani Christians face discrimination and hostility in distinct ways.
A unique aspect of discrimination in Pakistan is the application of the Blasphemy Law that is deployed disproportionately against Christians and other minorities. Conviction on blasphemy can carry a death penalty, although in practice the accused may linger incarcerated for lengthy periods during appeals processes. Equally concerning is that the mere rumor of blasphemy can ignite mob violence. For example, the Associated Press reported in 2023 that Muslim mobs in Jaranwala in Punjab Province (where most Pakistani Christians reside) burned houses and churches in response to rumors that a Quran had been desecrated. According to Amnesty International, “Earlier this year, on 7 August 2023 a teacher accused of blasphemy in Turbat was shot and killed. In February 2023, in Nankana, a man accused of desecrating the Quran was dragged out of a police station by a vigilante mob and beaten to death. Similarly, in December 2021, a Sri Lankan man accused of blasphemy was lynched to death.”
This volatile atmosphere, which primarily impacts Christians although other minorities can be victimized too, is compounded by employment discrimination, with Christians often relegated to menial labor. In addition, there is a pattern of abduction of Christian women, leading to forced conversions and marriage, according to the 2023 State Department Report. “[...] there were 103 cases of forced marriage and the conversion of Christian, Hindu, and Sikh women and girls during the year. In January, a UN panel of experts said it was ‘deeply troubled' by reports of the rise in abductions, forced marriages, and forced conversions of underage girls and women in the country." The justice system in Pakistan is viewed as too slow or unwilling to offer redress: on the contrary, it is quick to convict Christians, but drags its feet when Christians are attacked. Christians in Pakistan therefore face a civilian population with a propensity for religious extremism, as well as organized terrorist forces, and a state that is not committed to–or at least not effective in--protecting its non-Muslim citizens.
Indonesia
The most populous Muslim majority country, Indonesia is characterized by what is sometimes regarded as a mild form of Islam, allowing for co-existence with the other five officially recognized religions; Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution promises freedom of religion for those groups; Christians therefore do have a right to conduct worship and establish community institutions, such as religious schools. However, in practice, the bureaucratic administrative resistance discussed with regard to Turkey can apply here as well, as can more general, social discrimination. Indonesia also maintains Blasphemy Laws, analogous to Pakistan, which can be a source of prosecutions as well as a catalyst to vigilante cultural conflict. According to the State Department in 2023: " Authorities continued to detain and sentence individuals to prison for violations of blasphemy laws. In Aceh, the only province to follow sharia, authorities conducted numerous public canings for violations, such as consuming or selling alcohol, gambling, and extramarital sex."
Furthermore, Indonesia’s distinct geography makes a difference: it is an archipelago, stretched over vastly different islands with varying demographics. In rural or isolated settings where Christians are less populous, they become particularly vulnerable to Islamist assault. In Aceh province, where Sharia law has official standing, Christians face strict limitations on church construction.
As recently as June 27, 2025, a mob of 200 Muslims attacked a Christian youth center in West Java. The event combined the role of building-permit limitations by government bureaucracy and a cultural animosity among the civilian population toward Christians. Neighbors claimed that the building owner had not obtained a permit for prayer, although prayer in private facilities–as opposed to a formal church–typically needs no permission. Unequal application of regulations against the backdrop of religious suspicion can lead to violence against Christians. On the one hand, large scale Islamist terror attacks, such as the suicide bombing on Bali on October 12, 2002 that left 202 dead, have declined. However, more characteristic of current anti-Christian violence in Indonesia are mob attacks, paradoxically at odds with the image of a more flexible Islam that prevails in parts of the national culture. Of course, organized terrorism might return; yet even without large scale bombings, the Christian community of Indonesia faces ongoing resistance, even as the specific form of the hostility changes.
Conclusion
Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia: These societies and cultures represent five different cases with regard to the persecution of Christians. They vary significantly in their legal and constitutional structures as well as in their geographical features and their demographics. What they have in common, however, is the persistence of systemic assaults on Christian communities. One should not imagine that there is somewhere a command-and-control international organization, directing this violence across the vast and diverse expanse from Nigeria to Bali. There is however indisputably a dangerous pattern with local variations: a volatile combination of anti-Christian animus, the charismatic appeal of Islamist or jihadist militancy, poor governance (including limited policing), economic precarity and the impact of social media disseminating imagery of violence, rendered more toxic by anti-western rhetoric.
What are the foreign policy consequences for the U.S.? Should Washington, with the foundational commitment to religious freedom, care about religious persecution in distant countries? During the first Trump administration, an effort was made to turn American foreign policy away from the Middle East and its wars and its terrorism in order to face the threat of rivals in a Great Power Competition. Yet Islamists are regaining strength and will persist in their anti-western goals. These goals include attacking Christians and Christian institutions: both because of the religious divide they perceive between Islam and Christianity, but even more because Christians are treated as the local representatives of the West. It is the West that the Islamists despise, and it is western values that Islamism wants to destroy, especially the American commitment to religious liberty.
Russell A. Berman is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He is also Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
[1] Martin Mosebach, The 21. A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs. Trans.Alta L. Price. (Walden, New York: Plough Publishing Co, 2020), p.ii.
