These African Christians Are Already Living in the Millennium
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” So Christ Himself told His disciples, and by extension us. (John 15:18, NIV) Increasingly, in this country, “the world” equates to our own federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the current administration — with plenty of help from their media friends — these agencies have deemed Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and even Orthodox as “extremists” in need of surveilling.
The attempt to portray Christians as a domestic threat has been going on for years — and succeeding, at least on the Left. The Stream’s John Zmirak is undoubtedly correct that “elites [and their unthinking followers] are genuinely out to get us.”
And we need to take steps, both spiritually and politically, to prevent that from happening while there is still time to do so.
More Christians Beheaded, Just Last Week
But the world’s hatred of Christians is much more overt, and deadly, in other countries than here. Just last week “Islamic State-Central Africa Province” beheaded 57 Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Christianity is the world’s largest religion in numbers of adherents (2.5 billion as of 2020), but its followers are also the most mistreated on Earth. Some 360 million of our coreligionists live under “significant persecution.” Five years ago, the British Foreign Office described their situation in some regions as “near genocide levels.” (Here’s the final report.) Last year, almost 5,000 Christians were killed, over 4,000 jailed, and nearly 15,000 churches vandalized or destroyed, according to OpenDoors.
Where It’s Not Safe to be Christian
That organization also ranks the most dangerous countries for Christians:
- North Korea
- Somalia
- Libya
- Eritrea
- Yemen
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Sudan
- Iran
- Afghanistan
- India
- Syria
- Saudi Arabia
- Mali
- Algeria
- Iraq
- Myanmar
- Maldives
- China
- Burkina Faso
Fourteen of these nations which torment the followers of Christ are majority Muslim and enforce shari`a to varying degrees; one, Nigeria, is split between Islam and Christianity but the Muslim-dominated northern states impose Islamic law on everyone there.
Only five of the persecuting polities on this list are not motivated by Muhammad’s vitriol: North Korea, China, Eritrea, India, and Myanmar. North Korea is, of course, a repressive Stalinist-style personality cult, as is Eritrea (albeit with trappings of religion). Communist China controls religion. India is increasingly nationalist Hindu, while Myanmar (Burma) is rife with Buddhist nationalism.
No, It’s Not All Muslims—But It IS Islam
While Hinduism, Buddhism, Marxism, and dictatorship can be deployed against Christ’s flock, the most weaponized ideology in this regard is — as has been the case for 1400 years — Islam.
Let me stress the de rigueur boilerplate here: I am not saying all, or even most, Muslims are jihadist fanatics. They are not. What I am saying is that Islam is the belief system most intolerant of other religions; and that Muslims who wish to act on that have the sanction, as they see it, of the founder of their religion — indeed, of their deity, Allah, as Raymond Ibrahim reports on regularly here at The Stream. Whether that’s 1% or 10% of 1.8 billion Muslims, it amounts to a veritable legion of oppressors.
Why single out Christians? Sura V:82 says they are the nearest in belief to the Muslims (while also condemning Jews as the most intense in hostility). But trumping that passage are the ones which mock the Trinity, scoff at the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and enjoin fighting against the “enemies of Allah.”
Furthermore, Christianity is Islam’s only real spiritual and historical rival. They are the two most missionary-minded religions, and the interactions of their spheres across space and time have often been violent, as numerous jihads, and the crusades sparked in response, have shown. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Christianity and Islam are fighting for world domination.
Decapitating Christians
However, for many years, that fighting has been merely metaphorical on the Christian side and quite literal on the Muslim one. The aforementioned Muslim decapitation of DRC Christians (likely Catholics, the bulk of that country’s faithful) is all too common. In 2019 the Islamic State in Nigeria beheaded 10 Christians. In 2017 that same group in Libya infamously cut the heads off of 21 Coptic Christians from Egypt as they forced them to kneel in orange jumpsuits on the beach. Two years before that, IS did the same to 15 Ethiopian Christians, also in Libya. I could go on, but the point, alas, has been made.
Why this Muslim obsession with cutting off the heads of Christians? I examined this topic way back in 2005, in “Beheading in the Name of Islam” (which, regrettably, is one of the most-read Middle East Quarterly articles ever). This method of dispatching enemies is not limited to modern IS terrorists. The Quran mandates it; Islam’s founder, Muhammad, ordered it; and Muslim states, from the Ottoman Empire and Gujarati Sultanate to the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have practiced it. Thus proving that Islam, far from being a religion of peace, “is, rather, a religion of the sword with the blade forever at the throat of the unbeliever’’—particularly if they’re Christian.
What Does the New Testament Say about these Martyrs?
What does the true Word of God have to say on this dreadful topic?
I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God…. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. (Revelation 20:4, NIV).
These people are “blessed and holy” who “will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years” (20:6). We Christians differ on exactly how to interpret some of that passage, but we can all agree that those African Christians, with their courageous testimony to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, are exactly whom John the Apostle was writing about. They clung to Him, and have been rewarded for their great faith. These martyred Christians from the DRC, Egypt, and Ethiopia exemplify Christ’s counsel “do not be afraid of those kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28, NIV). Muslims jihadists can only do the former.
American Christians are not yet experiencing that level of persecution. But don’t be too sure it can’t happen here. Let us pray that should our society’s manufactured mistrust of Christians turn murderous, we might have even a mustard seed of the faith the church in Africa is showing.
Timothy Furnish has a PhD from Ohio State in Islamic, World & African history. He’s been an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne, a US Special Operations Command analyst, an author and professor. Furnish is the military/security affairs writer for The Stream.
