The message that international religious freedom advocates have been sharing all along—that prioritizing religious freedom is crucial for human flourishing and national stability—is increasingly catching on, with this yr’s International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit reflecting the expansion of their global, interfaith movement over the past five years.
The summit, held this week in Washington, DC, has been a key a part of mounting momentum around bringing more attention to spiritual persecution around the globe, with sessions this yr addressing crises from Nigeria to Nicaragua.
“In so lots of the global crises around the globe, there’s a non secular freedom dimension,” said Jeremy Barker, director of the Middle East Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute, who has seen greater recognition for the IRF cause over the past five years. “It’s not marginal but mainstream.”
Last yr marked the twenty fifth anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act, which required the US State Department to make religious freedom a necessary aspect of its foreign policy focus, and the United States has continued to see public victories for the cause. Former president Donald Trump nominated an IRF ambassador inside six months, something his predecessors took many more months to do, and elevated the position of the IRF office throughout the State Department.
The Trump administration also placed on the initial two IRF summits as government-hosted ministerials, followed by other nations including Poland, the United Kingdom, and Czechia. (The ongoing US summit is now organized by civil society.) Former IRF ambassador Sam Brownback also oversaw the launch of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, a world focus group which now includes 37 member nations.
At this yr’s summit, the present US IRF ambassador, Rashad Hussain, said he makes sure IRF officials are represented in State Department foreign policy meetings to focus on how religious freedom is an imperative for national security.
“Countries and societies that protect their religious freedom usually tend to be secure and prosperous, and countries that don’t protect religious freedom are less more likely to be stable,” Hussain said. “It is a necessary a part of our foreign policy, and we see evidence for that every one around the globe.”
The movement has also made strides on the worldwide stage, with leaders in other nations stepping as much as host religious freedom roundtables modeled after the longrunning US model, with support from the recently created IRF Secretariat.
“The issues are starting to be recognized as a bit more mainstream,” Barker said. “Certainly from the administration side—senior people from the State Department, from USAID—are taking a look at democracy promotion, countering violent extremism … and see religious freedom as having something to say in those spaces.”
Meanwhile, deteriorating religious freedom conditions could be observed around the globe.
In its 2024 World Watch List, Open Doors reported that over 365 million Christians live in countries experiencing high levels of persecution or discrimination. The organization found that every one 50 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels, in line with Open Doors’ metrics—only the fourth time that has happened since 1993, the primary yr of the report.
There are sobering examples of the persecution of spiritual minorities worldwide. Religiously motivated genocides have been recognized by the United States in China against Uyghur Muslims and in Burma against Rohingya Muslims.
The 2023 annual report from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom highlighted dismal conditions for religious minorities in lots of countries, including the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and Hindu nationalism’s rise in India resulting in discriminatory laws, mob and vigilante violence, and destruction of mosques and churches.
At the summit, Brownback said religious freedom is crucial to the flourishing of human rights: “And boy, do we’d like some flourishing. The great global human rights project has suffered decline within the last 20 years on the hand of expanding authoritarian regimes and complicated technology.”
The summit kicked off with an “advocacy day” Monday where attendees from various faiths flocked to Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers.
Over Tuesday and Wednesday, greater than 70 speakers discussed worsening situations of spiritual freedom in Nigeria, India, Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. They also discussed how military conflicts have exacerbated religious repression, from Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Breakout sessions checked out religious minorities within the Middle East, the usage of technology by repressive regimes, and the Israel-Hamas war, with one private session showing raw footage from the October 7 terrorist attack.
The annual event strives to be bipartisan, featuring politicians from each side of the aisle who called on the United States to do more to flex its powers to pressure bad actors.
“This mustn’t be a partisan issue,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said of China’s brutalization of Uyghur Muslims, who’ve suffered torture, re-education, forced labor, and imprisonment in internment camps. He also decried reports of organ harvesting of Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former Democratic National Committee chair and member of the Appropriations Committee within the House, said that she’s made an effort to prioritize robust funding for US-led and international efforts to advertise religious freedom for all, including those that don’t practice any faith.
“In my time in Congress, I’ve seen immense progress in our government’s efforts to carry repressive regimes accountable and supply justice for the downtrodden,” she said.
Former vp Mike Pence argued that the United States should pressure oppressive regimes through existing trade agreements, at one point singling out Nicaragua.
“The time has come for the United States to make it clear to Nicaragua that we’ll not tolerate motion against, suppression of, church leaders and spiritual leaders in Nicaragua without consequence,” he said on the summit. Since 2004, Nicaragua has had a free trade agreement with the United States.
The Nicaraguan government has cracked down on Catholics and evangelicals since 2018, closing ministries, imprisoning church leaders, and deporting Catholic clergy. A priest who had been imprisoned under Daniel Ortega’s regime spoke from behind a screen concerning the persecution.
“We are probably the most powerful economy on earth,” Pence said. “And we should make it clear to Nicaragua that you’ll begin to respect the religious liberty of individuals of each faith or our relationship will change.”
Pence also called for the United States to impose economic pressure on China resulting from the continuing US-recognized genocide of Uyghur Muslims within the country’s Xinjiang region.
Another panel spotlighted the “double persecution” women face: Lou Ann Sabatier, a veteran communications consultant and cofounder of the Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) Women’s Alliance, noted that persecution comes not only from government or non-state actors but in addition from communities and families, making the oppression unseen.
Women in minority religions experience persecution from their network of close relationships within the domestic sphere, panelists noted: They’re forced into marriages, physically abused to force conversions, subjected to sexual violence and rape, and cut off from family support in the event that they seek to convert.
Open Doors’ 2023 report on gender noted that sexual abuse “will be the most typical technique to persecute Christian women and girls” around the globe.
Every attendee or speaker Christianity Today interviewed mentioned the deteriorating conditions in Nigeria, where 50,000 Christians have died during the last 14 years resulting from the rise of Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and Fulani extremists, according to a Nigerian civil rights group, the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law.
Open Doors also agreed that the deadliest country for Christians during the last yr was Nigeria. Over 4,100 Christians were killed within the West African nation last yr, representing over 80 percent of Christians killed globally. Open Doors’ report is taken into account to lean on the conservative side in its estimates of the variety of Christians killed for his or her faith.
“No one knows the true number, however it’s really high and it’s higher than the official numbers,” Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, told CT. “You know, people go in after these attacks, they usually’ll find people for days within the bushes. Either they run out from their homes or run out within the night or are shot and slashed. So the count is higher. … It’s a slow-moving genocide.”
King has advocated for Christian victims of persecution since 2003. His upcoming book, The Whisper, is a devotional focused on what persecuted Christians and martyrs can teach the church.
“We tend to think about [the persecuted] as our very poor cousins. But that’s not it in any respect,” said King. “They’re family. But they’re our very wealthy relations, they usually’re way ahead of us.”
King said the testimonies of persecuted Christians have taught him “what it means to be a Christian.”
“Our brothers and sisters within the persecuted church, they’ve their doctorates in suffering,” he said. “They went to seminaries called torture, imprisonment, endurance. These are probably the most effective seminaries on this planet to make you go deep with God.”
