By Chris Smith
Religious persecution is festering and exploding around the world. What has been unconscionable for decades, centuries, has gotten worse.
According to Open Doors 2025 World Watch List: “More than 380 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.”
Forty-five years ago, during my first term in Congress, I read Tortured for Christ by Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand.
As so many of you know, it is the true story of unspeakable physical torture and psychological abuse of underground Christians under Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and Pastor Wurmbrand’s harrowing 14-year incarceration. Sabina, his brave wife, also suffered prison and forced labor for her faith.
I was moved to tears when I read it. And challenged to act.
Like so many, I was inspired by Pastor Wurmbrand’s indomitable faith, breathtaking courage and hope and challenged by his admonishment to believers to cease enabling evil by our naiveté, cold-hearted indifference or cowardly complicity.
After being drugged and beaten Pastor Wurmbrand said he was in such bad shape that he even forgot the words to the Lord’s Prayer so he simply prayed: “Our Father I have forgotten the prayer, but you surely know it by heart…”
Jesus’ powerful and unambiguous teaching in Matthew 25—to see those construed by this world to be the “least of these” to be as Jesus Christ Himself.
Pastor Wurmbrand was a spiritual and moral giant but situationally, the “least of these.”
Whether it be defending unborn babies and their mothers from the violence of abortion or protecting the vulnerable victims of human trafficking or feeding the hungry or mitigating terrorism and war—the least of these situationally—the increase in the number of persecuted Christians worldwide today, begs a more robust, effective and sustained response by women and men of goodwill.
We must act. In Nigeria. In China. In scores of nations where the believer is unwelcomed.
My first religious freedom mission was to Moscow and Leningrad in 1982 on behalf of Soviet Jews. While there I also met, and prayed with the Siberian Seven—a group of Pentecostal Christians who fled to the US Embassy and lived there for five years until finally getting exit visas. During that trip—and many subsequent trips—I began to grasp Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s astute observation that communism doesn’t merely believe that God does not exist, it hates Him.
Solzhenitsyn called it “militant atheism.”
Like you I saw that hate throughout the Soviet Union, in Romania, in the Warsaw Pact Countries—and that God-hatred continues to thrive today within dictatorships like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam and China.
More than ever before, vigorous U.S. leadership and diplomacy are needed to address religious freedom violations globally—and end Christian persecution.
All the tools embedded in laws like the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act need to be rigorously utilized including timely and faithful designation of “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) status for serious offenders, the meting out of sanctions on CPC designated countries, holding not just countries but individuals who persecute to account including making such individuals inadmissible to the United States—no visa—enhanced religious freedom training for the foreign service including ambassadors, and integrating religious freedom into every aspect of U.S. foreign policy.
Radical Islamists—like Fulani terrorists, Hamas and Boko Haram—believe they have a right to murder, rape and torture, all in God’s name.
In December 2020, President Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern only to be reversed without justification by Secretary Blinken in November of 2021.
Religious leaders in Nigeria were outraged by Sec. Blinken’s decision.
One Nigerian Bishop challenged Blinken and said Christian persecution is “more intense than ever.” (Bishop Mamza)
And Genocide Watch has called Nigeria “a killing field of defenseless Christians.”
Yet, the Government of Nigeria has failed to make progress against religiously motivated persecution of Christians despite religious freedom being enshrined as an essential human right in its Constitution.
The Nigerian government’s failure to decentralize security services at the state level and to secure its borders, further inhibits efforts to address the underlying causes of violence impacting religious groups. And it will only worsen as Nigeria is already the most populous African country with its population expected to reach nearly 400 million by 2050.
With its rich resources in minerals, metals, oil, and gas—the subject of conflict for years—Nigeria has great potential for success, especially to alleviate poverty among its citizens and to become a key economic, trade, and national security partner of the U.S.
The protection and strengthening of Nigeria’s religious and civil freedoms must be at the forefront of the U.S.-Nigeria bilateral relationship.
Twelve years ago, on a visit to Jos, Nigeria, I visited an amazing man of faith and courage—Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama. We visited churches that had been recently firebombed by Boko Haram and spent hours listening to survivors tell their stories and praying for them and their loved-ones.
Archbishop Kaigama has steadfastly called for an end to the violence, for reconciliation and peace and this week “encouraged Nigerian youth, across religious and ethnic divides, to take initiative rather than wait for change to be imposed.
To the Christian and Muslim young people, he said, “if we all decide that peace starts with me, then our society will change…”
“Faith liberates. Faith secures you in the hands of God, and therefore, it’s of great importance to have faith.”
At a Nigerian IDP camp, a dozen years ago, I met with an evangelical believer—Habila Adamu.
Dragged from his home by Boko Haram terrorists, he was ordered to renounce his faith. With an AK-47 pressed to his face, he was asked “are you ready to die as a Christian?”
With amazing courage Habila answered, “Yes, I am ready to die as a Christian.” He was asked a second time and he repeated his answer—“Yes, I am ready to die as a Christian.”
This time, the terrorist pulled the trigger. A bullet ripped through Habila’s face. He crumpled to the ground, left for dead.
By some miracle, he survived.
I asked Habila to come to Washington, DC to tell his story. At a congressional hearing I chaired, Habila told my committee— “I am alive because God wants you to have this message—knowing Christ” is so much “deeper” than merely knowing Boko Haram’s story of hate and intolerance.
He closed his testimony with this— “Do everything you can to end this ruthless religious persecution…but know Christ first.”
The systematic slaughter and abuse of Nigerian believers must stop.
Delay is denial—and a death sentence to many.
At a hearing I chaired this past March—Conflict and Persecution in Nigeria—the case for a CPC designation, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of the diocese of Makurdi, Nigeria—said that “Militant Fulani herdsman are terrorists. They steal and vandalize, they kill and boast about it, they kidnap and rape, and they enjoy total impunity from the elected officials. None of them have been arrested and brought to justice.”
Nina Shea testified at the hearing that “militant groups of nomadic Fulani Muslim herders are reported to be the greatest threat to Nigeria’s Christians, particularly those in Middle Belt farming communities…” She pointed out that “The Nigerian civic group Inter Society on Civil Rights and Rule of Law finds that 52,000 Christians have been killed and over 20,000 churches have been attacked and destroyed since 2009 by various Islamist extremist groups in Nigeria… Nigeria’s government allows the militant Fulani herders to attack defenseless Middle Belt Christians with complete impunity…”
I’ve introduced H.Res 220 asking President Trump to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) and appealing to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu to stop the violence.
Then there’s China.
As we meet, China is committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s accelerated and brutal crackdown on believers in China must be exposed and stopped.
On a trip to China in 1994 I had the awesome privilege of meeting with Bishop Su Zhimin. Bishop Su was a leader of the underground Catholic Church.
As we spoke and then prayed, the Bishop prayed for his persecutors, he prayed for the misguided leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Bishop Su’s body bore witness to the brutality of China’s Communist Party.
He was beaten, starved, and tortured for this faith and spent some 40 years in prison.
Yet, he prayed not just for the persecuted church, but for the conversion of those who hate, torture and kill. His witness and his faith absolutely amazed me. Love those who hate you as Christ did from the cross? (As Ericka Kirk did and said in her heartfelt message after her husband Charlie was assassinated.)
Do good to those who persecute you? For Bishop Su these were more than words, it was his faithful and faith-filled response to one of our Lord’s most difficult teaching. Unfortunately, only a few years later, Bishop Su was arrested again and disappeared. He has not been heard from since.
This week Ambassador Sam Brownback and I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times and pointed out that in October, Chinese security agents swept through cities from Beijing to the coast, raiding the Zion Church network and detaining its founder, Pastor Jin “Ezra” Mingri. The point was plain—in Xi Jinping’s China, devotion that isn’t Communist Party-approved is treated as a political problem to be solved by police.
Mr. Jin’s case is not an aberration; it’s the product of a system built to subordinate conscience to the Chinese Communist Party. Under the banner of “sinicization,” Beijing licenses clergy, edits holy scriptures, censors online worship, bars minors from religious life and restricts contact with fellow believers abroad. Officials enforce these rules by raiding services, charging pastors with “fraud” or “illegal business” and blocking them from leaving the country.
Each of us must pray and work to protect religious liberty.
I look forward to working with the administration on these issues and eagerly await the release of the 2025 International Religious Freedom report—an essential tool for the Administration to take additional punitive measures against those who enable this targeted persecution to continue.
We in Congress will pray AND not stop fighting until perpetrators are brought to justice and until the religiously persecuted are safe and free.
We will not be silent while our brothers and sisters are slaughtered.
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CHRIS SMITH serves New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
