Christians are the single most persecuted minority on planet Earth, with almost 5,000 killed for their faith in 2025. This year has been even worse, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in Nigeria alone during the first seven months of 2026.
As a result of murder, persecution, threats, and intimidation, Christians have been steadily fleeing Muslim-dominated nations and regions, reducing their share of the population each year.
Recent examples of the violence and persecution faced by Christians across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia follow.
Fulani herdsmen killed at least 32 Christians across Plateau, Nasarawa, and Benue states in Nigeria in early August. The deadliest stretch occurred in five villages in Riyom, Plateau State, between August 2 and August 12. Attackers shot residents as they slept and set homes ablaze in Dorong and Jol villages.
That followed a late-July massacre in Naridon village, Kaduna State. Suspected Fulani militants killed 30 Christians, including 11 children and a Catholic priest, just before midnight on July 26.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Islamic State-linked Allied Democratic Forces killed at least 114 civilians across the eastern provinces of North Kivu, Ituri, and South Kivu in July 2026, according to the Congolese monitoring group Ebuteli. These deaths accounted for nearly half of all documented killings that month.
Amnesty International’s May 2026 report on ADF abuses documented massacres carried out with hammers, axes, machetes, and guns. These included a September 2025 massacre at a funeral in Ntoyo village that killed more than 60 mourners.
In Mozambique, Islamic State Mozambique Province has continued targeting Christian villages in Cabo Delgado throughout 2026. The group claimed responsibility for attacks in Ancuabe and Chiure districts in May that burned churches and hundreds of Christian homes. These followed earlier beheadings of Christians in nearby operations.
The group explicitly labels Christian civilians “combatants” to justify targeting them.
Religious freedom in Syria has “continued to worsen” since Assad’s fall, according to USCIRF’s 2026 report, which cites ongoing attacks on Alawites, Druze, and Christians under the interim government.
Recent incidents include the June 2025 Mar Elias Church suicide bombing in Damascus, which killed 25 worshippers during Divine Liturgy. The attack was claimed by a group calling itself Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah.
In Pakistan, blasphemy-driven mob violence remains active. A Christian cable technician, Washaal Masih, was abducted by Muslim extremists in Lahore on August 20. He was threatened at gunpoint and pressured to convert to Islam.
Days earlier, a blasphemy allegation against Christian youth Aamir Masih in Nowshera Virkan, Punjab, drew an angry Muslim crowd to his home. Police detained him and seven family members, according to an August 14 report.
Both incidents recall the 2023 Jaranwala riots, in which mobs burned more than 20 churches and 80 Christian homes.
Beyond mob violence, Pakistan’s Christian minority faces a second, more systemic form of coercion: generational debt bondage in the brick kiln industry. Pakistan has more than 20,000 brick kilns, employing more than 4.5 million workers nationwide.
Religious minorities make up just 5 percent of Pakistan’s population but account for roughly half the kiln workforce in Punjab and Sindh. One report cited by Christian Aid Mission found as many as 80 Christians among every 100 kiln workers at some sites.
Estimates of how many Christians are trapped in bonded labor vary by source and should be treated as advocacy-sector figures rather than government data. A persecution researcher with Open Doors UK put the number of Christians in slave and bonded labor at up to one million. A separate ministry estimate placed the total number of people in kiln bondage at 3.5 million to 4 million, “many of them” Christian.
Pakistan’s own National Commission for Human Rights estimated in a 2023 report that approximately 3 million people were in bonded labor across all sectors. It did not provide a religious breakdown.
Kiln owners advance small loans against future labor, with families’ average starting debt ranging from $600 to $1,200. They then apply interest rates that workers describe as ranging from 200 to 2,000 percent. The debt compounds faster than wages can offset it.
Pakistan outlawed bonded labor in 1992, but enforcement is essentially absent. A November 2025 British parliamentary debate noted that debts are passed from parents to children as inherited obligations. Workers earn as little as $3.10 a day, compared with a legal minimum wage of roughly $6.
The places in the world that are now Muslim-majority were not always that way. Iraq was Christian first. Tradition holds that Christianity arrived with St. Thomas the Apostle, and Baghdad served as the seat of the patriarch of the Church of the East for roughly 540 years, from 775 to 1317.
Today, Iraq’s Christian population has collapsed to about 140,000, less than one percent of the country’s population of more than 46 million.
Egypt followed a similar arc. Coptic tradition credits St. Mark with founding the Egyptian church around 42 CE, and Copts remained the majority for centuries after the Arab conquest. Estimates now place Egypt’s Christian population at roughly 10 percent, though the Egyptian government’s own figures run lower.
Iran’s transformation began with a different faith entirely. Zoroastrianism, the religion of the prophet Zarathustra, dominated pre-Islamic Persia and contributed the concept of paradise to Western religious vocabulary. The word traces back to the Old Persian pairidaeza. Iran’s official census records the population as 99.38 percent Muslim today.
Syria gave Christianity its name. The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch, then a Syrian city, and Damascus is where Saul of Tarsus experienced the conversion that made him the Apostle Paul. Christians made up about 10 percent of Syria’s population before the civil war. That figure has since fallen below 2 percent.
Under the new government headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani and a former al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliate, there have been several massacres of minorities, including Alawites and Druze. These massacres have caused Christians to flee the country, reducing their numbers even further.
Lebanon was Christian-majority as recently as 1932, when Christians made up 53 to 54.5 percent of the population. Today, Christians make up an estimated 30 to 35 percent, still the largest Christian community of any Arab country.
Turkey’s Christian era lasted a millennium under the Byzantine Empire. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, is still based in Istanbul today. Yet Christians now make up roughly 0.2 percent of Turkey’s population. This decline was driven largely by the early-20th-century Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides.
Since then, Turkish law has made it exceptionally difficult for Christian communities to hold property or build new churches. Religious minority groups can operate only through a state-regulated foundation system, and the government has seized or nationalized thousands of church-owned properties over the decades.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate alone has seen its holdings shrink from roughly 8,000 properties in 1936 to fewer than 500 today. Although proselytizing is not formally illegal, Christians who engage in it face police suspicion and occasional harassment.
Across North Africa, Christianity was the civilizational mainstream. St. Augustine, one of Christianity’s most influential theologians, was a Berber born in what is now Algeria, and the region was fully Christianized by the 5th century. The 7th-century Arab conquests ended that.
Farther east, the pattern repeats with Buddhism rather than Christianity. Pakistan’s Gandhara region was a center of Buddhist civilization for centuries before Islam arrived. Pakistan is now 96.4 percent Muslim.
Afghanistan’s Buddhist history was erased in 2001 when the Taliban dynamited the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroying monuments that had survived for 1,500 years.
Indonesia, once dominated by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, is now home to more Muslims than any other country on Earth. Roughly nine in ten of its more than 280 million people are Muslim, putting the Muslim population near 242 million.
Muslim expansion continues today. In late July 2026, an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 migrants crossed the border from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta within days, the largest such crossing on record.
Across Europe, Pew Research projects that the Muslim share of the population will rise from roughly 5 percent in 2016 to between 11 and 14 percent by 2050. This increase is driven by migration and a fertility gap. European Muslims average 2.6 children per woman, compared with 1.6 for non-Muslims. Pew notes that this gap would continue pushing the Muslim share upward even if migration stopped entirely.
At the same time, Christian identification across Europe fell from 74 percent of the population in 2010 to 67 percent in 2020. France and the United Kingdom lost their Christian majorities altogether.
The pattern that largely emptied Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey of their Christian populations over centuries is now visible in compressed form on the European continent itself.
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