Persecution of Christians

[11]: 2  The same report recommends that Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, the Central African Republic, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Sudan, and Turkey constitute the US State Department's "special watchlist" of countries in which the government allows or engages in "severe violations of religious freedom".

Herod Agrippa was reportedly eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the Great lost his life, Saint Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight.

[32] One early account of a mass killing is the persecution in Lyon in which Christians were purportedly mass-slaughtered by being thrown to wild beasts under the decree of Roman officials for reportedly refusing to renounce their faith according to Irenaeus.

[45] By autumn however, Galerius's nephew, former caesar, and co-augustus Maximinus Daia (r. 310–313) was enforcing Diocletian's persecution in his territories in Anatolia and the Diocese of the East in response to petitions from numerous cities and provinces, including Antioch, Tyre, Lycia, and Pisidia.

[45] Only one martyr is known by name from the reign of Licinius, who issued the Edict of Milan jointly with his ally, co-augustus, and brother-in-law Constantine, which had the effect of resuming the toleration of before the persecution and returning confiscated property to Christian owners.

[57] Damasus then had seven Christian priests arrested and awaiting banishment, but they escaped and "gravediggers" and minor clergy joined another mob of hippodrome and amphitheatre men assembled by the pope to attack the Liberian Basilica, where Ursacinus's loyalists had taken refuge.

[62]: 242, 254  The Donatists fomented protests and street violence, accosted travelers, attacked random Catholics without warning, often doing serious and unprovoked bodily harm such as beating people with clubs, cutting off their hands and feet, and gouging out eyes while also inviting their own martyrdom.

[85] A cave containing hundreds of skeletons near the Jaffa Gate, 200 metres east of the large Roman-era pool in Mamilla, correlates with the massacre of Christians at hands of the Persians mentioned in the writings of Strategius.

[68]: 49  The Synaxarion claims that they had the embers of burnt icons applied to their heads, subjected to other torments, and then dragged though the Byzantine streets to their public execution in the area of the city's VIIth Hill, the so-called Medieval Greek: ξηρόλοφος, romanized: Xērólophos, lit.

[68]: 49 Andrew of Crete was beaten and imprisoned in Constantinople after having debated with the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (r. 741–775), possibly in 767 or 768, and then abused by the Byzantines as he was dragged through the city, dying of blood loss when a fisherman cut off his foot in the Forum of the Ox.

[68]: 19 Having defeated and killed the emperor Nikephoros I (r. 802–811) at the Battle of Pliska in 811, the First Bulgarian Empire's khan, Krum, also put to death a number of Roman soldiers who refused to renounce Christianity, though these martyrdoms, known only from the Synaxarion of Constantinople, may be entierely legendary.

[68]: 61–62  Theophilos had him tortured and his hands burned with heated irons, though he was released at the intercession of the empress Theodora and hidden at the Monastery of John the Baptist tou Phoberou, where he was able to paint an image of the patron saint.

[118]: 219 Evaristos, a relative of Theoktistos Bryennios and a monk of the Monastery of Stoudios, was exiled to the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli peninsula) for his support of his hegumenos Nicholas and his patron the patriarch Ignatios of Constantinople when the latter was deposed by Photios I in 858.

[68]: 33–34 When Abd Allah ibn Tahir went to besiege Kaisum, the fortress of Nasr: "There had been great oppression in the whole country because the inhabitants [christian dhimmis] were forced to bring provisions to the camp; and in every place it was a time of famine and a dearth of all sorts of things."

[123] In 1017, al-Hakim issued an order of toleration regarding Christians and Jews, while the following year confiscated ecclesiastical property was returned to the Church, including the construction materials seized by the authorities from demolished buildings.

Some [of their attackers] shamelessly place virgins in front of their own mothers and force them to sing wicked and obscene songs until they have finished having their ways with them... men of every age and description, boys, youths, old men, nobles, peasants and what is worse still and yet more distressing, clerics and monks and woe of unprecedented woes, even bishops are defiled with the sin of sodomy and it is now trumpeted abroad that one bishop has succumbed to this abominable sin.In a poem, Malik Danishmend boasts: "I am Al Ghazi Danishmend, the destroyer of churches and towers".

[142] In 1091 his ambassadors told the king of Croatia Muslims were destroying sacred sites, while his letter to Robert I, Count of Flanders, deliberately described emotively the rape and maltreatment of Christians and the sacrilege of the Jerusalem shrines.

[143] Crusaders believed that by fighting off the Muslims, the persecution of Christians would abate, in accordance to their god's will, and this ideology – much promoted by the Crusader-era propagandists – was shared at every level of literate medieval western European society.

He claimed that "Since they deviate from faith in the Trinity, so that hitherto they who are in filth become filthier, gradually they have come to the final degradation of having taken paganism upon themselves as the punishment for the sin proceeding from this, they have lost the soil of their native land to invading foreigners ...".

[147]: 3  The problem with this view, according to political science professor Andrew R. Murphy,[149] is that such concepts as intolerance were not part of eleventh century thinking about relationships for any of the various groups involved in or affected by the crusades, neither the Latins, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Baybars, nor others.

[158][156]: 229, 235  The campaign continued in what Marvin refers to as "an increasingly murky moral atmosphere" for the next 16 years: there was technically no longer any crusade, no indulgences or dispensational rewards for fighting it, the papal legates exceeded their orders from the Pope, and the army occupied lands of nobles who were in the good graces of the church.

[156]: 235 The Northern (or Baltic crusades), went on intermittently from 1147 to 1316, and the primary trigger for these wars was not religious persecution but instead was the noble's desire for territorial expansion and material wealth in the form of land, furs, amber, slaves, and tribute.

[173]: 191, 196–198 when Sultan Baybars took Antioch from the Crusaders he wrote a letter to Christians boasting of the atrocities they would have seen his soldiers commit had they been there:[174] You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money!

As a result, when Tipu's army invaded Guruvayur and adjacent areas, the Syrian Christian community fled Calicut and small towns like Arthat to new centres like Kunnamkulam, Chalakudi, Ennakadu, Cheppadu, Kannankode, Mavelikkara, etc.

Albanian elders often opted to save their clans and villages from hunger and economic ruin by advocating village-wide and region-wide conversions to Islam, with many individuals frequently continuing to practice Christianity in private.

In the aftermath of the Great Turkish War, massive punitive measures were imposed on Kosovo's Catholic Albanian population and as a result of them, most members of it fled to Hungary and settled around Buda, where most of them died of disease and starvation.

[305][306][307] The Communist Party destroyed churches, mosques and temples, ridiculed, harassed, incarcerated and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools and media with anti-religious teachings, and it introduced a belief system called "scientific atheism", with its own rituals, promises and proselytizers.

The existence of different Church institutions was an illustration of the situation which resulted from the proclamation which denounced the 2nd Republic as an anti-Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, and Communist internationalist conspiracy which heralded a clash between God and atheism, chaos and harmony, Good and Evil.

[320] Anticlerical opinion accused the Catholic priesthood and religious orders of hypocrisy: clerics were guilty of taking up arms against the people, of exploiting others for the sake of wealth, and of sexual immorality all while claiming the moral authority of peacefulness, poverty, and chastity.

[332] Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of the Nazi Empire which were conquered by the Soviet Red Army and Yugoslavia became one-party Communist states and the project of coercive conversion to atheism continued.