Communist Albania Religion in Albania was subordinated to the interests of
Marxism during the rule of
the country's communist party when all religions were suppressed. This policy was justified by the communist stance of
state atheism from 1967 to 1991. The Agrarian Reform Law of August 1945 nationalized most of the property which belonged to religious institutions, including the estates of mosques, monasteries, religious orders, and dioceses. Many clergy and believers were tried and some of them were executed. All foreign Roman Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were expelled from Albania in 1946. The military seized churches, cathedrals and mosques and converted them into basketball courts, movie theaters, dance halls, and the like; and members of the clergy were stripped of their titles and imprisoned. Around 6,000 Albanians were disappeared and murdered by agents of the Communist government, and their bodies were never found or identified. Albanians continued to be imprisoned, tortured and killed for their religious practices well into 1991. Religious communities or branches of them which had their headquarters outside the country, such as the
Jesuit and
Franciscan orders, were henceforth ordered to terminate their activities in Albania. Religious institutions were forbidden to have anything to do with the education of the young, because that activity had been made the exclusive province of the state. All religious communities were prohibited from owning real estate and they were also prohibited from operating philanthropic and welfare institutions and hospitals.
Enver Hoxha's overarching goal was the eventual destruction of all
organized religions in Albania, despite some variance in his approach to it. Owning anything related to Christianity became a reason for imprisonment due to alleged support for anti-government plots or coup attempts.
Iraq The Assyrians were subjected to another series of persecutions during the
Simele massacre of 1933. British officials estimated around 600 Assyrian civilians were killed at the hands of the
Kingdom of Iraq, though Assyrian sources estimated a death toll in the thousands. In 1987, the last Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians. They were tolerated under the secular regime of
Saddam Hussein, who even made one of them,
Tariq Aziz his deputy. However, Saddam Hussein's government continued to persecute the Christians on an
ethnic, cultural and racial basis, because the vast majority are Mesopotamian
Eastern Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians (aka
Chaldo-Assyrians). The Assyro-Aramaic language and script was repressed, the giving of Hebraic/Aramaic Christian names or Akkadian/Assyro-Babylonian names was forbidden (for example
Tariq Aziz's real name was Michael Youhanna), and Saddam exploited religious differences between Assyrian denominations such as
Chaldean Catholics, the
Assyrian Church of the East, the
Syriac Orthodox Church, the
Assyrian Pentecostal Church and the
Ancient Church of the East, in an attempt to divide them. Many Assyrians and Armenians were ethnically cleansed from their towns and villages during the
al Anfal Campaign in 1988, despite the fact that this campaign was primarily directed against the Kurds.
Madagascar by Ranavalona I in Madagascar Queen
Ranavalona I (reigned 1828–1861) issued a royal edict prohibiting the practice of
Christianity in Madagascar, expelled British missionaries from the island, and sought to
stem the growth of conversion to Christianity within her realm. Far more, however, were punished in other ways: many were required to undergo the
tangena ordeal, while others were condemned to hard labor or the confiscation of their land and property, and many of these consequently died. The tangena ordeal was commonly administered to determine the guilt or innocence of an accused person for any crime, including the practice of Christianity, and involved ingestion of the poison contained within the nut of the tangena tree (
Cerbera odollam). Survivors were deemed innocent, while those who perished were assumed guilty. In 1838, it was estimated that as many as 100,000 people in Imerina died as a result of the
tangena ordeal, constituting roughly 20% of the population. contributing to a strongly unfavorable view of Ranavalona's rule in historical accounts.
Malagasy Christians would remember this period as
ny tany maizina, or "the time when the land was dark". Persecution of Christians intensified in 1840, 1849 and 1857; in 1849, deemed the worst of these years by British missionary to Madagascar W.E. Cummins (1878), 1,900 people were fined, jailed or otherwise punished in relation to their Christian faith, including 18 executions.
Nazi Germany Hitler and the
Nazis received some support from certain Christian communities, in particular the
German Christian movement within the
German Evangelical Church. Once in power, the Nazis moved to consolidate their power over the German churches and bring them in line with Nazi ideals. Some historians say that Hitler had a general covert plan, which some of them say existed even before the Nazis' rise to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich, which was to be accomplished through Nazi control and subversion of the churches and it would be completed after the war. The Third Reich founded its own version of Christianity which was called
Positive Christianity, a Nazi version of Christianity which made major changes in the interpretation of the Bible by arguing that
Jesus Christ was the son of God, but he was not a Jew, arguing that Jesus despised Jews and Judaism, and arguing that
the Jews were the ones who were solely responsible for Jesus's death. Outside mainstream Christianity, the
Jehovah's Witnesses were targets of Nazi Persecution, for their refusal to swear allegiance to the Nazi government. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s,
Jehovah's Witnesses refused to renounce their political neutrality and as a result, they were imprisoned in
concentration camps. The Nazi government gave detained Jehovah's Witnesses the option of release if they signed a document which indicated their renunciation of their faith, their submission to state authority, and their support of the German military. Historian Hans Hesse said, "Some five thousand Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps where they alone were 'voluntary prisoners', so termed because the moment they recanted their views, they could be freed. Some lost their lives in the camps, but few renounced their faith."
Empire of Japan At its height, the
Empire of Japan forced its subjects in the territories it occupied to worship Japanese deities in
Shinto shrines in a
state-sponsored Shinto programme, and Christians in the
occupied Korean peninsula were no exception. Under pressure from the Imperial Japanese Government, the Presbyterian Church, which was the largest community of Protestant Christians in Korea at the time, ruled that 'Shinto shrines are not a religion, and [bowing before them] is a celebration of a state'. However, some Christians, like
Chu Ki-chol, who viewed bowing before the deities in a Shinto shrine as worshipping idols and therefore against Christian doctrines, continued to resist such pressures.
Late Ottoman Empire During the modern era, relations between Muslims and Christians in the
Ottoman Empire were largely shaped by broader dynamics which were related to European colonial and neo-imperialist activities in the region, dynamics which frequently (though by no means always) generated tensions between the two communities. Too often, growing European influence in the region during the nineteenth century seemed to disproportionately benefit Christians, thus, it triggered resentment on the part of many Muslims, likewise, many Muslims suspected that Christians and the European powers were plotting to weaken the
Islamic world. Further exacerbating relations was the fact that Christians seemed to disproportionately benefit from efforts at reform (one aspect of which generally sought to elevate the political status of non-Muslims), likewise, the various Christian nationalist uprisings in the Empire's European territories, which often had the support of the European powers. in 1895Persecutions and forced migrations of Christian populations were induced by Ottoman forces during the 19th century in the European and Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The
Massacres of Badr Khan were conducted by
Kurdish and
Ottoman forces against the
Assyrian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire between 1843 and 1847, resulting in the slaughter of more than 10,000 indigenous Assyrian civilians of the
Hakkari region, with many thousands more being sold into
slavery. On 17 October 1850 the Muslim majority began rioting against the
Uniate Catholics – a minority that lived in the communities of Judayda, in the city of Aleppo. During the
Bulgarian Uprising against Ottoman rule (1876), and the
Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), the persecution of the
Bulgarian Christian population was conducted by Ottoman soldiers. The principal locations were
Panagurishte,
Perushtitza, and
Bratzigovo. Over 15,000 non-combatant
Bulgarian civilians were killed by the Ottoman army between 1876 and 1878, with the worst single instance being the
Batak massacre. During the war, whole cities including the largest Bulgarian one (
Stara Zagora) were destroyed and most of their inhabitants were killed, the rest being expelled or enslaved. The atrocities included impaling and grilling people alive. Similar attacks were undertaken by Ottoman troops against Serbian Christians during the
Serbian-Turkish War (1876–1878). in
Asia Minor, . Since 1923, only the
Metropolis of Chalcedon retains a small community. was a mass slaughter of the Assyrian population perpetrated by
Ottoman forces and some
Kurdish tribes during
World War I. The abolition of
jizya and emancipation of formerly
dhimmi subjects was one of the most embittering stipulations the Ottoman Empire had to accept to end the
Crimean War in 1856. Then, "for the first time since 1453, church bells were permitted to ring... in Constantinople," writes M. J. Akbar. "Many Muslims declared it a day of mourning." Indeed, because superior social standing was from the start one of the advantages of conversion to Islam, resentful Muslim mobs rioted and hounded Christians all over the empire. In 1860 up to 30,000 Christians were massacred in the Levant alone. Mark Twain recounts what took place in the levant: {{Blockquote Between 1894 and 1896, a series of ethno-religiously motivated
anti-Christian pogroms known as the
Hamidian massacres were conducted against the ancient
Armenian and
Assyrian Christian populations by the forces of the
Ottoman Empire. The massacres mainly took place in what is today southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria and northern Iraq. Assyrians and Armenians were massacred in
Diyarbakir,
Hasankeyef,
Sivas and other parts of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The death toll is estimated to have been as high as 325,000 people, with a further 546,000 Armenians and Assyrians made destitute by forced deportations of survivors from cities, and the destruction or theft of almost 2500 of their farmsteads towns and villages. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were also destroyed or forcibly converted into mosques. These attacks caused the death of over thousands of Assyrians and the forced "Ottomanisation" of the inhabitants of 245 villages. The Ottoman troops looted the remains of the Assyrian settlements and these were later stolen and occupied by south-east Anatolian tribes. Unarmed Assyrian women and children were raped, tortured and murdered. According to H. Aboona, the independence of the Assyrians was destroyed not directly by the Turks but by their neighbours under Ottoman auspices. The
Adana massacre occurred in the
Adana Vilayet of the
Ottoman Empire in April 1909. A massacre of
Armenian and
Assyrian Christians in the city of
Adana and its surrounds amidst the
31 March Incident led to a series of anti-Christian
pogroms throughout the province. Reports estimated that the Adana Province massacres resulted in the death of as many as 30,000 Armenians and 1,500 Assyrians. Between 1915 and 1921 the
Young Turks government of the collapsing
Ottoman Empire persecuted
Eastern Christian populations in
Anatolia,
Persia, Northern
Mesopotamia, and
The Levant. The onslaught by the
late Ottoman army (which included
Arab,
Kurdish, and
Circassian irregulars) resulted in an estimated 3.4 million deaths, divided between roughly 1.5 million
Armenian Christians, 0.75 million
Assyrian Christians, 0.90 million
Greek Orthodox Christians, and 0.25 million
Maronite Christians (see
Great Famine of Mount Lebanon); groups of
Georgian Christians were also killed. The massive ethno-religious cleansing expelled from the empire or killed the
Assyrians,
Armenians,
Greeks, and
Bulgarians who had not converted to Islam, and it came to be known as the
Armenian genocide,
Assyrian genocide,
Greek genocide, and
Great Famine of Mount Lebanon. which accounted for the deaths of Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Maronite Christians, and the deportation and destitution of many more. The Genocide led to the devastation of ancient
indigenous Christian populations who had inhabited the Middle East for thousands of years.
Benny Morris,
Dror Ze'evi,
Uğur Ümit Üngör, and several other
historians argue that the
Armenian genocide,
Greek genocide, and
Assyrian genocide constitute a series of extermination campaigns, usually referred to as the
late Ottoman genocides, that had been carried out by the
Ottoman Empire against
its Christian subjects. In the aftermath of the
Sheikh Said rebellion, the
Syriac Orthodox Church, and the
Assyrian Church of the East were subjected to harassment by Turkish authorities, on the grounds that some
Assyrians allegedly collaborated with the rebelling
Kurds. Consequently, mass deportations took place and Assyrian Patriarch
Mar Ignatius Elias III was expelled from the
Mor Hananyo Monastery which was turned into a Turkish barrack. The patriarchal seat was then temporarily transferred to
Homs.
Turkey The
Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, after the vast majority of Christian inhabitants of Anatolia had been expelled and massacred as a result of the
late Ottoman genocides. However, there still remained sizeable Greek and Armenian minorities in Istanbul. Beginning in the 1940s, the Turkish government instituted repressive policies forcing many Christians to emigrate. Examples are the
labour battalions drafted among non-Muslims during World War II, as well as the
Fortune Tax levied mostly on non-Muslims during the same period. These resulted in financial ruination and death for many Christians. The exodus was given greater impetus with the
Istanbul Pogrom of September 1955 and the
expulsion of Istanbul Greeks which led to thousands of Greeks fleeing the city, eventually reducing the Greek population from 200,000 in 1924 to about 7,000 by 1978 and to about 2,500 by 2006.
Soviet Union on 5 December 1931: The USSR's official
state atheism resulted in the
1921–1928 anti-religious campaign, during which many "church institution[s] at [the] local, diocesan or national level were systematically destroyed." After the
Russian Revolution of 1917, the
Bolsheviks undertook a massive program to remove the influence of the
Russian Orthodox Church from the government, outlawed
antisemitism in society, and promoted
atheism. Tens of thousands of churches were destroyed or they were converted to buildings which were used for other purposes, and many members of the clergy were murdered, publicly executed and imprisoned for what the government termed "anti-government activities". An extensive educational and propaganda campaign was launched to convince people, especially children and youths, to abandon their religious beliefs. This persecution resulted in the intentional murder of 500,000 Orthodox followers by the government of the Soviet Union during the 20th century. In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. The state established
atheism as the only scientific truth. Soviet authorities forbade the criticism of atheism and agnosticism until 1936 or of the state's anti-religious policies; such criticism could lead to forced retirement. Militant atheism became central to the ideology of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority policy of all Soviet leaders. Christopher Marsh, a professor at the
Baylor University writes that "Tracing the social nature of religion from Schleiermacher and Feurbach to Marx, Engles, and Lenin...the idea of religion as a social product evolved to the point of policies aimed at the forced conversion of believers to atheism." Under the doctrine of state atheism in the Soviet Union, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to
atheism" was conducted by the Communists. 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. Many priests were killed and imprisoned; thousands of churches were closed. In 1925 the government founded the
League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution. The League of Militant Atheists was also a "nominally independent organization established by the Communist Party to promote atheism". The Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions against particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most
organized religions were never outlawed. It is estimated that 500,000 Russian Orthodox Christians were martyred in the
gulags by the Soviet government, excluding the members of other
Christian denominations who were also tortured or killed. The Soviets' official religious stance was one of "religious freedom or tolerance", though the state established atheism as the only scientific truth (see also the Soviet or committee of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Scientific and Political Knowledge or
Znanie which was until 1947 called
The League of the Militant Godless and various
Intelligentsia groups). Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden and sometimes, it resulted in imprisonment. Some of the more high-profile individuals who were executed include
Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, priest and scientist
Pavel Florensky.
Spain The
Second Spanish Republic, established in 1931, attempted to establish a regime with separation between State and Church, as had been established in France in 1905. When it was established, the Republic passed legislation which prevented the Church from conducting educational activities. The Spanish Second Republic was characterized by a process of political polarisation, as party divisions became increasingly embittered and questions of religious identity came to assume major political significance. 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. The Church's high-ranking officials like Isidro Goma, bishop of
Tudela, reminded their Christian subjects of their obligation to vote "for the righteous", and they also reminded their priests of their obligation to "educate the consciences." 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. The Catholic Church endorsed the rebellion which was led by the fascist
Francisco Franco, and
Pope Pius XI expressed sympathy for the Nationalist side during the
Spanish Civil War. and "fully consistent with a Spanish history of popular anticlericalism and anticlerical populism". In
Barcelona, out of the 58 churches, only the cathedral was spared, and similar desecrations occurred almost everywhere in Republican Spain. Payne called the terror the "most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western History, in some way even more intense than that of the
French Revolution."
United States The
Latter Day Saints, (
Mormons) have been
persecuted since their founding in the 1830s. The persecution of the Mormons drove them from New York and
Ohio to
Missouri, where they continued to be subjected to violent attacks. In 1838, Missouri Governor
Lilburn Boggs declared that Mormons had made war on the state of Missouri, so they "must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State". At least 10,000 Mormons were expelled from the State. In the most violent altercation which occurred at that time, the
Haun's Mill massacre, 17 Mormons were murdered by an anti-Mormon mob and 13 other Mormons were wounded. The
Extermination Order which was signed by Governor Boggs was not formally invalidated until 25 June 1976, 137 years after being signed. The Mormons subsequently fled to
Nauvoo, Illinois, where hostilities escalated again. In Carthage, Ill., where
Joseph Smith was being held on the charge of
treason, a mob stormed the jail and killed him. Smith's brother, Hyrum, was also killed. After a
succession crisis, most Mormons followed
Brigham Young, who organized an evacuation from the United States after the federal government refused to protect them. 70,000
Mormon pioneers crossed the
Great Plains to settle in the
Salt Lake Valley and surrounding areas. After the
Mexican–American War, the area became the US
territory of Utah. Over the next 63 years, several actions by the
federal government were directed against Mormons in the
Mormon Corridor, including the
Utah War, the
Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the
Poland Act,
Reynolds v. United States, the
Edmunds Act, the
Edmunds–Tucker Act, and the
Reed Smoot hearings. , from the shores of America. The second iteration of the
Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915 and launched in the 1920s, persecuted Catholics in both the United States and
Canada. As stated in its official rhetoric which focused on the threat of the
Catholic Church, the Klan was motivated by
anti-Catholicism and American
nativism. Its appeal was exclusively directed towards
white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; it opposed
Jews,
blacks, Catholics, and newly arriving
Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as
Italians,
Russians, and
Lithuanians, many of whom were either Jewish or Catholic.
Warsaw Pact in
Central Chișinău was one of the churches that were "converted into museums of atheism", under the doctrine of
Marxist–Leninist atheism. 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. The Soviet Union ended its war time truce with the Russian Orthodox Church, and
extended its persecutions to the newly Communist Eastern bloc: "In
Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, Catholic leaders who were unwilling to be silent were denounced, publicly humiliated or imprisoned by the Communists. Leaders of the national Orthodox Churches in
Romania and Bulgaria had to be cautious and submissive", wrote
Geoffrey Blainey. While the churches were generally not persecuted as harshly as they had been in the USSR, nearly all of their schools and many of their churches were closed, and they lost their formally prominent roles in public life. Children were taught atheism, and clergy were imprisoned by the thousands. In the
Eastern Bloc, Christian churches, along with Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques were forcibly "converted into museums of atheism."
North Korea ==Current situation (1989 to the present)==