What Is the Most Persecuted Religion in the World?

If we count the countries where each faith meets harassment, the answer is Christianity. Pew Research Center’s report of June 2026 found that in 2023 Christians were harassed by governments or by private individuals and groups in 165 of the 198 countries and territories it studies, more than any other faith, while Muslims were harassed in 143 countries and Jews in 98. Pew itself warns us not to read those figures as a ranking of suffering. A country goes into its count when the sources report “even a single incident” of harassment there in the year, and so, Pew says, its figures “should not be interpreted as determining which religious group faced the most persecution”.

That count of countries is one of five figures quoted for persecution, and the other four, 388 million, 4,849, 2,424 and 5.4 billion, can look as if they disagree with it. They count different things, two of them people of every faith, and our page sets all five side by side with what each one counts.

Our brothers and sisters in Christ are harassed in more countries than the followers of any other faith, and still none of the counts we have can weigh one faith’s suffering against another’s, so we have to hold both of those together. Paul gave the churches of Galatia a way to do it: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). The household of faith is our own family, and we want what it suffers to be known. The Muslims and Jews harassed in the same reports are among the “all men” to whom Paul tells us to do good.

How does Pew count harassment?

Pew has kept this count since 2007, scoring every country each year on two measures, one for what governments do to restrict religion and one for hostility from “private individuals, groups or organizations”. It builds both from published reports by the US State Department, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the United Nations and groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Harassment, as Pew uses the word, covers a great deal. At one end are “insults or other hate-filled, biased remarks (either oral or written)” and “government policies that make religious practice more difficult”, and at the other “damage to property, detentions, assaults, displacements and killings”.

Christians have been harassed in more countries than any other group in every year of Pew’s count, from 107 countries in 2007, when Muslims were harassed in 96, to 165 in 2023, when Muslims were harassed in 143. Christians and Muslims are also the two largest faiths in the world. Pew’s study of the world’s religions counted 2.3 billion Christians in 2020, 28.8% of the world’s population, with Muslims at 25.6%, and it found Christians “the most geographically dispersed group”, a majority in 120 countries and territories. A faith that lives in more countries can be harassed in more of them.

Why can’t a count of countries name the most persecuted faith?

Each country counts once in Pew’s tally, whatever happened there, and Pew’s method says so plainly: “the study does not assess either the severity or the frequency of the harassment in each country”. Nicaragua, where 27 Catholic priests and two seminarians were detained during 2023, is one country among the 165. Myanmar, where United Nations figures cited by the State Department counted 147,000 Rohingya Muslims held in two dozen displacement camps that year, is one among the 143. A country where the sources reported a single incident in the whole year is one as well.

Jews, who “make up less than 1% of the world’s population”, were harassed in 98 countries in 2023 by Pew’s count, up from 90 the year before, and Pew traces part of the rise to antisemitic statements after the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023. A count of countries cannot tell us whether a small people harassed in half the world’s countries suffers more or less than a far larger one harassed in most of them.

Open Doors counts Christians alone

Because Open Doors counts no one else, its figures can tell us a great deal about our own family and nothing about how other faiths fare beside it. Its World Watch List 2026 was published in January 2026 and covers the year from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. It defines persecution as “any hostility experienced as a result of one’s identification with Christ”, and in that year, by that definition, “more than 388 million Christians face high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith”, about one Christian in seven in the world. The definition goes on to say that it “can include hostile attitudes, words and actions towards Christians”, so the 388 million takes in pressure and discrimination as well as violence.

Open Doors asks us to read that number with care: “it does not mean that all Christians in those situations are directly facing high levels of persecution.” Its count takes the 81 countries that score 41 points or more on its list and, within them, the Christians who live in regions, or belong to churches, where it judges the situation high or worse. In the same twelve months Open Doors recorded 4,849 Christians, our brothers and sisters, killed “because of their Christian identity”, and it calls its figures for violence “an absolute minimum figure”.

What does Aid to the Church in Need count?

Aid to the Church in Need is a Catholic foundation, and it looks at people of every faith, because “if religious freedom is denied to one group, there is no true religious freedom for anyone.” Its report of October 2025, on 196 countries from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2024, found grave violations of religious freedom in 62 of them. It counts 24 of those as countries of persecution, home to more than 4.1 billion people, and 38 as countries of discrimination, home to nearly 1.3 billion.

Together, in Aid to the Church in Need’s count for those two years, the 62 countries are home to “almost 5.4 billion people” of every faith and of none, 64.7% of the world’s population. That is the whole population of those countries, so the figure tells us how much of the world lives with grave violations of religious freedom and cannot tell us which faith suffers most. Where the report follows the jihadist groups spreading from the Sahel to Pakistan, it finds them “targeting Christians and Muslims who cannot accept the extremist ideology”.

Who says Christians are the most persecuted?

Pope Benedict XVI said it in his message for the World Day of Peace of 1 January 2011. On 31 October 2010, in the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad, “two priests and over fifty faithful were killed as they gathered for the celebration of Holy Mass”, and the Pope remembered them in that message, which he signed on 8 December, about five weeks later. He wrote in it, “At present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith.”

An independent review for Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, led by the Bishop of Truro, Philip Mounstephen, said it again in 2019. Drawing on reports from different organisations, it estimated “that one third of the world’s population suffers from religious persecution in some form, with Christians being the most persecuted group.” You may also have heard that 80% of persecuted believers are Christians, and the same review gives that figure: “the overwhelming majority (estimated at 80%) of persecuted religious believers are Christians”, it says, and the bishop’s preface puts it as “80% of religiously motivated discrimination”. Both times a footnote says the figure “was drawn from research carried out by the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) in 2009”. It adds that the figure “no longer appears on the ISHR website”, which it says “is simply because it is now ten years old”, and that leading figures at the society, in private conversation, “stand by the figure and suggest that it is now a conservative estimate”. Neither footnote names a title, page or link for that research.

Miray Philips, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, answered the claim in September 2025. Of Pew’s figures and Open Doors’ she wrote that “neither data source substantiates this claim”, since Pew measures how widely restrictions reach and Open Doors “only collects data on Christians”. She does not doubt the suffering: “It is true that Christians are suffering egregious forms of violence globally,” she writes, “and this warrants political attention and moral outrage.”

Was Christianity the most persecuted religion in history?

We know of no count like Pew’s that covers every faith across the centuries, and Pew’s own reaches back only to 2007. What we have from the very beginning is the Lord’s word that it would come. “Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you,” he told his disciples (John 15:20), and he set them in a long line of the persecuted: “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matthew 5:12).

The Truro review traces that hostility to the oldest Christian confession. “‘Jesus is Lord’ is the earliest Christian Creed,” it says, and those words “explain why from the earliest days the Christian faith attracted persecution. To say that Jesus is Lord was to say that Caesar was not Lord, as he claimed to be.” The story of those first centuries under the Caesars is told in how Christianity changed the Roman Empire.

The same review gives a reason for keeping watch over Christians that reaches past our own household. “Because the Christian faith is perhaps the one truly global faith it has become a bellwether for repression more generally,” it says. “If Christians are being discriminated against in one context or another you can be confident other minorities are too.” Care for our own, on that reading, is care for every minority beside us. We remember the household of faith first because we belong to it, and Paul tells us what that belonging means: “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Related reading

• How many Christians are persecuted? The figures side by side
• Muslim persecution of Christians: facts and figures
• Where are Christians persecuted today? The countries on three lists, side by side
• The 21 Martyrs of Libya: the Christians killed at Sirte in 2015
• Pope Leo XIV expresses his closeness to persecuted Christians in the Middle East