Where Are Christians Persecuted Today? The Countries, List by List

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Christians are persecuted today in dozens of countries, and there are six that every one of the main lists agrees on: North Korea, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya and Iran. Three bodies publish these lists. All six countries are among the first ten on Open Doors’ World Watch List 2026, all six are named a “country of particular concern” in the 2026 report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and all six are in the worst category of Aid to the Church in Need’s 2025 report. Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Syria are the other four in Open Doors’ first ten, and seven more countries stand lower on that list but are named by both the commission and Aid to the Church in Need: Afghanistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, China, Nicaragua and Turkmenistan.

Long before anyone kept a list, the Lord sent a letter to the church in Pergamos, a city where one of its own people had already been killed, and it says, “I know thy works, and where thou dwellest” (Revelation 2:13). He knew where they lived. We have to learn it the slow way, from people who count, and they do not all count the same thing.

The table has seventeen countries. The first ten are Open Doors’ first ten, in its order, and the seven after them are the countries further down its list that the US commission recommended and Aid to the Church in Need also puts in its worst category. The first column of numbers is Open Doors’ rank, the second is what the commission recommended, and the third is the category Aid to the Church in Need gives the country.

Country	Open Doors rank, 2026	US commission, 2026	Aid to the Church in Need, 2025
North Korea	1	Particular concern	Persecution
Somalia	2	Armed group named	Persecution
Yemen	3	Armed group named	Persecution
Sudan	4	Armed group named	Persecution
Eritrea	5	Particular concern	Persecution
Syria	6	Particular concern	Discrimination
Nigeria	7	Particular concern	Persecution
Pakistan	8	Particular concern	Persecution
Libya	9	Particular concern	Persecution
Iran	10	Particular concern	Persecution
Afghanistan	11	Particular concern	Persecution
India	12	Particular concern	Persecution
Saudi Arabia	13	Particular concern	Persecution
Myanmar (Burma)	14	Particular concern	Persecution
China	17	Particular concern	Persecution
Nicaragua	32	Particular concern	Persecution
Turkmenistan	35	Particular concern	Persecution

Where the table says “Armed group named”, the commission did not recommend the country itself. It named an armed group at work there instead: al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Houthis in Yemen and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

These seventeen are not the only countries on more than one list, because Open Doors ranks fifty. Cuba is twenty-fourth there and Tajikistan twenty-seventh, and both are among the countries the commission recommended. Eight more that Open Doors ranks are under persecution for Aid to the Church in Need: Mali, Burkina Faso, the Maldives, Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Cameroon and Mozambique.

Open Doors is the only one of the three that looks at Christians alone, because its mandate, as it says itself, is “to support suffering Christians worldwide”. It calls persecution “Any hostility experienced as a result of one’s identification with Christ”, and its researchers say they start from “the everyday life of the Christian and the Church”. So they ask what a believer meets in private life, in the family, in the community, in the nation and in the church, and after that they weigh violence. A high place on the list tells us about all of that together, and about more than how many believers were killed.

The 2026 list covers the year from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025, and its first ten, in order, are North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya and Iran. North Korea was first the year before as well. Syria was eighteenth then and is sixth now, and Libya has gone from fourth to ninth. Five of the ten are in Africa, and Open Doors writes that “One of every 8 Christians on planet Earth lives in the 14 Sub-Saharan countries that appear on the 2026 World Watch List.”

Out of the same research comes the number you may have heard: more than 388 million Christians, one in seven of all the Christians in the world, living where persecution and discrimination are high. Open Doors puts it at one in five in Africa, two in five in Asia and one in twelve in Latin America. It also says something we ought to repeat whenever we repeat the number, that “it does not mean that all Christians in those situations are directly facing high levels of persecution.” How many have been killed and imprisoned is a question of its own, and we have gathered some of those counts in the facts and figures on Muslim persecution of Christians.

The second list comes out of an American law. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 created the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, which describes itself as “independent, bipartisan”, and the commission watches over the freedom of people of every religion and of none, so its list is wider than Christians. The Act is also where the phrase “country of particular concern” comes from. It means a country whose government engages in or tolerates “particularly severe” violations of religious freedom, and the Act spells those out as “systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations”, such as torture, “prolonged detention without charges” and the disappearance of persons.

In its 2026 report, which looks back over 2025, the commission recommended eighteen countries for that name: Afghanistan, Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, India, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. Recommending is all the commission can do, because the naming itself belongs to the State Department, and the State Department’s list as the report prints it has thirteen of the eighteen. The five it does not have are Afghanistan, India, Libya, Syria and Vietnam.

Sometimes the people doing the harm are an armed group and there is no government to name. For that the same law has a second term, an “entity of particular concern”, meaning a group that “exercises significant political power and territorial control”. The commission named seven such groups in 2026, and that is how Somalia, Yemen and Sudan come into its report. The commission also keeps a list of people of every faith whom governments and armed groups have targeted for what they believe. At the end of 2025 the list had 2,424 people on it, and the commission’s records showed more than 1,650 of them still in some form of custody. The Christians on it who are still held are named, one by one, in Christians in prison, by name.

The third list is a Catholic one. Aid to the Church in Need is “a Pontifical Foundation of the Catholic Church”, and every two years it reports on religious freedom for people of all faiths. Its 2025 report covers January 2023 to December 2024 and sorts countries into three groups. The worst, Persecution, is for countries “where people face serious and repeated acts of violence or harassment because of their faith”. The next, Discrimination, is for countries that “have laws or practices that unfairly target certain religious groups”. The third group is kept under observation.

Twenty-four countries are under persecution, and the report arranges them by what drives it. First come Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Libya, the Maldives, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen; then China, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan; then Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and last India and Myanmar. Thirty-eight more are under discrimination, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Türkiye, Vietnam and Syria are among them. The report says of its own sorting that “there is necessarily a subjective element in such an analysis”.

You may also have seen a much bigger number, 165 countries, and that one comes from Pew Research Center. Pew’s researchers read the year’s reports on 198 countries and territories and note every country where Christians were harassed, whether by government officials or by anyone else. For 2023 they found 165 such countries for Christians and 143 for Muslims. The number is so large because of how little it takes to be counted, as Pew explains: “A country is counted as having had religion-related harassment if the sources report that even a single incident of harassment took place in that country in the year under review.” Then Pew gives its own warning, that “the summary statistics presented here should not be interpreted as determining which religious group faced the most persecution.” So Pew can tell us how widely Christians meet hostility, and for where it is heaviest we have to go back to the other three.

People often ask where Christianity is illegal, and no report answers with a single list, because the laws are not alike. What we can say comes from the country pages of two of the reports above, the US commission’s for 2026 and Aid to the Church in Need’s for 2025.

In a few places it is worship itself. In North Korea the security ministry treats religious activity as an “anti-state crime”, and the commission’s report says, “Possessing a Bible, interacting with Christian missionaries while escaping North Korea, or engaging in worship can lead to severe punishment, including torture, forced labor, imprisonment, and execution.” In the large rural areas of Somalia that al-Shabaab controls, the group enforces its own version of Islamic law, “forbidding Christian worship, punishing apostasy with death”. In the Maldives “Non-Muslim worship is banned, proselytism criminalised”, and Saudi Arabia has what the commission calls “the constitutional prohibition on public non-Muslim worship”. In Iran two Christians were arrested in February 2025, and their indictment counted praying, baptisms, communion and Christmas as their crimes and called the Bible a “prohibited book”. We tell more of that on our page on Christians in Iran.

More often the law falls on the person who leaves Islam. The reports’ word for this is apostasy, which means leaving the religion one is counted as belonging to. It is punishable by death in Afghanistan, in Yemen and in Mauritania, and in Saudi Arabia “Apostasy and blasphemy remain capital crimes”. In Libya the law “criminalizes conversion away from Islam and proselytization”, and in April 2025 a court in Tripoli sentenced ten Christians and one atheist to prison for between three and fifteen years. In Qatar the penal code makes conversion from Islam a crime, while Christians who are not Qatari “are relatively free to practice their faith”, and in Mauritania non-Muslim worship “is restricted to foreigners”. So in the same country a foreign worker may go to church while a convert is watched, or keeps his faith to himself.

Elsewhere the law works through registration. Eritrea recognises only four religious groups, and three of them are churches: “the Tewahedo Eritrean Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and evangelical Lutheran churches”. Baptists and Pentecostals are among those arrested there. In Turkmenistan “Unregistered worship remained illegal”. India’s laws are of another kind again: by the commission’s count for 2025, twelve of its twenty-eight states have laws against conversion. And where the law does not forbid a conversion, the people around the convert may, as Aid to the Church in Need says of Morocco: “Conversion from Islam is not illegal yet socially penalised.”

A country can stand high on one list and be missing from another, and the first reason is who is being counted. Open Doors looks only at Christians, while the commission and Aid to the Church in Need look at everyone who suffers for a belief, and that is how Russia and Vietnam can be among the commission’s eighteen and yet be fifty-sixth and fifty-fifth for Open Doors.

The second reason is who is doing the harm. The commission’s first term is for governments, so Somalia, Yemen and Sudan, where it names armed groups, are not among its eighteen countries, although Open Doors ranks them second, third and fourth. The third is the year, since Pew’s count is for 2023 and Aid to the Church in Need stops at December 2024, while Open Doors’ year ended in September 2025 and the commission’s in December 2025.

Nigeria is on all three lists, and it is where Open Doors counted the most deaths. Of the 4,849 Christians it records as killed for reasons of faith in the year to September 2025, 3,490 were in Nigeria, and Open Doors calls its violence data an “absolute minimum figure”. Our map of Christians in Nigeria shows where, and another page looks at who counted Nigeria’s destroyed churches, and how.

The letter to Pergamos does not stop at “where thou dwellest”. A few words later the Lord says, “thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you.” He knew the city, and he knew the man who died there by name. We have the names of countries and of a few of the people in them, and Paul has told us what they are to us: “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

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• Prayers for persecuted Christians
• Christians in China
• Hebrews 13:3 and what it asks of us
• The 21 martyrs of Libya, killed at Sirte in 2015
• 20 Bible verses about suffering

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