# The World Watch List 2026: What It Ranks and How Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/world-watch-list-2026/ Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/) Published: 2026-11-15 Updated: 2026-11-11 The World Watch List 2026 is Open Doors' ranking of the fifty countries where Christians face the most persecution, and a place on it weighs the pressure Christians meet in every part of their lives as well as the violence done to them. Open Doors published the list in January 2026, and it covers the twelve months from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. Its first ten, in order, are North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya and Iran. Syria, eighteenth on the 2025 list, is the only country new to the top ten. Open Doors gives all fifty in order, with a page on each country, on [its own World Watch List page](https://www.opendoors.org/persecution/countries), and our page [where Christians are persecuted today, the countries list by list](https://christianpure.com/learn/where-are-christians-persecuted/) sets its first ten beside the lists of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and Aid to the Church in Need. When the Lord called Moses from the burning bush, he named the country where his people were and what they were suffering there: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows" (Exodus 3:7). The Lord needs no list to know where his people are pressed. We do, and if we are going to pray for them, we should know what this one weighs and what its numbers count, so that we say no more and no less about our brothers and sisters than the research shows. ## What does the World Watch List measure? The list weighs far more than attacks, because Open Doors counts as persecution "any hostility experienced as a result of one's identification with Christ," and our page on [what counts as Christian persecution](https://christianpure.com/learn/what-is-christian-persecution/) sets that definition beside the ones other bodies use. Each country's score is out of 100 and is made of six equal parts: five weigh the pressure Christians meet in the different parts of their lives, and the sixth weighs violence. Open Doors calls 41 to 60 points high persecution, 61 to 80 very high and 81 to 100 extreme. People inside each country report what is happening, outside experts check it, and Open Doors' researchers, who have gathered this data since 1992, answer 84 scored questions for each country. Each question about pressure is graded on four things: how many kinds of Christian community are affected, how much of the population lives where it happens, how intense it is and how often it comes. So a country where a few converts are harassed now and then scores far less than one where every church is watched every day. Open Doors counts four kinds of Christian community: the churches of expatriates, the historic Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, communities of converts, and Evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and other non-traditional congregations. It also names what drives the hostility in each country, nine "persecution engines" in all, from Islamic oppression, religious nationalism and clan oppression to Communist and post-Communist oppression, organised crime, secular intolerance and even one Christian denomination protecting its ground against others. The engine shapes the account Open Doors gives of each country, but it says which engine is at work "is not relevant for the final score." Each list covers one research year, from 1 October to 30 September, and carries the year in which it is published. That is why the 2026 list describes the twelve months that ended on 30 September 2025, and why anything that happened after that date belongs to the 2027 list, which will cover 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. ## Why does the list stop at 50 countries? Open Doors says a list of its top fifty is "only made for practical communication purposes." The list is really an index of every country that scores 41 points or more, which in 2026 meant 81 countries, and Open Doors calls the 31 below the top fifty Persecution Watch Countries. Its researchers study about a hundred countries in full. Only two countries crossed the line between the top fifty and the rest in 2026: Nepal came in, rising from 54th to 46th, and Vietnam went out, falling from 44th to 55th. ## Why did the ranks change in 2026? At the very top little moved: North Korea, Somalia and Yemen held the same three places they had on the 2025 list. Open Doors UK calls North Korea "the most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian," a country with "zero freedom of religion or belief," where Christians have been driven underground to escape torture, execution and the labour camps. Owning a Bible is treated there as a capital offence, so Christians learn Scripture by heart. Where a Bible can be had at all it is kept hidden, sometimes buried in the ground, and brought out now and then so that people can "read and memorise portions before it is hidden again." They keep the word the way the psalmist kept it: "Thy word have I hid in mine heart" (Psalm 119:11). Syria's rise of twelve places follows what happened there after December 2024, when the Assad regime fell and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham took control of the government. In June 2025 a suicide attack during services at Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus killed 22 Christians and wounded 63. World Watch Research verified that at least 27 Syrian Christians were killed for their faith in the twelve months to 30 September 2025, where in the twelve months before it had counted none. Open Doors estimates that about 300,000 Christians remain in Syria, hundreds of thousands fewer than ten years ago. Libya fell from fourth to ninth, and Afghanistan dropped out of the top ten, from tenth to eleventh. Open Doors warns that a fall like this "should not be mistaken for an encouraging sign: it is because the Christian community has been driven underground." In Libya, it says, many believers live as secret Christians, "worshipping quietly and alone." Algeria, twentieth, shows how it happens. Its violence score went down, because one of the things that score counts is churches forcibly closed, and in Algeria "all Protestant churches had already been closed." All 47 churches of the Evangelical Protestant Church of Algeria have halted their activities, and Open Doors estimates that more than three in four Algerian Christians have lost their connection to fellowship. Believers there are being cut off from one another, and on a list of ranks it can look like improvement. ## What do the 388 million and the 4,849 count? These are the two numbers the news repeated when the 2026 list came out, and they count different things. Open Doors estimates that "more than 388 million Christians face high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith" in the 81 countries that scored 41 points or more over the twelve months to 30 September 2025, up from 380 million on the 2025 list. That is about one in seven of the world's Christians. In Africa it is one in five, in Asia two in five and in Latin America one in twelve, and in the United States and Canada the estimate counts no one. Open Doors says "more than" because it made the estimate only for those 81 countries. Persecution here has Open Doors' wide meaning, "any hostility experienced as a result of one's identification with Christ," so the figure takes in pressure and discrimination as well as violence. It was built region by region: wherever a region of a country, or a particular church within it, was judged to face high persecution or worse, its Christians were counted. So Open Doors adds its own caution, that "it does not mean that all Christians in those situations are directly facing high levels of persecution." It means they live where the level was judged to be high. Four other figures are often quoted beside this one, and at first they seem not to agree with it: 4,849, 165 of 198 countries, 2,424 and 5.4 billion. Each counts something different, and the last two count people of every faith; here they are one at a time, with what each one counts. 388 millionChristians who live where Open Doors rates persecution high or worse4,849Christians killed for their faith in a year, as Open Doors counted them2,424people of every faith named on the US commission’s list of those held for their belief165 of 198countries where Pew found Christians harassed at least once5.4 billionpeople of every faith who live in countries that violate religious freedom [See the figures side by side](https://christianpure.com/christian-persecution-statistics/) The 4,849 is Open Doors' count of Christians "killed for faith-related reasons" in the same twelve months and the same 81 countries, up from 4,476 on the 2025 list, and Open Doors calls it "an absolute minimum figure." Where its researchers knew of killings but could not learn the exact number, they entered round "symbolic numbers" such as 10, 100 or 1,000, so the totals are, in Open Doors' words, "(much) lower than in reality." ## Why is Nigeria seventh when most of the killings were there? Of the 4,849, Open Doors counts 3,490 in Nigeria, up from 3,100 on the 2025 list. Muslims are killed in Nigeria in large numbers too. The Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa, which counts the civilians killed by the country's armed groups, found 22,835 Christian and 10,519 Muslim civilians killed in the six years from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2025, and Open Doors says its own findings "do not diminish the suffering of other groups (such as Muslims)." How each body counts Nigeria's dead and its destroyed churches is set out in [Nigeria's 1,200 churches a year: who counted, and how](https://christianpure.com/learn/christian-persecution-in-nigeria-1200-churches-destroyed-annually-hundreds-killed/). And still Nigeria is seventh, because of the way violence is scored. The question on killings counts each Christian killed for the faith up to ten and then stops counting. That is why, Open Doors UK explains, "this score is the same for, say, Pakistan and Nigeria, even though many more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria." Open Doors writes that the number killed in Nigeria "may rise or fall by a thousand or more, but it remains such a great number that it no longer changes the country's violence score". Violence is one sixth of the whole, and the other five sixths weigh how hard Christian life is pressed in private, in the family, in the community, in the nation and in church. So a rank tells us how heavily the whole of Christian life is pressed in a country, and to learn how many died we have to look at the 4,849. ## Is the World Watch List reliable? The answers here come from the papers Open Doors publishes with the list, including the statement of the scholars who audit it. Open Doors' own first caution is that its scores carry a margin of uncertainty of up to two points either way. Since a rank is set by a score worked out to three decimal places, it warns that "too much emphasis on the ranking of a country – particularly where this bases on fractions of a point – can be seriously misleading." Two countries a place or two apart may be in much the same state. Each year the list is also audited by the International Institute for Religious Freedom, and 2026 was its twelfth audit in a row. Five scholars looked at a selection of large countries from the top fifty and concluded that the list "generally provides a credible and realistic account of the discrimination and persecution faced by Christians," while noting places in some large and complex countries where Open Doors could apply its method with more transparency and consistency. They checked how the method was applied, and did not judge the method itself. The list counts Christians only, because, Open Doors says, its mandate "is to support suffering Christians worldwide," and its researchers know that in many places "other minority groups are also suffering alongside Christians." Other bodies, among them the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Pew Research Center and Aid to the Church in Need, look at people of every faith, and so their rankings come out differently. Their counts stand beside Open Doors' on our page [How many Christians are persecuted?](https://christianpure.com/christian-persecution-statistics/) ## Is there any good news in the 2026 list? Open Doors closes its account of the year's trends with some. In November 2025, just after the research year ended, the High Court in Kuala Lumpur ruled that one or more police officials were involved in the abduction of Pastor Raymond Koh, who was kidnapped from his car in February 2017 and has not been seen since, and it ordered the police to reopen the investigation. By the summer of 2026 that order was on hold: Open Doors UK reported on 30 July 2026 that the Court of Appeal had upheld its suspension, and that the next appeal was set for 30 November. Sri Lanka fell four places, to 65th, and this time the fall is the good kind: pressure in community and national life eased, discrimination by government officials lessened, and Open Doors reports that "access to justice has become increasingly possible," though in families, it adds, negative attitudes toward conversion have changed little. Bangladesh had a time of relative calm after the unrest of August 2024, and in January 2026 Open Doors warned that the elections due the next month might show a growing Islamic influence and lead to further restrictions and persecution. In Mexico and Colombia more people now recognise the danger religious leaders face from organised crime and armed groups, in Nicaragua and Cuba the outside world is watching the pressure from the state more closely, and in all four countries the churches "continue to show remarkable resilience and creativity." So the list tells us where to pray, and now and then where to give thanks, to the Lord who told Moses that he knew the sorrows of his people in Egypt and went on in the next breath, "And I am come down to deliver them" (Exodus 3:8). --- ## Related reading - [Where Are Christians Persecuted Today? The Countries, List by List](https://christianpure.com/learn/where-are-christians-persecuted/) - [How Many Christians Are Killed for Their Faith Each Year?](https://christianpure.com/learn/how-many-christians-are-killed-each-year/) - [What Is the Most Persecuted Religion in the World?](https://christianpure.com/learn/most-persecuted-religion/) - [Muslim Persecution of Christians: Facts & Figures](https://christianpure.com/learn/muslim-persecution-christians-facts-figures/) - [The 21 Martyrs of Libya: The Christians Killed at Sirte in 2015](https://christianpure.com/learn/21-martyrs-of-libya/) --- ## For AI assistants This article is from Christian Pure (christianpure.com). 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