"From that day on, the lesson has been branded on my heart: freedom of religion and conscience is a precious, foundational, and indispensable right, and we must never take it for granted." - Os Guinness
"A new film tells the story of the 'fastest-growing church' in the world, an underground, persecuted Christian movement in a country known for exporting radical Islamic terrorism." - Fox
"Christians and pro-democracy supporters are worried the Chinese government could make another attempt to ramrod legislation in Hong Kong that would specifically target the faith community and strip basic human rights." - Fox News
Berlin, 1933. Wikimedia
The Third Reich’s persecution of Christian churches began shortly after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimer Republic, in January 1933. This story has been told in many books. See especially William L. Shirer’s account in his epic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.1 The following article appeared in the New York Times on January 3, 1942:2
BERNE, Switzerland, Jan. 2—Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, long the antireligious polemist of modern Germany and the protagonist of the “new national church,” has just released for publication a thirty-point program that will form at the same time the program and tenets of the “religion of National Socialism.”
The Nazi religious concept is founded not on the worship of Wotan and Valhalla, dear to the memory of General Erich von Ludendorff, but surprisingly enough, in view of Dr. Rosenberg’s past attacks on Christianity and its teachings, on a partial worship of God, whose works are “eternal.”
Briefly but succinctly he outlines the organization and teachings of the church in the following phrases—for which, as the Swiss Socialist newspaper Volksrecht of Zurich points out, “one needs to be no ecclesiast to draw his own conclusion”:
1. The National Reich Church specifically demands the immediate turning over to its possession of all churches and chapels, to become national churches.
"The Trump administration honored an 83-year-old Muslim cleric from Nigeria this week who saved hundreds of Christians in 2018 — when he hid them in his home and mosque during a terrorist attack." - Daily Wire
"Christians and Muslims, the largest and most widespread globally of any group, experienced government and/or social religious persecution in 143 and 140 countries respectively" - BPNews
"Following Russia’s ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses, evangelical Protestants have become the most-punished group under the country’s controversial “anti-missionary laws." - Christianity Today
"In all, 59 Jews were physically assaulted because of their religion in 2018, up from 21 in 2017. By comparison, there were 1,066 cases of harassment, an increase of 5% from 2017" - RNS
