Our Lord never promised His people an easy road in this world. “If they have persecuted me,” He said, “they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). From the stoning of Stephen until today, those who bear the name of Christ have been hated, imprisoned and killed for it. And yet the history of persecution is also the history of a precious liberty that God’s people fought and suffered to win: the freedom to worship God according to His Word and the conscience, without the sword of the state.
November is the month when many churches set aside a day to pray for the persecuted church. On October 27, 2026, Aid to the Church in Need released its report Persecuted and Forgotten?, which found that more than 220 million Christians are exposed to the most severe forms of persecution, and that conditions grew worse in more than half of the 18 countries it studied while none improved. Before looking at the news, it is worth looking back at how we got here.
Persecuted by Pagan Rome
The first great persecutions came from pagan Rome. After the great fire of Rome in A.D. 64, the Emperor Nero blamed the Christians, and many were put to death in cruel ways; according to early tradition, both Peter and Paul died at Rome in those years. For two and a half centuries, Christians lived under the threat of arrest whenever they refused to offer incense to the emperor or to the gods of Rome. The last and worst of these persecutions, the “Great Persecution,” began under Diocletian in A.D. 303. Churches were destroyed, Scriptures were burned, and believers were tortured and killed.
Then everything changed. In A.D. 313 the Emperor Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, granting toleration to Christians. By A.D. 380, under Theodosius, the Christianity of the imperial church had become the official religion of the empire. The persecuted had gained the favor of the state — and it was not long before a state church began to persecute others.
When the State Church Became the Persecutor
Through the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic institution used the power of kings and courts against all who would not bow to the Pope. The Waldenses, who held to the Scriptures and preached in the common tongue, were hunted for centuries in the valleys of the Alps; as late as 1655 many of them were massacred in the valleys of Piedmont. In 1209 Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Albigenses of southern France, and in the decades that followed Rome established the Inquisition to root out “heresy.” Many thousands of Bible believers were imprisoned, tortured and burned. In 1572, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France took the lives of thousands of Protestants. John Foxe recorded many of the martyrs of his own century in his Actes and Monuments, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in English in 1563. Truly the Scripture was fulfilled: “I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (Rev. 17:6).
It must be said honestly that the Protestant state churches of the Reformation often did the same. They broke from Rome but kept the union of church and state, and with it the sword. In January 1527 the Anabaptist Felix Manz was drowned in the river at Zurich for teaching believer’s baptism, and many more of those who rejected infant baptism were killed in Protestant as well as Catholic lands. In England, nonconformists were fined and imprisoned for preaching outside the established church. John Bunyan spent about twelve years in the Bedford jail for preaching the Gospel without a license, and his years in prison produced some of his best-known writings.
Baptists and the Cause of Religious Liberty
Few have suffered more for liberty of conscience, or done more to win it, than the Baptists. In 1612 Thomas Helwys, pastor of one of the first Baptist churches in England, published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, in which he dared to tell King James I that the king had no power over the souls of his subjects. Helwys was thrown into Newgate prison and died there. In America, Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts for his convictions, founded Providence in 1636 as a refuge for liberty of conscience, and helped found the first Baptist church in America there. In 1651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in Boston for holding a worship service in a private home. In colonial Virginia, Baptist preachers were jailed in the 1760s and 1770s for preaching without a license, some of them preaching to crowds through the bars of their cells.
Their suffering was not in vain. In 1786 Virginia adopted Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, and in 1791 the First Amendment to the Constitution forbade Congress to make any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Baptist preacher John Leland is often credited with pressing James Madison to support such a guarantee. The liberty that Christians in America have long taken for granted was bought in large part by the tears, stripes and prison cells of those who went before.
The Twentieth Century and Beyond
The twentieth century brought persecution on a scale the world had never seen. Communist governments in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe and elsewhere closed churches, imprisoned pastors and sent untold numbers of believers to labor camps, all in the name of an atheistic state. Today the pressure comes chiefly from the remaining Communist states, from militant Islam, and from religious nationalism in countries such as India. (For a fuller survey of the countries where Christians suffer most, see The Persecuted Church Today.)
It should be noted that most of the victims named in the reports below are professing Christians of every kind — Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. We do not agree with the doctrines of Rome or of the Orthodox churches, and the persecutors seldom ask what a man believes about grace or the Scriptures. They kill him because he bears the name of Christ. That is reason enough for us to grieve, to pray, and to speak.
Persecution in the News: Early November 2026
Nigeria
Nigeria remains the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian. On November 8, gunmen attacked two largely Christian communities near Barkin Ladi and Mangu in Plateau State, killing at least six people, including a soldier; no arrests have been reported. On November 3, gunmen attacked a market in Benue State, killing four people, among them a pastor. On November 4, militia in Kaduna State killed two Christian men and abducted about 20 residents, and late in October seven Christian mourners and eight farmers were abducted in other attacks. According to Aid to the Church in Need, more than 3.5 million people have been driven from their homes by the violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
On November 12, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey will chair a House hearing titled “One Year Later: Assessing Nigeria’s Efforts to Protect Christians and Secure the Middle Belt.” It comes a year after President Trump again designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for severe violations of religious freedom, and it will be Smith’s fourteenth hearing on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. Witnesses are to include Open Doors US and Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute.
Elsewhere in Africa
In Ethiopia, gunmen killed 34 Orthodox Christians at Endato in the Oromia region on November 5, bringing the toll from a recent series of attacks there to 94. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighters of the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist militia, killed more than 30 people in an attack on November 10, after burning Christian homes and shops in North Kivu earlier in the month. In Uganda, a father violently attacked his two children after learning they had become Christians. And it was reported on November 6 that Islamic State militants in Libya had kidnapped and killed Milad Malak, a 20-year-old Coptic church servant from Egypt, in early October.
Asia and Latin America
In Myanmar, a military air and drone strike on November 3 hit a Christian Bible school in Karen State while no fighting was going on, killing three female students. In India, two Christian girls were assaulted in Telangana for sharing their faith, a man was arrested in Uttar Pradesh under an anti-conversion law over a prayer meeting, and Christian leaders in Karnataka are calling for that state’s anti-conversion law to be repealed; more than 700 violent incidents against Christians were recorded in India in 2025. In China, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri was released after nine months in detention, but the pressure on independent churches continues. In Malaysia, the government is clamping down on those who leave state-approved Islam, and in Cuba at least ten people connected with Protestant gatherings were detained or restricted between November 5 and 7.
The Aid to the Church in Need report also warned that the religious side of these attacks is “too often downplayed or ignored by the international media,” which tends to describe them as ethnic quarrels or disputes over land.
How Should Christians Respond?
First, we must remember them. The Scripture commands us to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them” (Heb. 13:3). Pray for the persecuted by name and by country, that the Lord would strengthen them, provide for the widows and orphans, and save many through their testimony, as He has so often done. Pray also for their persecutors, as our Lord commanded, for Saul of Tarsus was once one of them.
Second, we must not take our own liberty for granted. It was won at great cost, and it can be lost. Christians should use it while they have it, to preach the Gospel freely and to stand for the right of all men to worship according to conscience. And third, we must be ready ourselves. Persecution has always been the normal lot of the church in this world, and the Lord’s promise to His suffering people still stands: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Rev. 2:10).
For more on this subject, see The Persecuted Church Today, Persecution Increasing in South Africa by Shaun Willcock, and Still Blood on the Harlot’s Lips.
Sources: Aid to the Church in Need, Persecuted and Forgotten? (October 27, 2026), as reported by Vatican News; Crossed Arrows International, Global Persecution Brief, November 11, 2026; International Christian Concern, November 2–11, 2026; Politics Nigeria, November 10, 2026. Historical material from standard histories of the church. Written by the Webmaster, November 11, 2026.