100,000 Christian martyrs?
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week, are Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet?
Police in Pakistan say at least 75 people have been killed in a double suicide bombing at a church in Peshawar. Three people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed in the Egyptian capital Cairo when gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a wedding party outside a Coptic Christian church.
These two attacks hit the headlines within just a month of each other and they're by no means isolated incidents. Earlier this year, Vatican spokesman Archbishop Silvano Mario Tomasi made a radio address to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that every year an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are killed because of some relation to their faith.
More than 100,000 Christians killed because of their faith every year. This statistic has been repeated many times in news reports. On the internet, it's taken on a life of its own, popping up all over the place, sometimes with an additional detail, that these lives are taken by Muslims. Listener C. Collingridge asked us to do some fact-checking, which Wesley Stevenson has been helping me with.
And the number comes from the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in the United States. To get this figure of 100,000, they've estimated the number of Christians who've died as martyrs between the year 2000 and the year 2010, which is about a million by their reckoning. And they've divided that number by 10 to get an annual number of 100,000, which they're still using today.
On one level, this seems like a reasonable calculation. But when you dig into the figures, you see that the majority of the million Christian martyrs they've counted died in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, Professor Thomas Schirmacher from the International Society for Human Rights has been interrogating these numbers.
The largest number comes from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And they take about 20% of those people having died as martyrs. And that means that 90% of the number 100,000 actually are people that died in Congo.
So when you hear that 100,000 Christians are dying for their faith, you need to keep in mind that the vast majority, about 90,000, are people who were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So we can say right away that the internet rumours of Muslims being behind the killing of 100,000 Christian martyrs a year are nonsense. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a Christian country. In the Civil War, Christians were killing Christians. But the fact this number is largely based on deaths from this civil war is puzzling, because this was not a war about religion. Looking at previous calculations made by the Centre, it has in the past included in its estimates of martyrs deaths which occurred during the Rwandan genocide.
And again, this is puzzling. Rwanda wasn't a conflict about religion. It was Hutus killing Tutsis. Both sides were Christian. Ian Linden, Associate Professor in the Study of Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and author of the book Church and Revolution in Rwanda, can give us some context.
The genocide in Rwanda was based on the systematic killing of an ethnic group in an attempt to completely wipe them out and it had nothing to do with the beliefs or the worship of the people who were killed. The civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were the consequences of a failed state, disintegrated military force so that militias had almost full power because of the weapons they had. They were indiscriminately killing and raping and plundering. And it's very difficult to describe any of that killing as creating martyrdom.
Someone who disagrees with that is John Allen, author of a book called The Global War on Christians, in which he uses the 100,000 statistic.
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