There isn’t a clear path to freedom for Iran’s Christians

The major US and Israeli military strikes on Iran and Iranian counter attacks on US bases across the Middle East create an unprecedented crisis for the Iranian people and Iranian Christians in particular.

The previous attacks on Iran led to a major crackdown on Christians there, even before the recent street protests began. The regime is at its most dangerous when it is both weak and threatened, as it is now.

As martyrdom is a central doctrine of Shi’a Islam, the regime is likely to fight its ‘enemies’ – including Iran’s Christians – until the very end. So, Christians are likely to see a significant increase in persecution in the short term.

What happens next?

This is of course the impossible question.

There is no obvious clear path to a free, still less a genuinely democratic society in Iran. Simply removing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei will not bring that about as the regime has tentacles across the whole of society.

There is no possibility of a military coup ushering greater freedom as happened in Egypt in 2013 when the army led by current Egypt’s current president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government following widespread street protests. Unlike the Egyptian army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the ideological guardians of the regime and have a constitutional duty of safeguarding the revolution at home and spreading it overseas. They also themselves control a huge swathe of Iran’s economy.

It is worth remembering that the 1979 Iranian revolution began as liberal protests against the Shah’s government. It was then hijacked by radical Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini who then turned on the liberals.

It is rare for deeply repressive authoritarian regimes to be replaced by anything like free democratic governments – Germany and Japan after the second world war are the exception, and that was largely due to the influence of Christian values – directly in the case of Germany’s post war Chancellor Konrad Adnenaur, and more indirectly through US influence on the reconstruction of Japan.

In the Islamic world we have two recent examples. First, Afghanistan where the post 9/11 western led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) allowed Western initiated attempts to set Afghanistan on the path to being a more free, democratic society. However, even that failed to abolish the country’s apostasy laws, leading to Afghan Christian Abdul Rahman subsequently being sentenced to death for apostasy.

While there was a window of greater freedom for Afghan Christians for a few years, the withdrawal of Western forces in 2021 was as we all know followed by the return of the Taliban, who operate a similar degree of lethal repression of religious minorities to the Iranian regime.

The second example is Sudan, which had an even more brutal Islamist regime under President Omar al-Bashir. In 2019 he was overthrown by a military coup after being indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Darfur genocide. That also led to a brief window of greater freedom for Sudanese Christians.

However, the key players in the new government – head of state Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and his deputy and coalition partner General Hemedti leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) formerly known as the Janjaweed militia – were both Islamists with past involvement in atrocities. By 2023 the coalition had collapsed as the RSF began laying siege to south-western Sudan, Christians were reported to have been abducted and sometimes murdered. While elsewhere in Sudan the government have repeatedly arrested Christians and labelled them as enemies of the state.

So, even if the present war between Iran does somehow lead to a period of greater freedom for Iranian Christians – it may only be a brief window.

Iran really does need urgent prayer – as there is currently no clear pathway to a better, more free Iran.