Measuring levels of persecution

Understanding the levels of persecution in a particular place is a useful piece of information. It tells you how difficult it will be to access it, for one thing. If tracked over time, it can also tell you whether persecution is increasing or decreasing.

How can we measure persecution, though? Is it by the number of martyrs? As we noted before, the number of martyrs is dropping, but an argument can be made that persecution is rising (especially through financial regulation, refusing churches permission to meet, harassment, etc). This is primarily fed by the fact that in our globally connected world, martyrs are a “hot-news-flash” while isolated cases of harassment don’t tend to get passed on as much. Perhaps we can measure by the number of arrests? Difficult to know, as in many cases families don’t want to make the arrests known for fear of preventing some kind of settlement that will cause the government to release the person arrested. What about regulations? But that’s really complex: are building code regulations a form of persecution? They can be used for that, but it would include just about every country on earth.

So what if instead we use a kind of “weather index”? Here’s one I’m working on developing. How might you modify it?

0 – “Normal” levels of persecution – isolated instances. [Germany vs homeschoolers for example] 1 – Broad, systemic community/economic pressure on new believers 2 – Excessive or prejudicial regulation, family or community threats of violence, government “blind eye” 3 – Isolated instances of governmental harassment: arrests, imprisonment, labor camps, “make an example” 4 – Organized campaign of harassment, frequent arrests, but death is actually rare 5 – Threat of death to most believers who make public their faith

How to apply this? I suggest with increasing “resolution”: the “national” or country-wide level of persecution might be one level, and individual provinces and districts might be completely different. For example, China as a whole probably rates a 2 or a 3. Certain areas within China are probably as low as zero (I’m thinking of Shanghai, for example). Others are probably as high as 4.

These are fairly broad “lines,” so a case where a country moves from one level to another would be really indicative – not just a minor uptick in the number of arrests. That would give you a better indicator of the “persecution weather.”