Secular Outlets Do Cover the Persecution of Christians!
There is a claim one often hears in Christian conservative circles: the secular Western media never reports on the persecution of Christians. It is a claim worth taking seriously, because it is sometimes true. Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, put the point bluntly in a much-quoted 2016 column: Christians are the world’s most persecuted minority, yet “you will hardly ever hear about it in the Western media.” Coverage of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria, for instance, has been chronically thin relative to the scale of the problem, and the motivations behind religiously targeted attacks are frequently flattened into “communal clashes” or “farmer-herder conflict.” I have written about this elsewhere, and the critique stands.
But the claim is also sometimes overstated, and on April 15, 2026, two pieces of reporting from decidedly non-Christian outlets made that point clearly. One was a major investigation by Human Rights Watch on Catholics in China. The other was a segment on Hindu nationalism and Christian conversions in India on The Intelligence, the daily news podcast from The Economist.
Human Rights Watch on China’s Catholics
Human Rights Watch is not a faith-based organization. It is a secular human rights watchdog with no confessional commitments, and its methodology is one of careful documentation rather than advocacy rhetoric. As its long-time leader Kenneth Roth stated, “stigmatize with facts.” That is precisely what makes its findings on China so weighty.
The report describes a decade of Xi Jinping’s “Sinicization” campaign as it applies to China’s estimated 10 to 12 million Catholics. It documents surveillance inside churches, travel restrictions on clergy, and what it calls arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, and house arrest of Catholic priests and bishops. Attention is given to the underground Catholic communities, those who have historically refused to join the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. According to HRW, the 2018 Vatican-Beijing agreement on bishop appointments, most recently renewed in 2024 for four years, has in practice been used by Chinese authorities to pressure underground believers into the official church. One member of an underground community told HRW that the agreement had become “the most intelligent weapon to legally destroy underground churches.”
One detail that struck me hardest was the reporting on children. Restrictions on minors and religion long predate Xi Jinping, but the 2018 Regulations on Religious Affairs tightened them considerably. The revised regulations barred religious activities in ordinary schools and prohibited minors under 18 from receiving religious education, and in many localities have been interpreted as a ban on children entering places of worship at all. A Catholic leader in northern China described to Dutch public broadcaster NOS how, during a Christmas Eve mass, local teachers were mobilized to pull children out of the service. Parents complied, fearing that their children would become social pariahs at school if they did not. HRW researcher Yalkun Uluyol put it bluntly: by preventing children from participating in the religious life of their community, China is severing generational bonds.
The report calls on Pope Leo XIV to review the Vatican’s agreement with Beijing. Whether he will is another matter. The Holy See appears to have concluded, after three renewals, that an imperfect relationship is better than none, and that roughly forty vacant dioceses in China cannot be filled through rupture. In my view, this is a defensible position practically, though perhaps not morally, given the fierce criticism it received from Joseph Zen, the Catholic Cardinal of Hong Kong. It is also one that HRW, from outside the confessional conversation, is able to interrogate on strictly human rights grounds.
The Economist on Hindu Nationalism, Christian Conversions, and Chhattisgarh
The second piece was an episode of The Intelligence titled “Food awakening: Iran’s ripple effect.” Alongside segments on Iran and the global food supply, the episode included a substantive segment with Asia correspondent Kira Huju on India, covering Hindu nationalism, Christian conversions, and the Modi government’s posture toward religious minorities.
The Economist is not a Christian publication. It is a liberal-internationalist news magazine with a secular sensibility, and when it devotes podcast time to the pressure facing Indian Christians, that is worth noting. More importantly, the segment placed the issue where it belongs: inside the broader discussion of how majoritarian religious nationalism reshapes the legal and social space available for minorities. The key instrument in that reshaping is what India calls, without irony, “Freedom of Religion” laws.
The euphemism and the reality
The name deserves scrutiny. These are not laws that protect freedom of religion. They are anti-conversion laws, and thirteen of India’s states have now enacted some version of them. The oldest of these statutes go back to the late 1960s, but the sharpest tightening has come since 2017, and Maharashtra in March 2026 was the most recent state to adopt one. The template is consistent. Conversion through “force, fraud, allurement, undue influence, misrepresentation, or marriage” is criminalized. Critically, the definitions of the latest laws are broad enough that almost any religious activity can be construed as falling within them. Offering education or healthcare can be characterized as “allurement.” A prayer meeting can be reframed as a “conversion gathering.” Interfaith marriage, under the so-called “love jihad” framing, becomes a criminal conspiracy.
More telling still: in every version of these laws, conversion to Hinduism is exempt. “Reconversion” to one’s “ancestral religion,” which is routinely treated as Hindu by default, is not treated as conversion at all. This default is itself contested: many Adivasi communities in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere have historically practiced Sarna or other tribal religions rather than Hinduism, and the statutory framework quietly absorbs those traditions into the Hindu fold. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the point. USCIRF, in a dedicated 2023 issue brief and reaffirmed in its 2026 Annual Report, concluded that the common features of these laws, including prior-notification requirements and burden-shifting provisions that presume the accused is guilty, are inconsistent with India’s obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Chhattisgarh as the test case
Of the thirteen states that have enacted such laws, Chhattisgarh is now the most severe example, and it is where the costs of this legislative model are most visible. Huju’s segment sketched the pattern in outline; the granular documentation in what follows draws on the reporting of specialist outlets and academic sources cited below. Governor Ramen Deka signed the Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Bill 2026 into law on April 7, 2026, replacing a 1968 statute inherited from Madhya Pradesh. The new law’s penalties are, by the state government’s own boast, designed to be “one step ahead” of similar legislation elsewhere.
Standard offenses carry seven to ten years in prison and a minimum fine of 500,000 rupees (roughly USD 5,360 at current exchange rates). If the person converted belongs to a “vulnerable” category, a category drawn broadly to include minors, women, persons of unsound mind, or members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or Other Backward Classes, the sentence rises to ten to twenty years and the fine doubles. “Mass conversion,” defined as involving as few as two people, brings ten years to life imprisonment. The neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh had earlier in 2025 proposed the death penalty for forced conversions, equating them with the rape of a minor. That proposal has not yet become law. The fact that it was made seriously at all is the relevant datum.
Chhattisgarh is also where the gap between the stated rationale for these laws and their actual operation is most glaring. Christians make up less than 2 percent of the state’s roughly 30 million residents. Yet in 2025, Chhattisgarh ranked second in India for anti-Christian violence, with 177 documented incidents. Two districts, Bastar and Kondagaon, have emerged as hotspots, with 65 reported incidents in 2023 alone documented by the Evangelical Fellowship of India. In December 2022, roughly 1,000 Adivasi Christians were displaced from their villages in Narayanpur in mass evictions.
The pattern extends beyond physical violence into what anthropologists would call social death. In several Bastar villages, gram sabhas have passed resolutions to socially boycott Christians, citing tribal self-governance powers to “protect” Adivasis from “contamination.” The gram sabha is the village-level assembly of all adult voters under India’s panchayati raj system, distinct from the elected panchayat council but empowered under tribal self-governance provisions to pass binding resolutions of this kind. Christians cannot buy or sell in local markets. Non-Christian villagers are fined by the panchayat if they speak to them. And in a particularly chilling development, more than 350 cases have been reported across Bastar district of Christian converts being denied burial in their ancestral village cemeteries. In a high-profile 2025 case, the body of Pastor Subhash Baghel, a Dalit Christian from Bastar, lay in a mortuary for three weeks while the Supreme Court adjudicated whether he could be buried at all. The court eventually ordered interment at a Christian cemetery roughly fifteen miles from his village.
The law adds further layers. Those wishing to convert must submit a 60-day prior notice to district authorities. “Changai sabhas,” the healing services that have been a feature of Adivasi Christian practice, are explicitly targeted for prohibition. In September 2025, Raipur authorities banned more than 200 house churches under the rationale of “maintaining law and order.” Each of these measures can be defended in isolation as a narrowly targeted regulation. Taken together and read against the background rate of anti-Christian violence documented by both secular and Christian sources, they form an architecture of legal pressure whose purpose is unmistakable.
Why the framing by The Economist matters
What is striking about the Intelligence segment is not that it broke new ground, because it did not. The reporting by Christian Daily International, UCA News, Open Doors, and International Christian Concern has been more detailed and more sustained, much of it resting on primary field documentation by the Evangelical Fellowship of India, whose incident-level data those outlets then analyze and amplify. What matters is that The Economist treats the story as a mainstream political and human rights issue, not a niche concern for co-religionists. That is exactly the kind of mainstreaming that religious freedom advocates have long argued for.
Why This Matters for the Argument
Two reports on a single day do not, by themselves, refute the complaint that secular media underreport Christian persecution. Coverage is still patchy. Some regions remain almost invisible. The framing is often wrong, even when the reporting appears. And there is an asymmetry between the attention given to anti-Christian violence in China, where it intersects with already salient Western anxieties about the Chinese Communist Party, and anti-Christian violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it does not.
But the reflexive line that “they never cover us” has two costs. First, it is empirically wrong often enough that it undermines the critique on the occasions when the critique is correct. Second, and more importantly, it blinds advocates to allies already in the field. Human Rights Watch will not frame religious freedom in theological terms. The Economist will not editorialize in defense of missionary activity. But both institutions, working from their own premises, can produce rigorous, credible documentation of what is happening to Christian communities under authoritarian and majoritarian regimes. They did so on the same day.
That matters because credibility in religious freedom advocacy depends heavily on who is doing the reporting. When a Christian organization documents the persecution of Christians, the finding is easily dismissed as self-interested, especially when the sources used are not publicly accessible. When Human Rights Watch documents the same pattern, applying the same methodological standards it uses for Uyghurs, Tibetans, and political dissidents, the finding enters a different conversation. When The Economist places anti-conversion laws in India within a broader analysis of Hindu majoritarianism, the story becomes legible to policymakers and investors who would never pick up a publication from a faith-based source.
The task, then, is not to complain that secular outlets never cover religious persecution. The task is to read them carefully when they do, cite them accurately, and build the kind of cross-institutional evidentiary base that makes the persecution of Christians, and the specific legal architectures that enable it, visible to audiences who have no confessional stake in the question. HRW and The Economist did that work this week. The rest of the religious freedom field should meet them there: reading secular reporting with the same seriousness we expect secular outlets to bring to our own, crediting it publicly when it is sound, and resisting the comfortable grievance that no one is listening. The evidence that someone is listening is already in print.