the Global Persecution of Christians: in Twenty-First Century

Every account of Christian persecution now begins with the same number. In January 2026, Open Doors published its thirty-third annual World Watch List and reported that 388 million Christians live in places where they face high to extreme levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. That is roughly one in seven Christians alive today. The previous year's figure was 380 million. The year before that, 365 million. It will continue to rise. This is the most important methodological point in the book and it belongs at the beginning because it governs how every future edition of the figure should be read. The headline number counts Christians living in countries with high or extreme levels of persecution. It rose from 380 million to 388 million in a single year 2026 - and will get worse and now one in seven Christians worldwide now live under those conditions, against one in nine in 2019. Three components drive it, and only one of them is persecution. The first is demographic. The Christian population of sub-Saharan Africa is growing rapidly. If conditions in Nigeria remained exactly as they are, the number of Christians living under those conditions would rise every year through births alone. The second is compositional. When a country crosses the threshold onto the list, its entire Christian population is added at once. Nepal's entry at forty-six in 2026 added a population; Vietnam's departure removed one. These movements can dwarf actual changes in conditions. The third is measurement. The figures for abuse, imprisonment, and sexual violence all rose in 2026, and Chapter 32 sets out why documentation improvement and real increase cannot be separated with the available data. The consequence is that the headline number is a poor instrument for detecting whether the world is getting better or worse. Improvement would show up as a stabilisation in a rising series, not as a fall - and would be reported by no one, because a number that rises more slowly is not a story.