Restrictions on Religious Freedoms Around the World

Floor Speech

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Mr. BYRNE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in this House on Ash Wednesday to talk about a problem that should be heavy on the hearts of everyone in this body and around the Nation, and that is the persecution of Christians around the world.

Millions of Christians will start their Lenten period of fasting and penitence today, and over the next several weeks will act out their faith leading up to Holy Week, when we remember the death and crucifixion of Jesus, and then the feast of Easter, his resurrection.

Sadly, in too many parts of the world, Christians will not be allowed to openly profess their faith and act out the things that for centuries Christians have been able to do.

This chart on my left, which was prepared by the Pew Research Center, shows that around the world there is religious persecution, but it is particularly bad in Asia and, sadly, in the Middle East, the very part of the world where Jesus came from.

This next chart from the same source shows that the problem is getting worse, not better. Sadly, we are seeing that the perpetrators are now more frequently governments than private individuals in these countries. The bottom part of this chart tells us the saddest news of all: the most likely people in the world to be persecuted for their religious beliefs are Christians. This is a little-known fact to many people. For some reason, the news media has not been willing to cover it as well as they should have been, but perhaps during this season of Lent in preparation for Easter, it is a time when all of us can understand that this is a real problem, a humanitarian problem, a problem for the rights and freedoms of people all over the world.

Now, there is something we can do about it, but we need to understand the problem more specifically to do so.

This last chart perhaps is the most troubling of all. In 1914, Christians made up about 20 percent of the entire population of the Middle East. By 2013, they made up only 4 percent. In Iraq since 2003, almost a million Christians have fled that country. Since the troubles began in Syria in 2011, half a million Christians have fled. In Egypt since the troubles there in 2011, 100,000 Coptic Christians have left that country.

Now, if you look at what is happening in Iraq and Egypt, that should be of particular concern to us because we will send this year to each of those two countries in aid over $1 billion. That is taxpayer money that has been brought to our government and that we send to those countries from the people of the United States of America. I believe we should exercise a different foreign policy. Not only should we state that we are going to stand up for the protection of religious minorities around the world that are persecuted, but in countries like Iraq and Egypt where we send hundreds of millions of dollars of aid, we should demand it, and we should demand it not just because we are a country in which the majority of people are Christians but because it is the right thing to do, and we have historically done that as a Nation.

As we go toward Holy Week and people around the world remember that Jesus Christ himself was persecuted to death, and for centuries thereafter throughout the Roman Empire, throughout what we today call the Middle East, Christians were persecuted, we need to make sure that the clock is not going to be rolled back, as it clearly is today. The United States of America, our President, our Secretary of State, this body, the entire Congress, and the American people should do what we have traditionally done, and that is to stand up for the rights of people around the world. In this particular context, that means standing up for Christians who are being persecuted and killed merely because of their beliefs.

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