Number of Christian martyrs continues to cause debate

The debate over the precise number of Christians martyred each year continues.

In May, a Vatican spokesman told the United Nations Human Rights Council that as many as 100,000 Christians are martyred each year.

That figure stems from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, recognised as “home to the world’s leading scholars of Christian demographics” according to Judd Birdsall, formerly of the US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, and currently a PhD student at Cambridge University.

While CSGC researchers estimated that around one million Christians were martyred in the first 10 years of the 21st Century, leading to an average of around 100,000 a year, Birdsall said he “found this figure puzzling”. While he said he admires CSGC’s “rigorous and interesting” work, his colleagues’ annual reports for the State Department contained “accounts of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of martyrs. Some Christian… organisations place the number as high as 1,000. Why the discrepancy?”

One such organisation is Open Doors International, which works in more than 25 countries to support Christians who face many levels of “persecution” - from extreme harassment and discrimination to torture and death. Keep reading

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