It seems likely that, when the history of our time is written, the authors will be incredulous that so little was said, let alone done, about the largest genocide of all time.
In fact, with an estimated 300 million Christians being persecuted for their faith, the difference between what is befalling believers now and what happened to the victims of past mass murderers – like Cambodia’s Pol Pot, the Nazis’ Adolf Hitler, the USSR’s Josef Stalin and Communist China’s Mao Tse-tung – is not just that the number of lives being destroyed today dwarfs those afflicted in previous eras. It is that the present horrors are happening on our watch.
The truth is that the sorts of systematic suppression of religious freedom that increasingly is evident around the world didn’t happen overnight. The torture, rape, enslavement and murderous – even genocidal – bloodletting of religious minorities has been inexorably building globally for decades. For example, Open Doors USA has estimated that there are 30 million more Christians subjected to heavy persecution this year than last.