Christians and Jews have faced recurring waves of persecution from the first century to the present, sometimes even twisting their own traditions to persecute each other. In every era, shifting political, religious, and social pressures have found ways to target those whose ultimate loyalty is to God rather than the state or the dominant culture.
Within roughly the past 85 years, the Jewish people were threatened with mass genocide by totalitarian fascists and Communists. Approximately six million Jews were exterminated in Nazi concentration and death camps—a crime that stands at the center of twentieth‑century evil. Wider counts of Nazi persecution and extermination (including Jews, Roma, the disabled, political and religious opponents, prisoners of war, and others) usually fall in the 15–20 million range, with the six million Jewish dead at the core of that figure.
Christians, too, have paid in blood. Researchers associated with the World Christian Database and Gordon‑Conwell estimate that about 70 million Christians have been martyred over 2,000 years, and that more than half of them died in the 20th century under fascist and communist regimes. One commonly cited Christian estimate suggests on the order of tens of millions of Christians—sometimes approximated around 30 million or more—were killed by communist regimes alone in the last century through executions, prisons, labor camps, man‑made famines, and other lethal persecutions with a strong anti‑religious component. The motives overlap—class, ethnicity, politics, and faith—but the scale is not in serious dispute.
Since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, Christians there have faced recurring waves of repression: expulsions of missionaries, closures or demolition of churches, “patriotic” state‑controlled church structures, imprisonment of clergy and laity, labor camps, and periodic campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution that aimed to eradicate or at least suffocate Christianity. During those decades, the regime destroyed churches, banned public worship, and imprisoned pastors and priests. Thousands of believers likely died in that period alone, though precise numbers cannot be verified.
Measured against that history, the religious persecution that occurs in the United States is, as some would put it, “small potatoes.” It does not usually involve prison, torture, or death. Yet it would be a serious mistake to dismiss it altogether. What we are seeing emerge is a pattern of soft ostracism and marginalization—penalties in employment, media smears, social stigma, and professional cost aimed at serious religious believers, particularly those who refuse to conform their consciences to the reigning orthodoxies on sexuality, life, and the authority of the state.
That brings us to the present controversy. Last week, the Chicago Bulls released Jaden Ivey after he spoke publicly about his Christian beliefs in relation to the NBA’s extended celebration of “Pride.” Whatever the official rationale, the timing and the rhetoric make clear that he was waived in the wake of comments that flowed directly from his Christian convictions. In response, hundreds of athletes from all sports, amateur and professional, have come to his defense. Christian fan pages and athlete‑focused accounts have amplified Ivey’s testimony, including his remark that “all I’m preaching is about Jesus Christ and they waived me,” and his insistence that his identity is “alive in Christ” regardless of his basketball status.
The same establishment culture in the media and corporate America that once rushed to defend Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the National Anthem now paints a very different picture when Christians engage the public square. The double standard is obvious. When the message tracks with elite ideology, dissenters are heroes. When it cuts against elite ideology, dissenters are bigots, cranks, or “unwell.”
This is not merely rhetorical carelessness; it is a tactic. Already there are pieces suggesting that Jaden Ivey is suffering from mental illness and is delusional. The same language is thrown at Donald Trump and at his supporters. I recently listened to a clinical psychologist opine that charismatic Catholics who love the Latin Mass are “delusional.” When you cannot answer an argument, you pathologize the person making it.
Claiming that a political opponent is mentally ill is what one does when one cannot make an intellectual argument. Once you decide your adversary is insane, you no longer have to respond to his reasoning. You have only to manage him, medicate him, or silence him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood this dynamic with prophetic clarity. A decorated Red Army officer turned political prisoner, he spent years in the Soviet gulag for the crime of criticizing Stalin in a private letter. Solzhenitsyn saw persecution of Christians as a direct consequence of militant atheism and of what he famously called “forgetting God.” In his Templeton Prize address, he argued that the whole catastrophe of the Russian twentieth century—revolution, terror, camps, and the systematic assault on the Church—could be summed up in that simple phrase: men have forgotten God.
In the Marxist‑Leninist systems he endured, hatred of God was not an accidental feature but a central driving force of the ideology. Militant atheism was the organizing principle of a political philosophy that had to destroy faith in order to control people. When a regime, a party, or even a cultural elite cannot tolerate the existence of a higher authority, it must eventually move to silence those who answer to God rather than to the state—or to corporate HR.
We see a softer version of that same instinct in our own time. The people who are coming to the defense of Jaden Ivey, of Jewish students on college campuses, and of Christians and Jews around the world who continue to be persecuted, have a political and social conscience grounded in their faith in God. They believe in a transcendent moral law, in the image of God stamped on every human person, and in the duty to speak the truth even when it costs them.
Many of those who oppose them, by contrast, have embraced an atomistic, atheistic political philosophy in which there is no God and no ultimate moral accountability—only power, preference, and the shifting judgments of the crowd. Yet if they truly believe there is no God, one must ask: why are they so afraid of Him? Why work so tirelessly to silence those who speak His name?
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” wrote Tertullian in the second century. The history of Jews and Christians in the last hundred years—and the courage of believers like Jaden Ivey in our own day—suggests he was right.
