“Christianity is considered an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” wrote February 7 the Christian religious freedom advocates Arielle Del Turco and Lela Gilbert. This statement indicates the extreme measures Iran’s theocratic Islamic Republic is willing to implement in order to repress alternative belief systems such as Christianity, and the enormous attendant political consequences.
Various media reports have confirmed that, concerning Christianity, the “Iranian government views converts as a Western attempt to undermine Islam and the Islamic Republic.” “Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has cataloged Christianity as an existential threat to the nation,” Vernon Brewer, the Christian humanitarian organization World Help’s founder, has written. “Iran’s ayatollahs,” American Foreign Policy Council Senior Vice President Ilan Berman has observed, “view those who adhere to a different set of religious principles as a mortal threat to their extreme interpretation of the Islamic faith.”
Middle East Concern (MEC), a human rights organization focused on persecuted Middle East Christians, has noted that the 1979 Islamic Republic constitution in its first article “institutes a theocracy.” Article 12 establishes “Islam and the Twelver Ja‘fari school of Shi’a Islam as the nation’s official religion. Accordingly, all Iranian laws must be derived from and be consistent with Islamic law.” Article 13 recognizes only Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians as “religious minorities” who “may exercise their religious ceremonies within the limits of the law.”
MEC noted that the Islamic Republic “interprets these three recognized minorities to refer only to those from ethnic communities such as Assyrian and Armenian Christians” as “part of the historical heritage of the nation.” Therefore media reports have observed that
Armenian and Chaldean churches are allowed to hold services, as long as they are not conducted in Persian, and they are observed by the police. Distributing Christian literature in Farsi is strictly forbidden, in order to prevent evangelization.
MEC has elaborated:
Churches are effectively banned from using the Farsi language in their activities, a restriction enforced through regular checks of the identity documents of attendees to ensure that only members of the minority communities attend, and that Persian Muslims are excluded.
The Islamic Republic’s extreme persecution of Christians has in 2020 made Iran number nine on the annual World Watch List of the 50 top Christian-persecuting countries compiled by the Christian aid organization Open Doors. Yet senior Islamic Republic clerics and Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi have worried in recent years about growing Christian influence in Iran. Thus these Iranian officials have therefore redoubled their efforts with millions of dollars in Islamic propaganda.
Under this oppression, Iranian converts from Islam to Christianity “have to live their faith secretly, pretending they are faithful Muslims when in reality they are Christians,” Brewer has noted. Del Turco and Gilbert have particularly observed that the “Iranian regime conducts mass arrests of Christians during the Christmas season to intimidate believers and prevent the spread of Christianity.” Dabrina Bet Tamraz, the daughter of Iranian parents imprisoned for their Christian evangelism, explained that “Christian celebrations make it easier for Iranian authorities to arrest a group of Christians at one time.”
Iranian-American political scientist Majid Rafizadeh has analyzed the “trumped-up charges” Iranian Christians face. These include “promoting Zionism…spreading corrupt Christians beliefs…propagating against the Islamic Republic in favor of Christianity…orientation toward the land of Christianity…endangering national security.” Del Turco and Gilbert found particularly “noteworthy” the accusation of “affiliation with Christian Zionists.”
Such charges reflect the Islamic Republic’s linkage of Christianity with foreign foes as manifested at the funeral for Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force commander killed by an American drone. There in Tehran on January 4, “thousands of radical Muslims” chanted “‘Death to America’…and in the minds of these extremists, America and Christianity are synonymous,” Brewer noted. “When the Iranian government feels threatened, Iran’s beleaguered Christians, particularly converts from Islam, feel the backlash of increased scrutiny and harassment from the government,” Del Turco and Gilbert have also observed.
Marziyeh Amirizadeh, an Iranian woman who endured horrible imprisonment for her Christian beliefs, noted the Islamic Republic’s corrupt nature during a February 5 event at Washington, DC’s Family Research Council (FRC). During a panel moderated by Del Turco and including Bet Tamraz (and with Gilbert in the audience), Amirizadeh observed that Islamic Republic leaders “have power in Islam and they want to keep people as a Muslim.” This sentiment echoed the 2019 film Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, whose producers noted that in Iran’s ruling religious institutions is “where the high-paying jobs are.”
Amirizadeh offered the hope that in Iran the “majority of the people are tired of this corrupted regime” and “are fighting for freedom and democracy.” FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin, a retired United States Army general and former Delta Force commander, made similar comments during his panel introduction. Iranians “are turning against Islam and turning against their government” amidst a generational change, as 60 percent of Iranians are under the age of 30, he said.
Boykin reflected upon his own personal experience with an Iran that overthrow the shah and instituted an Islamic Republic in 1979. That year Iranians seized the American embassy with 52 Americans. He remembered the six hours he spent in an Iranian desert on April 24, 1980, as a Delta Force commando who witnessed the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, a military attempt to free the hostages.
Boykin recalled that “Iran during the Cold War was a tremendous ally” for America in matters such as intelligence gathering on the Soviet Union. With the fall of a “very pro-Western” shah, Iran dramatically became under the Islamic Republic a fierce enemy of the United States. However in Iran the “tide is turning again” and the “Iranian people could be our allies again.”
The film Sheep Among Wolves Volume II likewise offered geopolitical speculation about an ideologically foundering Islamic Republic, particularly with respect to its fierce Jew-hatred expressed against Israel. By contrast, Iranian converts to Christianity “bowing their knees to the Jewish Messiah” have a “kindled affection toward the Jewish people” and, in one convert’s words, “we fall in love with Jews.” The evangelical movie producers thus spoke of evangelizing in Iran a “resistance church” against threats to Israel while an Iranian Christian argued that the “spirit of Islam, which is Haman, very soon is going to hang by its own neck.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s theocracy thus exemplifies the weakness of all totalitarian societies repeatedly exhibited throughout history. Absent ideological indoctrination, whose success depends upon rigid suppression of competing viewpoints, true believers in a regime will dwindle in a society not governed according to openly debated interests. For such a faith-based government, any “heresy” is a matter of state, for losing the battle for hearts and minds (or souls) can only result in the downfall of government that has no objective value.