Christians have long been the canary in the mineshaft for the real intentions of the Iranian government

The world has been gripped by the protests in Iran and the Iranian government’s brutal response. More than 600 protests have taken place in at least 187 cities across Iran. In an authoritarian police state where the government seeks to tightly control information – and has recently cut off the internet to do so – it is impossible to definitively confirm how many have been killed. However, it is clear that thousands have been.

But what is happening to many protestors on the streets is what has been happening for decades to Iranian Christians. According to the News Agency of Human Rights Activists in Iran more than 10,000 people have been arrested and imprisoned during the last few weeks' protests.

Many of these have been arrested under the vaguely worded offences of “waging war against God” (moharebah) and spreading “corruption on earth” (Efsad-e-fel-arz). Both of these carry a maximum penalty of execution. It is precisely these vaguely worded ‘catch-all’ offences in the Iranian Penal Code have been repeatedly used for many years to arrest and imprison Iranian Christians.

The reason the Iranian government is so brutally treating both Christians and protestors is actually the same. They both have a vision for an alternative Iran to the theocratic Islamic state of which the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is the head.

A speech Khamenei made on the 27 December, the day before the current street protests began, illustrates how much the Iranian government’s vision of society differs from that of the protestors. Explaining why the Iranian government was in conflict with the USA, he said: 

“It is not about the nuclear issue or things like that. It is about standing up to the unjust order, against the domineering imposition of the system of global hegemony in the world today, and of turning towards a just national and international Islamic system. This is the great cause that Islamic Iran has raised its banner for, and which has enraged the corrupt and aggressive powers.”

In other words, only the Islamic system in Iran is “just” and this must be spread worldwide. No alternative to it anywhere in the world is acceptable.

That is why the Iranian government has at times quite explicitly stated that it wants to eradicate Evangelical Christians from Iran. It is also why it is so brutally cracking down on the protestors – because what they are demanding is an alternative form of government.

So, what happens to Christians now?

The Iranian government officially only tolerates the historic Armenian, Assyrian and Chaldean Christian churches – although even they are closely watched and not allowed to worship in the national language (Farsi). However, the Farsi-speaking house churches which have no legal status have grown exponentially under persecution. A high proportion of Christians in these have either themselves converted from a Muslim family background or their parents did. 

Iran’s constitution states that the Ja’fari school of shari’a is the unchangeable law and religion of Iran. This asserts that any adult male who leaves Islam must be executed, while any woman who converts must be imprisoned with minimal food and beaten with rods at the time of prayer every day until she either returns to Islam or dies. 

In practice, the extent to which the Iranian regime actually carries out the sort of punishments the law proscribes varies according to what is happening in Iran and the wider world. This is because the regime is made up of both a) hardliners who ignore everything western governments say because they are non-Muslims and b) pragmatists who think Iran needs some relationship with the west if its economy is not to collapse – and respond a little to some of the human rights concerns raised by the west. 

That is why there have been no official judicial executions of Christians in Iran for the last three decades. Although the threat very much lies there in the background, with officials threatening Christian prisoners with execution or carrying out mock executions on them.

At the moment, the threat to Iranian Christians is extraordinarily high – as the hardliners in the regime are both dominant and threatened. They responded to the April 2024 Israeli and June 2025 Israeli and US strikes by significantly increasing arrests of Iranian Christians. Christians have been “reminded” by prison officials of a journalist who was executed in 2020.

Six months ago, the UN Human Rights Council reported that some of the 975 executions carried out in 2024 were linked to the women’s freedom protests which began in 2022 and that members of “minority groups” were disproportionately likely to be executed. So, the threat is clearly very real for Iranian Christians.

We have seen multiple reports of extra-judicial killings of protestors by Iranian security forces, including people shot at close range in the back of the head. That echoes what happened to a number of Iranian Christians when the regime stopped formally judicially executing Christians in the 1990s. For example, in 1993 Rev Mehdi Dibaj who had previously been sentenced to death for apostasy was released following an international outcry. Six months later he was extra-judicially murdered by government agents.

So the risk to Iranian Christians right now is extraordinarily high.

The Iranian church has grown exponentially since the 1979 Islamic revolution. What is happening on the streets of Iran is likely to increase the level of disillusionment with radical Islam.

However, as martyrdom is a central doctrine of Shi’a Islam, the regime is likely to fight its ‘enemies’ – including Iran’s Christians – until the very end.

Pray for Christians in Iran