[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 37 (Wednesday, March 5, 2014)]
[House]
[Page H2156]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          RESTRICTIONS ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS AROUND THE WORLD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Alabama (Mr. Byrne) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BYRNE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in this House on Ash Wednesday 
to talk about a problem that should be heavy on the hearts of everyone 
in this body and around the Nation, and that is the persecution of 
Christians around the world.
  Millions of Christians will start their Lenten period of fasting and 
penitence today, and over the next several weeks will act out their 
faith leading up to Holy Week, when we remember the death and 
crucifixion of Jesus, and then the feast of Easter, his resurrection.
  Sadly, in too many parts of the world, Christians will not be allowed 
to openly profess their faith and act out the things that for centuries 
Christians have been able to do.
  This chart on my left, which was prepared by the Pew Research Center, 
shows that around the world there is religious persecution, but it is 
particularly bad in Asia and, sadly, in the Middle East, the very part 
of the world where Jesus came from.
  This next chart from the same source shows that the problem is 
getting worse, not better. Sadly, we are seeing that the perpetrators 
are now more frequently governments than private individuals in these 
countries. The bottom part of this chart tells us the saddest news of 
all: the most likely people in the world to be persecuted for their 
religious beliefs are Christians. This is a little-known fact to many 
people. For some reason, the news media has not been willing to cover 
it as well as they should have been, but perhaps during this season of 
Lent in preparation for Easter, it is a time when all of us can 
understand that this is a real problem, a humanitarian problem, a 
problem for the rights and freedoms of people all over the world.
  Now, there is something we can do about it, but we need to understand 
the problem more specifically to do so.
  This last chart perhaps is the most troubling of all. In 1914, 
Christians made up about 20 percent of the entire population of the 
Middle East. By 2013, they made up only 4 percent. In Iraq since 2003, 
almost a million Christians have fled that country. Since the troubles 
began in Syria in 2011, half a million Christians have fled. In Egypt 
since the troubles there in 2011, 100,000 Coptic Christians have left 
that country.
  Now, if you look at what is happening in Iraq and Egypt, that should 
be of particular concern to us because we will send this year to each 
of those two countries in aid over $1 billion. That is taxpayer money 
that has been brought to our government and that we send to those 
countries from the people of the United States of America. I believe we 
should exercise a different foreign policy. Not only should we state 
that we are going to stand up for the protection of religious 
minorities around the world that are persecuted, but in countries like 
Iraq and Egypt where we send hundreds of millions of dollars of aid, we 
should demand it, and we should demand it not just because we are a 
country in which the majority of people are Christians but because it 
is the right thing to do, and we have historically done that as a 
Nation.
  As we go toward Holy Week and people around the world remember that 
Jesus Christ himself was persecuted to death, and for centuries 
thereafter throughout the Roman Empire, throughout what we today call 
the Middle East, Christians were persecuted, we need to make sure that 
the clock is not going to be rolled back, as it clearly is today. The 
United States of America, our President, our Secretary of State, this 
body, the entire Congress, and the American people should do what we 
have traditionally done, and that is to stand up for the rights of 
people around the world. In this particular context, that means 
standing up for Christians who are being persecuted and killed merely 
because of their beliefs.

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