The Hussites of Bohemia in the early Fifteenth Century, the Paulicians, the Albigenses—all were persecuted by evil states working in concert with organized false religion. Godly Protestants later suffered, too: Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand was imprisoned and tortured for fourteen years by Romanian communists during the Twentieth Century—first in solitary confinement for three years, then in group cells and forced labor camps. During his imprisonment, Wurmbrand ministered relentlessly to his fellow prisoners, preaching the Gospel to criminals, political prisoners, and even to guards. He conducted secret worship services, shared Scripture from memory when no Bibles were available, and discipled men who had never heard the name of Christ. He was beaten, starved, drugged, and subjected to tortures designed to break his faith; he bore the scars on his body for the rest of his life. Fellow Christians on the outside—members of the underground Romanian church—risked their own freedom to smuggle food, messages, and encouragement to Wurmbrand and other imprisoned pastors, knowing that discovery meant their own arrest. His wife, Sabina Wurmbrand, was herself imprisoned for three years in a communist labor camp, separated from their young son Mihai, forced into slave labor on the Danube Canal, and yet she never renounced her faith or her husband’s ministry. Fellow believers in the underground church cared for Mihai during his parents’ imprisonment—a living demonstration of the body of Christ functioning as it was designed to function. Upon their eventual release and emigration, the Wurmbrands together founded Voice of the Martyrs, the organization that has since served persecuted Christians in more than sixty countries. Sabina’s witness—like Elizabeth Bunyan’s, like Ann Judson’s—demonstrates that when the state casts a Christian into prison, it does not imprison one person; it tests an entire household, an entire church, an entire network of believers whose faithfulness or failure will determine whether the imprisoned saint is sustained or abandoned.

I include my own case not out of self-importance but because it belongs in this catalog and because I can document it with a precision that historical cases do not always permit. In October 2019, during Chile’s so-called “Social Upheaval”—a Marxist-orchestrated wave of rioting, looting, and destruction that scorched Chile—I was attacked by a mob of dozens of young men, primarily criminals, communists, and leftists, who yelled “Kill him!” and other expletives while hurling rocks, bottles, and sticks at my pickup truck in Reñaca, Chile. One assailant, Sebastián Valdés Muñoz, opened my door to “lynch” me, as an eyewitness testified in court. I fired two dissuasive shots—seated with my seatbelt fastened, all angled downward toward the ground—out of the twenty rounds at my disposal. (Two more were fired later, eighty meters down the road, also at the ground at the corner of Las Brisas Street.) Two ricochet fragments from the first shot supposedly struck an assailant’s thigh (Luis Ahumada), and another from the third or fourth shot allegedly hit the radiator and gearbox of an older (1998) stopped car. For these acts of self-defense, I was charged with two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to eleven years and three days in prison. The Chilean Supreme Court later reduced the charges to “severe injuries” and “property damage,” cutting the sentence to six years and twenty-six days, since I obviously had no intention of killing anyone by firing toward the ground—but I was still going to serve many years in prison for defending my life.

The forensic evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated my innocence. The prosecution’s ricochet theory violated basic physics—the angle of ricochet cannot exceed the angle of incidence, yet the prosecution’s scenario required precisely that impossibility. The entry hole in Ahumada’s pants was seven millimeters, inconsistent with the 10.6-millimeter .40 caliber round I fired. Could the elasticity of the fabric account for a 34% reduction in the diameter of the hole? Even more telling was the fact that there was no exit hole in Ahumada’s pants despite the prosecution’s claim of a through-and-through wound—physically impossible given that a 135-grain .40 caliber bullet has more than sufficient kinetic energy to exit the thigh, after passing through sixteen centimeters of soft tissue without striking bone. No bullet was ever recovered from either the assailant’s thigh or the vehicle’s gearbox. Where did it go? Published scientific studies confirm that ricochets at the sharp angles required by the prosecution’s theory (over 30°) would disintegrate the bullet entirely. In short, the wounds and damage were not caused by my firearm or any gunshot whatsoever. The prosecution knew this—or should have known it—and prosecuted anyway, because in Chile, as in much of the modern democratic world, the criminal who destroys property and assaults citizens in the name of “social justice” is exonerated, while his victim becomes the perpetrator if he dares to defend himself.

My wife Pamela endured every week of my imprisonment with a faithfulness that I can only describe as Bunyanesque. She traveled to the prison for visitation, stood in humiliating lines alongside the girlfriends and wives of violent criminals, carried bags of supplies through security, managed our finances from the outside, coordinated with lawyers, maintained communication with our supporting churches, and sustained our household—all while bearing the social stigma of being married to a convicted man in a country where the press had already determined my guilt. My co-pastor, Valentín Navarrete Urbina, was likewise faithful, as I mentioned before, and visited me over 230 times, delivering more than 250 sacks of food and supplies. The Historic Baptists (Bautistas Históricos) congregation maintained weekly Zoom worship services that I attended and taught from behind bars. Fellow libertarians and Reformed Baptists around the world wrote letters and emails, sent books, contributed financially, and prayed by name. I was not forgotten—and because I was not forgotten, I was able to minister to dozens of inmates, start Bible studies, write Suffering Unjustly, and produce the five-book, eleven-volume Bearing the Cross: A Gringo Political Prisoner Exposes the Injustices, Indignities, and Vexations of the Chilean Criminal Justice and Prison System that form the narrative backbone of this very book. The body of Christ sustained me, exactly as Hebrews 13:3 commands.

And such has been human history ever since for Evangelicals—Baptists in particular. The pattern is unmistakable: the satanic state, acting through its judicial power, casts faithful Christians into prison (Revelation 2:10), and the body of Christ—faithful wives, faithful churches, faithful sending organizations—rallies to minister to them, sustain them, and preserve their witness for the generations to come. This is not an optional ministry. It is the very essence of what it means to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3).

The Global Witness of Imprisoned Christians

The persecution of believers is not limited to the Baptist tradition, and the reader who thinks the imprisonment of Christians is a relic of earlier centuries is dangerously naïve. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a harvest of imprisoned saints, even if some of their doctrine was remoter from biblical, historic Baptist theology, that rivals anything in the apostolic age. I already mentioned Richard Wurmbrand, but there are many others.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Russian novelist and historian, was arrested in February 1945 while serving as a Red Army artillery officer for making critical remarks about Stalin in private letters. He was sentenced to eight years in Soviet labor camps, followed by internal exile in Kazakhstan until 1956. During his imprisonment, he labored in construction gangs, foundries, and a sharashka—a special prison research institute—and was diagnosed with cancer during exile. It was in the camps that Solzhenitsyn’s Orthodox Christian faith deepened from nominal inheritance to living conviction. He later wrote: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” (The Gulag Archipelago, Part IV). His literary witness from and about prison—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (written 1958–1968, published abroad in 1973)—documented the Soviet camp system with a moral authority that shook an empire. His second wife, Natalia Svetlova, became his essential literary collaborator, managing smuggled manuscripts at enormous personal risk and preserving The Gulag Archipelago for publication when the KGB was hunting for every copy. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and spent twenty years in exile before returning to Russia in 1994. His story demonstrates that God can use imprisonment not merely to sustain faith but to produce a literary and moral witness that transforms the conscience of nations.

Wang Mingdao (1900–1991) was one of China’s most prominent independent church leaders, a man who refused to join the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement and paid for that refusal with over two decades of his life. He was first arrested in August 1955 along with his wife Jingwen (Deborah) Liu. Under intense psychological pressure, he signed a confession and was briefly released in 1956—but he publicly recanted his confession, declaring it false, and was re-arrested in 1958 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent approximately twenty-two years in prison, not released until 1980, when he was nearly eighty years old and almost blind. His wife, Deborah, was also imprisoned and served approximately twenty years. After his release, Wang Mingdao still refused to join the Three-Self Movement. He reportedly told visitors, “I am a watchman. My job is to blow the trumpet.” He died in 1991, and his faithfulness under decades of imprisonment made him an enduring icon of the Chinese house church movement—a movement that now numbers in the tens of millions precisely because men like Wang Mingdao refused to bow to Caesar.

Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng, 1903–1972), founder of the Local Church movement in China and author of The Normal Christian Life and The Spiritual Man, was arrested in 1952 and subjected to a public show trial in 1956, convicted of fabricated charges including “counter-revolutionary crimes.” He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. When his sentence expired around 1967—during the Cultural Revolution—he was not released. He died on May 30, 1972, at a labor camp in Anhui province, having spent the last twenty years of his life behind bars. His wife, Charity Chang, was also persecuted; she died in November 1971, shortly before him, and the couple was never permitted to see each other in their final years. A note was reportedly found under Watchman Nee’s pillow after his death, written in a shaking hand: “Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and rose again. This is the greatest truth in the universe.” Whether that note is verified history or pious tradition, it captures the faith of a man who chose to serve twenty years in prison rather than compromise with the state.

More recently, Pastor Wang Yi of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu—a Reformed Protestant house church—was arrested on December 9, 2018, along with his wife Jiang Rong and over one hundred church members in a sweeping crackdown. Before his arrest, Wang Yi had pre-written a declaration titled “My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience,” which was released publicly after his detention. He was tried in secret and sentenced on December 30, 2019, to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” His congregation was scattered but continued meeting in small groups despite ongoing harassment. Wang Yi’s case demonstrates that the persecution of the church in China did not end with Mao; it continues under Xi Jinping, and the judicial machinery deployed against Chinese house churches in the twenty-first century operates with the same contempt for religious liberty that imprisoned Wang Mingdao in 1955.

In Africa, the persecution of Christians by state and quasi-state actors continues with a ferocity that the Western church scarcely comprehends. In Eritrea, Patriarch Abune Antonios, the third Patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, was placed under house arrest in 2006 after he protested government interference in church affairs and demanded the release of imprisoned priests. He remained under house arrest for over sixteen years—an elderly patriarch, confined to his quarters by a state that could not tolerate a churchman who insisted on the independence of the church from political control. Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in Eritrea have faced severe persecution since a 2002 crackdown that banned all religious groups except the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, and Sunni Muslim communities. Members of unregistered churches—including the Gospel for All Church—have been imprisoned in shipping containers and underground cells at military facilities, sometimes for years without charge or trial. Helen Berhane, an Eritrean gospel singer, was imprisoned from 2004 to 2006 in a metal shipping container, tortured, and eventually released and forced to flee the country.

In Nigeria, the case of Leah Sharibu has become a symbol of Christian persecution under Islamist violence. On February 19, 2018, Boko Haram abducted 110 schoolgirls from Dapchi, Yobe State. Most were released the following month. Leah—the only Christian among the captives—was kept because she refused to renounce her faith and convert to Islam. She was fourteen years old. As of this writing, she has not been released, and her exact condition is unknown. Her refusal to deny Christ, at fourteen, in the hands of men who behead unbelievers, is a witness that puts many comfortable Western Christians to shame. In Sudan, Meriam Ibrahim was sentenced to death for apostasy and one hundred lashes for adultery by a Sudanese court in May 2014—her “crime” being that she was raised Christian by her mother and married a Christian man. She gave birth in prison while shackled. After international outcry, her sentence was overturned in June 2014, and she eventually emigrated to the United States.

In North Korea—the most closed and repressive state on earth—the systematic persecution of Christians is documented, but the individual victims are largely unknown, their names suppressed by a regime that treats Christian faith as a capital offense. Organizations such as Open Doors and Christian Solidarity Worldwide estimate that tens of thousands of Christians are held in political prison camps (kwanliso), where conditions are comparable to the worst of the Soviet gulag. Specific cases that have reached international attention include Pastor Lim Hyeon-su, a Korean-Canadian pastor detained in North Korea in early 2015 during a humanitarian visit and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, released on medical grounds in August 2017 after diplomatic intervention; and Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American Christian missionary arrested in November 2012 and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, released in November 2014. But for every Lim or Bae who is eventually released through diplomatic channels, there are thousands of North Korean believers whose names will never be known this side of eternity—men and women whose faithfulness unto death will be revealed only when the books are opened (Revelation 20:12).

The catalog of imprisoned Christians could fill volumes. From the apostles in Jerusalem to Wang Mingdao in Beijing, from Bunyan in Bedford to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, from the Waldensian valleys to the shipping containers of Eritrea, the story is always the same: the state, animated by Satan (Revelation 2:10; Luke 4:6), deploys its judicial power against the saints—and the saints endure, sustained by the God who “delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions” (Daniel 6:27).

Modern Examples of Judicial Injustice

The examples of unjust public policy destroying Christian lives in the modern era are not hypothetical. They are happening now, in countries that consider themselves civilized and democratic. Consider some instances from the United States, Germany, and Chile—countries I know well from direct experience or extensive study.

Self-defense criminalized. A man shoots his pistol in public in Chile, and the ricochet hits the radiator of a parked car with two people inside; he is charged with attempted murder. An off-duty Chilean prison guard shoots and wounds six knife-wielding assailants—one of them stabbing him while he was protecting his father—and is sentenced to eight years for attempted murder. In Chile, defense must be “proportional.” If one is attacked with a knife, he may not use more than a knife to defend himself, lest he, the victim, be deemed the assailant. Such is the jurisprudence of a system that has rejected God’s law.

Homeschooling criminalized. In Germany, parents who exercise their God-given right to educate their children according to biblical convictions lose custody of those children to the state. In multiple countries, parents who discipline their children by spanking face the same consequence. The state declares itself a better parent than the parents God appointed.

Divorce courts weaponized. In the United States, a feminist adulteress can leave her husband, file for divorce, falsely claim domestic violence in order to gain immediate custody of the children, and walk away with well over half the family assets plus years of support payments—while her ex-husband is financially ruined. Worse still, American family courts routinely “impute” fictitious income to the man—often double what he actually earns. When he cannot make the support payment, even though he lives with his parents or in his car to save money, he is jailed and likely barred from seeing his children again. In another case, a concerned father’s complaints to the court about his ex-wife’s new husband making professional pornographic films at home when the children are present are simply ignored.

Gun ownership criminalized. A Chilean policeman is sentenced to five years in prison for having a gun in his car with the serial number filed off. A civilian receives three years for “unjustified” firing of his pistol in public, even when there is no victim. In the United States, a man shoots an “endangered” owl on his own property and loses the property as a consequence.

Property confiscated without trial. A man loses his land, car, or boat because someone unknown to him plants or places illegal drugs there without his knowledge, and someone reports the substances to the police. In the United States, there is often no trial for such seizures; the property is simply confiscated. Elderly people, often sickly and no longer working, lose their homes due to nonpayment of property taxes.

These examples are not exceptional. They are commonplace. In all modern Western countries, there are millions of people who suffer unjustly. Indeed, one does not have to look far to find a Christian imprisoned, effectively childless, or ruined by some court that has followed or applied bad or evil public policy.

Where Public Policy Conflicts with God’s Law

The scope of the conflict between modern public policy and biblical principles is staggering. Consider the following areas—by no means exhaustive—in which a serious, committed Christian may run afoul of the state merely by attempting to live according to his conscience before God:

Not hiring homosexuals or pastors refusing to perform same-sex marriages, as required by public policy.

Noncompliance with gender or racial hiring quotas.

Homeschooling one’s children when public policy forbids or restricts it.

Protesting at abortion clinics and trespassing on their property to save unborn children.

Owning or carrying a gun for self-defense when prohibited by legislation.

Refusing to vaccinate one’s children as a conscientious objector.

Selling or distributing Bibles or Christian literature where public policy prohibits it.

Attending church services or preaching the Gospel when forbidden by public policy.

Refusing to be drafted or fight in non-defensive wars.

Ignoring modern caste systems that privilege one race, gender, or group over others.

Helping persecuted pastors from one country immigrate to another country illegally.

Converting from one religion to another when it is illegal to do so.

Teaching contrary to politically sacred codes regarding race, religion, gender identity, revisionist history, mutilation of the genitalia of children, honoring elective suicide for the elderly and even children, or the classification of human beings (including the unborn) into those with inalienable rights and those without them.

Non-payment of certain modern taxes according to one’s conscience before God.

Refusal to participate in Social Security or other welfare programs.

Variations of these policies, and others, are endless. Yet 1 Peter 2:13 commands us to submit ourselves “to every ordinance of man.” How can a Christian do that in the foregoing cases? The simple answer is that he cannot—at least not without sinning against God. Even in marriage, the wife’s submission is never absolute; a husband may not require her to sin. So too with respect to public policy: we must submit only to those ordinances that do not require us to sin or to go against our consciences before God. As the apostles Peter and John declared in Acts 5:29, “We ought to obey God rather than men.”