Most extreme are what our report calls the “unspeakable atrocities” carried out in camps in North Korea, where Christians are subject to forced labor, torture, starvation, rape, and forced abortions. Some believers have been hung on crosses and held over fires; others have been crushed by steamrollers. By one estimate, 75 percent of Christians in these camps die from cruel punishments.

Communist Eritrea bans so-called unregistered churches and brutally tortures their adherents to the point where, as a source reports, “prisoners cry out to be dead and go crazy because of the torture they receive.” There is evidence that there are hundreds of such prisons housing Christians throughout Eritrea.

In Communist China, where repression of Christianity has taken a more subtle, less openly vicious turn, the leadership has labeled Christianity “a foreign infiltration.” Churches belonging to denominations that resist government control are routinely destroyed, their bishops and leaders regularly held captive without being formally charged; crucifixes and other religious symbols on churches are destroyed.