Senator Doug Mastriano, a longtime friend of IFA, is planning to introduce legislation condemning the persecution of Christians and calling on the President to do the same.

A Pennsylvania state senator is set to introduce a resolution condemning the “worldwide persecution of Christians,” describing it as a “human rights catastrophe” that meets, in many cases, the threshold of “religious genocide.”

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Sen. Doug Mastriano, who was the Republican nominee in the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, announced the planned resolution in an Oct. 20 memo highlighting the Open Doors statistic that more than 380 million Christians who live under the threat of persecution worldwide, facing imprisonment, forced conversion, mob violence, and systematic suppression of worship.

Calling Christians the most targeted faith community on Earth, Mastriano said that “This persecution takes many forms — imprisonment, forced conversion, mob violence, and systematic suppression of worship. Yet the goal is the same everywhere: to silence the Gospel and erase its followers.”

“In the near future, I will introduce a resolution condemning — in the most unequivocal terms — the worldwide persecution of Christians,” Mastriano wrote.

“What we are witnessing today is not mere intolerance or unrest. It is a human rights catastrophe — and, in many nations, a coordinated campaign of religious genocide.”

The resolution points to blasphemy laws in Pakistan being “wielded as weapons of terror,” often leading to false accusations that ignite mobs and result in lynchings, home burnings, and community destruction.

It cites specific incidents, including the destruction of Christian neighborhoods like Joseph Colony in Lahore and Gojra City, as well as the 2023 attacks in Jaranwala, where mobs burned more than 20 churches and hundreds of homes.

Recounting a pair of deadly attacks in Quetta in April 2018, when gunmen attacked an innocent Christian family, leaving four dead and one wounded, the resolution states that, hours later, “assailants on motorcycles opened fire on innocent Christians outside a church in Essa Nagri, killing Rashid Khalid and Azhar Iqbal and wounding three others. These back-to-back attacks underscored the grave persecution faced by Christians in Pakistan.”

Young Christian girls in Pakistan, said Mastriano, are “routinely kidnapped, raped, forced into marriage, and coerced to convert,” with justice seekers facing threats or death, according to the memo.

In China, the resolution accuses the government of waging “open war on faith itself” by demolishing churches, removing crosses, imprisoning pastors and using AI surveillance to monitor attendance. “House church” networks have been infiltrated, raided, and shut down, while children are barred from services and believers are ordered to replace images of Christ with portraits of Xi Jinping.

The resolution depicts Haiti as a hotbed of lawlessness where gangs burn, loot and occupy churches, kidnapping priests and nuns at gunpoint for ransom or murder, including an incident which involved a gang storming a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince, abducting children and workers.

“Christian institutions, once the lifeline of hope, education, and charity, are now under siege from heavily armed gangs who rule entire neighborhoods,” said Mastriano.

The resolution identifies Nigeria as the site of the most intense persecution, with thousands of Christians killed each year by groups like Boko Haram and Fulani militias — more than in all other countries combined, Open Doors has warned.

Pointing out how tens of thousands have been murdered over the past decade, with villages burned and mass graves marking wiped-out communities, Mastriano emphasized the human suffering behind the numbers.

“Behind every statistic lies a life — a mother shielding her children from a mob, a pastor preaching forgiveness as his church burns, a child clutching a Bible while fleeing through smoke and rubble,” he added.

The resolution aims to reaffirm Pennsylvania’s solidarity with persecuted Christians and its commitment to religious liberty, and officially calls on President Donald Trump, the secretary of state and Congress to take several steps to protect religious liberty across the world. Those steps include formally recognizing the persecution of Christians worldwide “as a grave human rights crisis and, in many cases, as genocide under international law,” and imposing “targeted sanctions” and other measures against regimes hostile to Christianity.

Mastriano quoted Pennsylvania founder William Penn: “True godliness doesn’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it.”

The push for increased protection of Christians worldwide comes amid reports of worsening persecution.

The International Society for Human Rights announced at a press conference held earlier this month in Berlin, Germany, that Christian persecution has “increased significantly in both quantity and intensity.”

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This article was originally published at The Christian Post. Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.