Is Christianity free from persecution

Answer 1

Throughout its long history, Christianity has been remarkably free from persecution by others. However, the Christian Church has often persecuted those with whom it disagreed, starting in the fourth century with the long persecution of the pagan temples, the subsequent persecution of those found to be heretics, the burning of witches, the papal approval of enslavement of non-Christians and the aggressive domination of indigenous religions in conquered territories.

True, the early Christian Church suffered occasional and generally localised episodes of persecution, but the third-century Church Father, Origen, writing of the total of Christian martyrs up to his own time, in Rome and elsewhere, states (Contra Celsum, 3.8) that there were not many - and that it was easy to count them. Edward Gibbon explains (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth or fifth centuries attributed to the magistrates of pagan Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which they themselves against the heretics or the idolaters of their own times. Thus it became Christian lore that the Christians had suffered unrelenting persecution during pagan times.

Today, Christians are persecuted in the Middle East by outlaw groups such as IS, and occasionally by tyrants seeking to divert attention away from their own shortcomings. Christians are persecuted by the regime in North Korea.