Tehran’s War on Christianity

By Gia Chacón

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has tried to control faith. In Iran, religion is not merely spiritual; it is political power.

And yet, despite one of the most restrictive religious systems in the world, Christianity has quietly grown.

Not in public churches.
Not in official buildings.
But in living rooms, basements, and small apartments where believers gather behind closed doors.

To be a Christian in Iran is to live with the knowledge that your faith can cost you everything.

Conversion from Islam is treated as a crime punishable by death under the regime’s interpretation of Islamic law, even though apostasy is not fully codified in the current penal code. Bibles are confiscated, house churches are raided, and pastors are interrogated, arrested, and imprisoned under vague charges like “acting against national security” or “propaganda against the state.”

For years, the Iranian government has portrayed Christianity as a foreign threat, a Western plot to undermine the revolution, precisely because it cannot control it. Many Iranian Christians are former Muslims who began asking questions: some were disillusioned by the regime’s control of religion; others encountered the Gospel through satellite television, social media, Persian-language Christian channels, or a friend willing to share their faith quietly.

Iranian authorities have repeatedly targeted Christian converts with arrests and long prison sentences, giving multi-year terms simply for meeting to pray or running house churches. The risks are not theoretical.

In 1990, Pastor Hossein Soodmand was executed for converting to Christianity. In the years that followed, Protestant leaders who defended converts, men like Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr and Pastor Mehdi Dibaj, were murdered after confronting the regime’s persecution of the church. More recently, courts have continued to imprison Christian converts under “national security” and “propaganda against Islam” charges for leading house churches or distributing Bibles.

I know one of these women personally. Marziyeh Amirizadeh distributed 20,000 Bibles across Iran, founded two secret house churches, and in 2009 was arrested, imprisoned in the infamous Evin Prison, and sentenced to death by hanging. Her crime, in the regime’s eyes, was sharing her faith. When interrogators demanded the name of her pastor, she answered: “Jesus Christ is my pastor.” She survived only because the world intervened: the United States government applied diplomatic pressure, and Pope Benedict XVI sent a personal letter to the Iranian government on her behalf. She was released after 259 days. Her best friend, Shirin Alamhooli, who sat beside her in that same prison, was later executed.

Today, much of Iran’s Christian community exists beyond the view of the state: small gatherings of believers meeting quietly, often changing locations, always aware that discovery could mean interrogation or prison. Despite these risks, Iran is now widely described by ministries and researchers as having one of the fastest-growing evangelical movements in the world, driven largely by converts who chose faith despite the consequences.

Now the dictatorship is, for the first time in decades, facing an existential threat.

The war did not begin with this month’s airstrikes. For years, Iran’s rulers have used their bully pulpit and their social-media accounts to threaten the United States and Israel. At rallies and in speeches, Khamenei led crowds in chants of “Death to America” — a slogan his government defended as policy, not rhetoric. On X (formerly Twitter), his official accounts amplified the same hostility in only slightly softer terms, describing Israel as a “cancerous tumor” that must be uprooted and vowing that Iran’s opposition to America would never change.

Those threats are now colliding with reality. The U.S.–Israeli operation that began on February 28 followed months of escalating confrontation and a brief but intense war in 2025. Airstrikes have hit missile facilities, command centers, and Revolutionary Guard sites across the country. Senior figures linked to the regime’s security apparatus, including the former Supreme Leader, have been killed, and Iran has responded with waves of missile and drone attacks of its own.

The system that has governed Iran since 1979 now faces external military pressure, economic strain, and internal uncertainty under a new Supreme Leader.

War is never simple. Civilians always suffer. Entire regions can be destabilized by a single miscalculation. But it would be naïve to pretend that the conflict now unfolding in and around Iran is meaningless or random.

For decades the Islamic Republic has projected power far beyond its borders, arming militant proxies, fueling regional conflicts, and enforcing ideological control at home through repression. It has also tried to suppress religious movements it could not dominate. Among them: Christianity.

For forty-five years the Iranian government has tried to stamp out the growth of a church it could neither regulate nor silence. It raided homes. It imprisoned believers. It threatened converts with death. Still, the church endured.

That endurance matters now. As bombs fall and leaders maneuver for advantage, another story is unfolding in Iran, quietly, in whispered prayers and crowded apartments. A generation of Iranians has discovered Christianity outside the state’s control. They have already learned how to build community without official permission, how to forgive persecutors, how to hold hope when every earthly power says they should be afraid.

No one knows what Iran will look like when the dust settles, whether this war entrenches the current regime or hastens its end. But one thing is already clear: the Islamic Republic spent decades trying to eliminate Christianity among its own people. It failed.

If this dictatorship eventually falls, the church that grew in secret will not suddenly appear; it will simply step into the light. The same Christians who have already paid a price for freedom of faith could become some of the country’s most powerful witnesses.

That possibility should shape how the world thinks about Iran’s future. When policymakers and pundits speak of “regime change” or “stability,” they are ultimately talking about the lives of ordinary people, among them a generation of Christians who built community without permission, survived imprisonment without renouncing their faith, and endured decades of repression without disappearing. Any future settlement that ignores them will miss one of the most hopeful realities inside the country today.

Iran’s political future remains uncertain. But the quiet resilience of its Christians offers a different measure of power. Dictatorships can demand outward conformity; they cannot manufacture inward conviction. The underground church in Iran has survived the regime.

Gia Chacón is a human rights advocate and founder of For the Martyrs, a leading voice for persecuted Christians worldwide. Her work has taken her into some of the world’s most dangerous countries, where she documents abuses and supports communities rebuilding after violence. Through her writing, media appearances, and leadership of the national March for the Martyrs movement, she calls attention to the global crisis of Christian persecution and mobilizes solidarity with those suffering for their faith.