Forced conversion

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v t e

Forced conversion is the adoption of a religion or irreligion under duress.^[1] Someone who has been forced to convert to a different religion or irreligion may continue, covertly, to adhere to the beliefs and practices which were originally held, while outwardly behaving as a convert. Crypto-Jews, Crypto-Christians, Crypto-Muslims and Crypto-Pagans are historical examples of the latter.

Religion and proselytization

The religions of the world are divided into two groups: those that actively seek new followers (missionary religions) and those that do not (non-missionary religions). This classification dates back to a lecture given by Max Müller in 1873, and is based on whether or not a religion seeks to gain new converts. The three main religions classified as missionary religions are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, while the non-missionary religions include Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism. Other religions, such as Primal Religions, Confucianism, and Taoism, may also be considered non-missionary religions.^[2]

Religion and power

In general,

While religious leaders and the state generally have different aims, both are concerned about power and order; both use reason and emotion to motivate behavior. Throughout history, leaders of religious and political institutions have cooperated, opposed one another, and/or attempted to co-opt each other, for purposes which are both noble and base, and they have implemented programs with a wide range of driving values, from compassion, which is aimed at alleviating current suffering, to brutal change, which is aimed at achieving long-term goals, for the benefit of groups which have ranged from small cliques to all of humanity. The relationship is far from simple. But religion has frequently been used in a coercive manner, and it has also used coercion.^[3]

Buddhism

People may express their faith through the act of taking refuge, and conversions usually require people to recite their acceptance of the Triple Gems of Buddhism. However, they may always practice Buddhism without fully abandoning their own religion.^[4] According to Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO), Christians from the Chin ethnic minority group in Myanmar are facing coercion to convert to Buddhism by state actors and programme.^[5]

Christianity

Christianity was a minority religion during much of the middle Roman Classical Period, and the early Christians were persecuted during that time. When Constantine I converted to Christianity, it had already grown to be the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Already under the reign of Constantine I, Christian heretics were being persecuted; beginning in the late 4th century, the ancient pagan religions were also actively suppressed. In the view of many historians, the Constantinian shift turned Christianity from a persecuted religion into a religion which was capable of persecuting and sometimes eager to persecute.^[6]

Late Antiquity

On 27 February 380, together with

The Codex Theodosianus (Eng. Theodosian Code) was a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors since 312. A commission was established by Theodosius II and his co-emperor Valentinian III on 26 March 429^[9][10] and the compilation was published by a constitution of 15 February 438. It went into force in the eastern and western parts of the empire on 1 January 439.^[9]

It is Our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans.... The rest, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative (Codex Theodosianus XVI 1.2.).^[11]

Forced conversion that occurred after the seventh century generally took place during riots and massacres carried out by mobs and clergy without support of the rulers. In contrast, royal persecutions of Jews from the late eleventh century onward generally took the form of expulsions, with some exceptions, such as conversions of Jews in southern Italy of the 13th century, which were carried out by Dominican Inquisitors but instigated by King Charles II of Naples.^[12]

Jews were forced to convert to Christianity by the Crusaders in Lorraine, on the Lower Rhine, in Bavaria and Bohemia, in Mainz and in Worms^[17] (see Rhineland massacres, Worms massacre (1096)).

Though he strongly condemned and prohibited forced conversion and baptism by decree,^[18] Pope Innocent III suggested in a private letter to a bishop in 1201^[19] that those who agreed to be baptized to avoid torture and intimidation might be compelled to outwardly observe Christianity:^[20]

[T]hose who are immersed even though reluctant, do belong to ecclesiastical jurisdiction at least by reason of the sacrament, and might therefore be reasonably compelled to observe the rules of the Christian Faith. It is, to be sure, contrary to the Christian Faith that anyone who is unwilling and wholly opposed to it should be compelled to adopt and observe Christianity. For this reason a valid distinction is made by some between kinds of unwilling ones and kinds of compelled ones. Thus one who is drawn to Christianity by violence, through fear and through torture, and receives the sacrament of Baptism in order to avoid loss, he (like one who comes to Baptism in dissimulation) does receive the impress of Christianity, and may be forced to observe the Christian Faith as one who expressed a conditional willingness though, absolutely speaking, he was unwilling ...

During the

After the end of

After the forced conversions, when all former Muslims and Jews had ostensibly become Catholic, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions primarily targeted forced converts from Judaism and Islam, who came under suspicion, because they were either accused of continuing to adhere to their old religion, or they were accused of falling back into it. Jewish conversos who still resided in Spain and frequently practiced Judaism in secret were suspected of being Crypto-Jews by the "Old Christians". The Spanish Inquisition generated much wealth and income for the church and individual inquisitors by confiscating the property of the persecuted. The end of Al-Andalus and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula went hand in hand with the increasing amount of Spanish and Portuguese influence in the world, influence which was exemplified by the Christian conquest of the aboriginal Indian populations of the Americas. The Ottoman Empire and Morocco absorbed most of the Jewish and Muslim refugees, but a large majority of them remained in Spain and Portugal by choosing to be Conversos.^[27]

Colonial Americas

During the

Upon converting to Christianity in the 10th century, Vladimir the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus', ordered Kiev's citizens to undergo a mass baptism in the Dnieper river.^[29]

In the 13th century the pagan populations of the

After Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, the Muslim population faced slaughter, expulsion, forced resettlement and conversion to Christianity.^[32]

In the 18th century, Elizabeth of Russia launched a campaign of forced conversion of Russia's non-Orthodox subjects, including Muslims and Jews.^[33]

Goa inquisition

The Portuguese carried out the

In 1567, the conversion of the majority of the native villagers to Christianity allowed the Portuguese to destroy temples in Bardez, with 300 Hindu temples destroyed. Prohibitions were then declared from December 4, 1567, on public performances of Hindu marriages, sacred thread wearing and cremation. All persons above 15 years of age were compelled to listen to Christian preaching, failing which they were punished. In 1583, Hindu temples at Assolna and Cuncolim were also destroyed by the Portuguese army after the majority of the native villagers there had also converted to Christianity.^{[35][verification needed]} "The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshiped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers", wrote Filippo Sassetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588.^[36]

Papal States

In 1858,

In 2009, the Assam Times reported that a group of Hmar militants with about 15 members calling themselves the Manmasi National Christian Army, tried to force Hindu residents of Bhuvan Pahar, Assam to convert to Christianity.^[39]

Hinduism

Indian Christians have alleged that Hindu groups in southern Chhattisgarh have forced Christian converts from Hinduism to revert^[40] to Hinduism. In the aftermath of the violence, American Christian evangelical groups have claimed that Hindu groups are forcibly reverting Christian converts from Hinduism back to Hinduism.^[40] It has also been alleged that these same Hindu groups have used allurements to convert poor Muslims and Christians to Hinduism against their will.^[41][42]

Islam

After the Arab conquests a number of Christian Arab tribes suffered enslavement and forced conversion.^[43]

Jizya and conversion

Jews and Christians were required to pay the jizya while pagans were either required to accept Islam, pay the jizya, be exiled, or be killed, depending on which of the four main

Wael Hallaq states that in theory, Islamic religious tolerance only applied to those religious groups that Islamic jurisprudence considered to be monotheistic "People of the Book", i.e. Christians, Jews, and Sabians if they paid the jizya tax, while to those excluded from the "People of the Book" were only offered two choices: convert to Islam or fight to the death. In practice, the "People of the Book" designation and dhimmi status were even extended to the non-monotheistic religions of the conquered peoples, such as Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and other non-monotheists.^[52]

Druze

The

The

Two out of the four schools of Islamic law, i.e. Hanafi and Maliki schools, accepted non-Arab polytheists to be eligible for the dhimmi status. Under this doctrine, Arab polytheists were forced to choose between conversion and death. However, according to perception of most Muslim jurists, all Arabs had embraced Islam during the lifetime of Muhammad. Their exclusion therefore had little practical significance after his death in 632.^[51]

Arab historian Al-Baladhuri says that Caliph Umar deported Christians who refused to apostatize and convert to Islam, and that he obeyed the order of the prophet who advised: “there shall not remain two religions in the land of Arabia.”^[63]

In the 9th century, the

After the Arab conquests a number of Christian Arab tribes suffered enslavement and forced conversion.[43]

During the rise of the Islamic Caliphates, it was increasingly expected for all Arabs to be Muslims and pressure was put on many to convert.^[68] The Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I said to Shamala, the Christian Arab leader of the Banu Taghlib: "As you are a chief of the Arabs you shame them all by worshipping the cross; obey my wish and turn Muslim." He replied, 'How so? I am chief of Taghlib, and I fear lest I become a cause of destruction to them all if I and they cease to believe in christ" Enraged Al-Walid had him dragged away on his face and tortured; afterward he commanded him again to convert to Islam or else prepare to "eat his own flesh." The Christian Arab again refused, and the order was carried out: Walid's servants "cut off a slice from Shamala's thigh and roasted it in the fire, and they thrust it into his mouth" and he was blinded during this as well. This event is confirmed by the Muslim historian Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani^[69][70][71]

In the early eighth century under the Umayyads, 63 out of a group of 70 Christian pilgrims from

There were forced conversions in the 12th century under the

• Daniel and companions, d. 1221
• John of Perugia and Peter of Sassoferrato, d. 1231
• Saint Serapion of Algiers, d. 1240

Christians under the Almohad rule generally chose to relocate to the Christian principalities (most notably the Kingdom of Asturias) in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, whereas Jews decided to stay in order to keep their properties, and many of them feigned conversion to Islam, while continuing to believe and practice Judaism in secrecy.^[81]

During the Almohad persecution, the

In order to increase their numbers in Anatolia, the newly arrived Seljuk Turks took Christian children and forcibly converted them to Islam and turkified them, acts specifically mentioned in Antioch, around Samosata, and in western Asia Minor. ^[85]

Danishmend's campaigns

During his campaigns, Sultan Malik Danishmend swore to forcibly convert the population of the city of Sisiya Comana to Islam and he did so upon capturing it. The governor of Comana forced its population to pray 5 times a day and those who refused to go to the mosque were brought to it by threat of physical violence. Those who continued to drink wine or do other things that Islam forbids were publicly whipped. The fate of the city of Euchaita was similar, with Malik giving the people the option of converting to Islam or death.^[86][87]

Yemen

In the late 1160s, the Yemenite ruler

Speros Vryonis cites a pastoral letter from 1338 addressed to the residents of Nicaea indicating widespread, forcible conversion by the Turks after it was conquered: "And they [Turks] having captured and enslaved many of our own and violently forced them and dragging them along alas! So that they took up their evil and godlessness."^[102]

After the Siege of Nicaea (1328–1331) The Turks began to force the Christian inhabitants who had escaped the massacres to convert to Islam. The patriarch of Constantinople John XIX wrote a message to the people of Nicea shortly after the city was seized. His letter says that "The invaders endeavored to impose their impure religion on the populace, at all costs, intending to make the inhabitants followers of Muhammad". Patriarch advised the Christians to "be steadfast in your religion" and not to forget that the "Turks are masters of your bodies only, but not of your souls.^{[103][104][105]}

Apostolos Vakalopoulos comments on the first Ottoman invasions of Europe and Dimitar Angelov gives assessment on the Campaigns on Murad II and Mehmed II and their impact on the conquered native Balkan Christians:^[106]

From the very beginning of the Turkish onslaught [in Thrace] under Suleiman [son of Sultan Orhan], the Turks tried to consolidate their position by the forcible imposition of Islam. If [the Ottoman historian] Şükrullah is to be believed, those who refused to accept the Moslem faith were slaughtered and their families enslaved. "Where there were bells," writes the same author [Şükrullah], "Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them into mosques. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins. Wherever Christian infidels were still found, vassalage was imposed on their rulers. At least in public they could no longer say 'kyrie eleison' but rather 'There is no God but Allah'; and where once their prayers had been addressed to Christ, they were now to "Muhammad, the prophet of Allah."

According to historian Demetrios Constantelos, "Mass forced conversions were recorded during the caliphates of Selim I (1512–1520),...Selim II (1566–1574), and Murat III (1574–1595). On the occasion of some anniversary, such as the capture of a city, or a national holiday, many rayahs were forced to apostacize. On the day of the circumcision of Mohammed III great numbers of Christians (Albanians, Greeks, Slavs) were forced to convert to Islam."^[107][108] After reviewing the martyrology of Christians killed by the Ottomans from the fall of Constantinople all the way to the final phases of the Greek War of Independence, Constantelos reports:^[108]

The Ottoman Turks condemned to death eleven Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople, nearly one hundred bishops, and several thousand priests, deacons, and monks. It is impossible to say with certainty how many men of the cloth were forced to apostasize.

For strategic reasons, the Ottomans forcibly converted Christians living in the frontier regions of Macedonia and northern Bulgaria, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. Those who refused were either executed or burned alive.^[109]

The community budgets of Jews was heavily burdened by the repurchasing of Jewish slaves abducted by Arab, Berber, or Turkish pirates, or by military raids. The mental trauma due to captivity and slavery caused unransomed prisoners who had lost family, money, and friends to convert to Islam.^[110]

During his travels through the Salt lake region of central Anatolia, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier observed in the town of Mucur, "there are numbers of Greeks who are forced everyday to become Turks".^{[111][page needed]}

During the

In Persia, instances of forced conversion of Jews took place in 1291 and 1318, and those in Baghdad in 1333 and 1344. In 1617 and 1622, a wave of forced conversions and persecution, provoked by the slander of Jewish apostates, swept over the Jews of Persia, sparing neither Nestorian Christians nor Armenians. From 1653 to 1666, during the reign of Shah Abbas II, all the Jews in Persia were Islamized by force. However, religious freedom was eventually restored. A law in 1656 gave Jewish or Christian converts to Islam exclusive rights of inheritance. This law was alleviated for the Christians as a concession to Pope Alexander VII but remained in force for Jews until the end of the nineteenth century. David Cazés mentions the existence in Tunisia of similar inheritance laws favoring converts to Islam.[110]

India

In an invasion of the

Aurangzeb employed a number of means to encourage conversions to Islam.^[125] The ninth guru of Sikhs, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was beheaded in Delhi on orders of Aurangzeb for refusing to convert to Islam.^[126][127] In a Mughal-Sikh war in 1715, 700 followers of Banda Singh Bahadur were beheaded.^[128] Sikhs were executed for not apostatizing from Sikhism.^[129] Banda Singh Bahadur was offered a pardon if he converted to Islam.^[130] Upon refusal, he was tortured,^[131][132] and was killed with his five-year-old son.^[129] Following the execution of Banda, the emperor ordered to apprehend Sikhs anywhere they were found.^[130]

18th century ruler

In the 1998 Prankote massacre, 26 Kashmiri Hindus were beheaded by Islamist militants after their refusal to convert to Islam. The militants struck when the villagers refused demands from the gunmen to convert to Islam and prove their conversion by eating beef.^[140] During the Noakhali riots in 1946, several thousand Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam by Muslim mobs.^[141][142]

Pakistan

The rise of

The Human Rights Council of Pakistan has reported that cases of forced conversion are increasing.^[145][146] A 2014 report by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace (MSP) says about 1,000 women in Pakistan are forcibly converted to Islam every year (700 Christian and 300 Hindu).^{[147][148][149]}

In 2003, a six-year-old Sikh girl was kidnapped by a member of the Afridi tribe in Northwest Frontier Province; the alleged kidnapper claimed the girl was actually 12 years old, had converted to Islam, and therefore could not be returned to her non-Muslim family.^[150] In Pakistan's Sindh province, a distressing pattern of crimes has emerged, including the abduction, coerced conversion to Islam, and subsequent marriage to older Muslim men who are often abductors. These crimes primarily target underage girls from impoverished Hindu families.^[151]

Rinkle Kumari, a 19-year Pakistani student, Lata Kumari, and Asha Kumari, a Hindu working in a beauty parlor, were allegedly forced to convert from Hinduism to Islam.^[152] They told the judge that they wanted to go with their parents.^[153] Their cases were appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The appeal was admitted but remained unheard ever after.^[154] Rinkle was abducted by a gang and "forced" to convert to Islam, before being head shaved.^[155]

Many Hindu girls living in Pakistan are kidnapped, forcibly converted and married to Muslims.[160] According to another report from the Movement for Solidarity and Peace, about 1,000 non-Muslim girls are converted to Islam each year in Pakistan.^[161] According to the Amarnath Motumal, the vice chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every month, an estimated 20 or more Hindu girls are abducted and converted, although exact figures are impossible to gather.^[162] In 2014 alone, 265 legal cases of forced conversion were reported mostly involving Hindu girls.^[163]

A total of 57 Hindus converted in Pasrur during May 14–19. On May 14, 35 Hindus of the same family were forced to convert by their employer because his sales dropped after Muslims started boycotting his eatable items as they were prepared by Hindus as well as their persecution by the Muslim employees of neighbouring shops according to their relatives. Since the impoverished Hindu had no other way to earn and needed to keep the job to survive, they converted. 14 members of another family converted on May 17 since no one was employing them, later another Hindu man and his family of eight under pressure from Muslims to avoid their land being grabbed.^[164]

In 2017, the Sikh community in Hangu district of Pakistan's

Within Pakistan, the southern province of Sindh had over 1,000 forced conversions of Christian and Hindu girls according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in 2018. According to victims' families and activists, Mian Abdul Haq, who is a local political and religious leader in Sindh, has been accused of being responsible for forced conversions of girls within the province.^[171]

More than 100 Hindus in Sindh converted to Islam in June 2020 to escape discrimination and economic pressures. Islamic charities and clerics offer incentives of jobs or land to impoverished minorities on the condition that they convert.

In October 2020, the Pakistani High Court upheld the validity of a forced marriage between 44-year-old Ali Azhar and 13-year-old Christian Arzoo Raja. Raja was abducted by Azhar, forcibly wed to Azhar and then forcibly converted to Islam by Azhar.[173] Pakistan has been found in breach of its international commitments to safeguard non-Muslim girls from exploitation by influential factions and criminal elements, as forced conversions have become commonplace within the nation. This concerning trend is on the rise, notably observed in the districts of Tharparkar, Umerkot, and Mirpur Khas in Sindh.^[174]

Indonesia

In 2012, over 1000 Catholic children in East Timor, removed from their families, were reported to being held in Indonesia without consent of their parents, forcibly converted to Islam, educated in Islamic schools and naturalized.^[175] Other reports claim forced conversion of minority Ahmadiyya sect Muslims to Sunni Islam, with the use of violence.^{[176][177][178]}

In 2001 the

In 2006, two journalists of the Fox News Network were kidnapped at gunpoint in the Gaza Strip by a previously unknown militant group. After being forced to read statements on videotape proclaiming that they had converted to Islam, they were released by their captors.^[185]

Allegations of

According to the UK prison officers' union, some Muslim prisoners in the UK have been forcibly converting fellow inmates to Islam in prisons.[193] An independent government report published in 2023 found that there have been multiple cases of Muslim gangs threatening non-Muslim prisoners to "convert or get hurt".^[194]

In 2007, a Sikh girl's family claimed that she had been forcibly converted to Islam, and they received a police guard after being attacked by an armed gang, although the "Police said no one was injured in the incident".^[195]

In response to these news stories, an open letter to Sir Ian Blair, signed by ten Hindu academics, argued that claims that Hindu and Sikh girls were being forcefully converted were "part of an arsenal of myths propagated by right-wing Hindu supremacist organisations in India".^[196] The Muslim Council of Britain issued a press release pointing out there is a lack of evidence of any forced conversions and suggested it is an underhand attempt to smear the British Muslim population.^[197]

An academic paper by Katy Sian published in the journal South Asian Popular Culture in 2011 explored the question of how "'forced' conversion narratives" arose around the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom.^[198] Sian, who reports that claims of conversion through courtship on campuses are widespread in the UK, indicates that rather than relying on actual evidence they primarily rest on the word of "a friend of a friend" or on personal anecdote. According to Sian, the narrative is similar to accusations of "white slavery" lodged against the Jewish community and foreigners to the UK and the US, with the former having ties to antisemitism that mirror the Islamophobia betrayed by the modern narrative. Sian expanded on these views in 2013's Mistaken Identities, Forced Conversions, and Postcolonial Formations.^[199]

In 2018, a report by a Sikh activist organisation, Sikh Youth UK, entitled "The Religiously Aggravated Sexual Exploitation of Young Sikh Women Across the UK" made allegations of similarities between the case of Sikh Women and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal.^[200] However, in 2019, this report was criticised by researchers and an official UK government report led by two Sikh academics for false and misleading information.^[201][202] It noted: "The RASE report lacks solid data, methodological transparency and rigour. It is filled instead with sweeping generalisations and poorly substantiated claims around the nature and scale of abuse of Sikh girls and causal factors driving it. It appealed heavily to historical tensions between Sikhs and Muslims and narratives of honour in a way that seemed designed to whip up fear and hate".^[202]

Judaism

Under the

In 2009, the BBC claimed that in 524 CE the Himyarite Kingdom, who had adopted Judaism as the de facto state religion two centuries earlier, led by King Yusuf Dhu Nuwas, had offered residents of a village in what is now Saudi Arabia the choice between conversion to Judaism or death, and that 20,000 Christians had then been massacred.^[209] During the reign of Dhu Nuwas, a political-power transferring process began and during it, the Himyarite kingdom became a tributary of the Kingdom of Aksum, which had adopted Christianity as its de facto state religion two centuries earlier. This process was completed by the time of the reign of Ma'dīkarib Yafur (519-522), a Christian who was appointed by the Aksumites. A coup d'état ensued, with Dhu Nuwas assuming authority after the killing of the Aksumite garrison in Zafar. A general was sent against Najrān, a predominantly Christian oasis, with a good number of Jews, who refused to recognize his authority. The general blocked the caravan route which connected Najrān with Eastern Arabia and he also persecuted the Christian population of Najrān.^{[210][211][212]} Dhu Nuwas campaign eventually killed between 11,500 and 14,000, and took a similar number of prisoners.^[213] A severe drought in the 6th century weakened the Himyarite kingdom and contributed to its eventual conquest by the Kingdom of Aksum in 525.^[214]

Atheism

Under the doctrine of

Christopher Marsh, a professor at Baylor University writes that "Tracing the social nature of religion from Schleiermacher and Feurbach to Marx, Engels, and Lenin... the idea of religion as a social product evolved to the point of policies aimed at the forced conversion of believers to atheism."^[223] Jonathan Blake of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University elucidates the history of this practice in the USSR, stating that:^[224]

God, however, did not simply vanish after the Bolshevik revolution. Soviet authorities relied heavily on coercion to spread their idea of scientific atheism. This included confiscating church goods and property, forcibly closing religious institutions and executing religious leaders and believers or sending them to the gulag. ... Later, the United States passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment which harmed US–Soviet trade relations until the USSR permitted the emigration of religious minorities, primarily Jews. Despite the threat from coreligionists abroad, however, the Soviet Union engaged in forced atheism from its earliest days.^[224]

Across

In the Eastern Bloc, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques were forcibly "converted into museums of atheism."^[228][229] Historical essayist Andrei Brezianu expounds upon this situation, specifically in the Socialist Republic of Romania, writing that scientific atheism was "aggressively applied to Moldova, immediately after the 1940 annexation, when churches were profaned, clergy assaulted, and signs and public symbols of religion were prohibited"; he provides an example of this phenomenon, further writing that "St. Theodora Church in downtown Chişinău was converted into the city's Museum of Scientific Atheism".^[215] Marxist-Leninist regimes treated religious believers as subversives or abnormal, sometimes relegating them to psychiatric hospitals and reeducation.^[230][231] Nevertheless, historian Emily Baran writes that "some accounts suggest the conversion to militant atheism did not always end individuals' existential questions".^[232]

French Revolution

During the

Articles 3, 5, 24, 27, and 130 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 as originally enacted were anticlerical and enormously restricted religious freedoms.^[243] At first the anticlerical provisions were only sporadically enforced, but when President Plutarco Elías Calles took office, he enforced the provisions strictly.^[243] Calles' Mexico has been characterized as an atheist state^[244] and his program as being one to eradicate religion in Mexico.^[245]

All religions had their properties expropriated, and these became part of government wealth. There was a forced expulsion of foreign clergy and the seizure of Church properties.^[246] Article 27 prohibited any future acquisition of such property by the churches, and prohibited religious corporations and ministers from establishing or directing primary schools.^[246] This second prohibition was sometimes interpreted to mean that the Church could not give religious instruction to children within the churches on Sundays, seen as destroying the ability of Catholics to be educated in their own religion.^[247]

The Constitution of 1917 also closed and forbade the existence of monastic orders (article 5), forbade any religious activity outside of church buildings (now owned by the government), and mandated that such religious activity would be overseen by the government (article 24).^[246]

On June 14, 1926, President Calles enacted

Due to the strict enforcement of anti-clerical laws, people in strongly Catholic areas, especially the states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Colima and Michoacán, began to oppose him, and this opposition led to the Cristero War from 1926 to 1929, which was characterized by brutal atrocities on both sides. Some Cristeros applied terrorist tactics, while the Mexican government persecuted the clergy, killing suspected Cristeros and supporters and often retaliating against innocent individuals.^[251] In Tabasco state, the so-called "Red Shirts" began to act.

A truce was negotiated with the assistance of U.S. Ambassador

See also

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References