A diverse set of motives drives the persecution. In much of the Middle East and parts of Africa, it’s Islamic radicalism; in India, it’s Hindu fundamentalism; in China and North Korea, it’s police states protecting their hegemony, and in Latin America, it’s often vested interests threatened by Christians standing up for peace and justice. The Globe, in a series that launches today, will report back from all those fronts in this unholy war.

If there were a Nobel Prize for enduring misery, Nabil Soliman would be an awfully compelling candidate.

Two years ago, the 54-year-old Egyptian Christian was a security guard in his small Upper Egyptian village of Nazlet El Badraman, where his family had lived for generations. Though hardly rich, he and his wife Sabah, along with their six children and five grandchildren, were comfortable and proud of Nabil for being the lone Christian in town to hold such a position of trust.

Then, the sky fell in.

In November 2013, Islamic radicals in his village went on a violent rampage, angry over the removal of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi as the country’s president. Christians, who represent roughly 10 percent of Egypt’s population, made convenient targets.

Soliman’s was among the first homes to be torched. Rather than restraining the mob, town police instead arrested Soliman, and, as they hauled him away to the station house, invited bystanders to beat him.

He and his family were forced to flee the village or be killed. Soliman lost his job, his pension, and his home. His family survives today in a stifling Cairo flat, living on a share of the meager income two of his sons generate selling second-hand clothes in the streets. He can’t afford the rent, or even to buy the medicines he needs to stave off his hepatitis C, a deadly disease brutally common in Egypt.

Understandably, Soliman is full of questions about his fate and his future. But none of them is “why.”

“This is all because we’re Christians,” he said in an interview this summer. “There is no other reason.”

Such stories and much worse are depressingly easy to collect, in Egypt, across the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world. Religious persecution is increasingly Christian persecution, here and globally. Pope Francis said in July 2014 that “there are more martyrs in the Church today than in the first centuries,” and empirical evidence bears him out.

In 2013, Christians were harassed either by the government or social groups in 102 of 198 countries included in a Pew Research Center study, the highest tally for any religious group. An earlier study by other researchers reported a 309 percent jump in attacks on Christians in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Read More