(LifeSiteNews) — The Taliban’s continued violation of religious freedom laws and violent outlawing of anything except Sunni Islam is forcing Christians underground.
As documented by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a law implemented by the Taliban in Afghanistan last August “reinforces a systematic and overt erasure of religious freedom in Afghanistan and facilitates the ongoing repression of religious minorities.”
The “Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” (PVPV) – also more widely known as the “morality law” – was first imposed in August 2024.
Designed to aggressively promote only one accepted version of Islam – Sunni Islam – the law thus targets all other creeds, including Christians but also Muslim minorities.
The local population is almost entirely Muslim: some 99 percent being Muslim as of 2021. As of 2021 there were just 200 Catholics officially known to be in the country.
Any non-Islamic ceremonies are strictly forbidden, as is offering assistance or even being friendly with non-Muslims.
Women are expressly forbidden from engaging in public life, and strict dress codes of full burkha and face coverings are enforced – for Muslim and non-Muslim women alike. “Young girls from Sikh and Christian families have been abducted, forcibly converted and married to Taliban members,” the USCIRF recounted earlier this year.
The wearing of crucifixes is expressly forbidden. Books deemed by the Taliban to contradict the accepted version of Islam are also banned and appropriated.
As a March hearing hosted by the USCIRF noted, “Both the Taliban and the Islamic State – Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, consider Christians, Ahmadi Muslims, and the Baha’is as converts from Islam, and therefore they are deemed apostates. This, quote-unquote, ‘offense’ is punishable by death. As a result, these communities often remain hidden in a desperate attempt to protect themselves and their families.”
In the past 12 months, the law has led to increased violations of religious freedoms, with the USCIRF writing that “non-Muslims are forced to practice in secret or risk arrest and torture.”
Earlier this year, the Taliban official responsible for overseeing the law described Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs as being “worse than four-legged animals.”
In order to implement the draconian law, Taliban officials of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice operate largely “without judicial oversight.” In the capital city of Kabul, facial recognition technology is used to penalize those found to be breaking the law.
Once arrested, particularly harsh treatment is reserved for certain minority groups: “while in Taliban custody, individuals’ ethnic or religious identity influenced the severity of torture inflicted, including for Christians and Hazaras.”
The current Taliban rule of Afghanistan has been in place since August 2021, and ever since then religious freedom bodies have warned of the deteriorating situation in the country.
A few days after the Taliban came to power four years ago, Aid to the Church in Need warned about many probable eventualities which have since come to pass: the implementation of Sharia law, promotion of Sunni Islam as the official religion and a rollback of religious freedoms.
“Our analysis, unfortunately, does not leave much room for hope,” wrote ACN at the time.
International Christian Concern has previously stated that “the Taliban are working to completely erase Christianity or any religious minority from the country, even stating that there are no Christians in Afghanistan, an obviously false claim.”
As of 2023, there were believed to be less than 10,000 Christians in Afghanistan.
The U.S. Department of State has designated the Taliban as an entity of particular concern as recently as December 2023.
