While there are many terrible places on earth to be a Christian (Sudan, North Korea, Afghanistan, Bhutan, etc.), Pakistan is arguably the worst. Other nations persecute believers, but in Pakistan the entire country has spent generations forming a world view that values the torturing of those that claim the name of Christ.

Pakistan used to have a noticeable Christian presence. Presbyterians had a sizeable school system, and those schools were largely responsible for the country’s relatively high literacy. But in 1973 Islam become the nation’s religion and the government seized those schools and replaced their teachers and curriculum. Now the Koran is required to be read and recited in all classes at all levels. When little kids learn science, they memorize passages about how Mohammad prophesied modern inventions. When they learn English, they learn it through the Koran. Meanwhile, it is illegal for Christians to touch or own the Koran.

Now, 40 years later, this plan was successful. Literacy in Pakistan is around 50%, but literacy for Christians is less than 10%. Universities require Koran memorization for entrance, so Christians are unable to hold any jobs which require an education. There are only a handful of believers who work for the government at any level. Christians are reduced to living in slums, where they are routinely robbed, and their houses frequently burned.

But that is not the worst of what happens to Christians there. The worst is that their children—particularly their young daughters—are the targets of violence. It is estimated by the few Christian organizations that track these things that around 3,000 Christian girls between the ages of 10-12 are kidnapped every year. Schools make Christians wear different uniforms than the other students, making them easy targets. They are forced to “convert” to Islam and marry Muslims (often becoming a man’s third or fourth wife), and their children are by law considered Muslim. Young kidnapped girls that refuse to convert and marry are beaten, physically tortured, and either killed or simply raped and left to die naked in the wilderness.

Christians do not have access to the legal system in Pakistan. By law, a Christian’s testimony carries only half credibility in court. Police must arrest Christians for any crime they are accused of, and they are really only accused of one crime: blasphemy, which carries an automatic death sentence. In perhaps the most perverse aspect of the legal system there, the government can say that they have never officially executed anyone for blasphemy because it is the lawyers who often carry out the execution before the trial.

Judges in Pakistan have been thoroughly intimidated by Al Qaeda. They know that if they ever find a Christian innocent of blasphemy that the judge’s family will be murdered. A few years ago (when there were still lawyers who would defend Christians) a Christian was convicted of writing blasphemy against Mohamed, and her case was appealed to the Supreme Court. There it was shown that the accused was actually illiterate, and obviously incapable of writing. The judge acquitted her, and he was murdered the next day. Since then there have been no cases of Christians found “not guilty.” They usually don’t even survive to their trial.

This is an important point because in the last few years blasphemy charges against Christians have become more common. Two particular cases are well known by most Pakistanis, and they served as the model for the current wave of persecution. In 2009 two neighbors were having a property dispute—it essentially boiled down to who was responsible for a hole in the fence. One neighbor was Muslim, and the other was a Christian. The Muslim fabricated a charge of blasphemy, the police incited a crowd, and the Christian family was beaten. Eventually the police arrested the Christian woman (Asia Bibi), who was convicted of blasphemy. The mob seized her house and turned it over to her Muslim neighbors.

In 2011 a wedding was being hosted in the house of a Christian family. A group of Muslims wadded up pages of the Koran and threw them over the fence into the yard, and then summoned the authorities who arrested the bride. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Those two cases have made a pattern for the rest of the nation to follow. Christians are frequently falsely accused of blasphemy, arrested, and their hoses are seized. If they lived in the slums (where most Christians live) it is likely that their entire neighborhood will be burned and turned into a mosque.

Because judges don’t want to hear these cases, and lawyers are afraid for their lives that they will not be seen as sufficiently hard against blasphemy, the most common outcome of these cases is that the accused are murdered by their lawyers.

In one of the most infamous cases, in 2012 a group of Muslims handed an 11-year-old Christian girl a bag with burned pages from a school book. The girl would have simply been kidnapped and forced to convert, but because she had Down’s Syndrome, they did not want to marry her to a Muslim. Instead, she was asked her to bring the bag home with her, and a mob then surrounded her house. She was arrested and charged with blasphemy, because the school book contained passages from the Koran. Because this story was picked up by international news, she was not immediately killed. Eventually she was given asylum in Canada.