Global Christian Relief Red List 2025

​Analysis 
 
Faltering States and Growing Churches: World Famous Dissident Alexi Navalny Writes a Classic on How Faith Brings Hope in Prison, Then Dies
Russia's most famous dissident, Alexi Navalny, died because of his harsh incarceration in Siberian prisons. He was only 47. His demise was widely mourned but less well known- -and almost ignored by the Western media- -was that Navalny adopted a robust Christian faith in his later years, committing to memory all 111 verses of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount in Russian, English, French and Latin.
 
His autobiography titled "Alexi Navalny: Patriot" came out in October 2024, and is more prison diary than anything else. But the book may well rank as a classic of religious prison literature in due course, alongside Bonhoeffer's "Letters and Papers from Prison" and Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in its affirmation of the strength of faith to overcome the worst the State can throw at a person. Navalny's book ends with an exercise of imagining the worst that could befall him, and contesting this with the ultimate religious comfort: "But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? .... My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won't let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me."
 
Other prominent dissidents with an explicit religious faith include Hong Kong's Jimmy Lai, whose conscience compels him to stay in jail on charges of treason for his role in pro-democracy protests; Wang Yi, the lawyer turned pastor in Chengdu, China, sentenced in 2019 to nine years in jail for the crime of insisting that the State should not ask for ultimate loyalty over God, and in so doing joins a long and historic list of Christian leaders. And April 2024 marked ten years since Boko Haram abducted 276 mostly Christian girls from a high school in Chibok. Roughly 98 Christian girls are still missing a national scandal highlighting the official disinterest and incompetence of successive Nigerian governments.
 
The 2025 Global Christian Relief Red List. Washington, D.C.