It is one of those good news, bad news scenarios. No Christian likes persecution, and increasingly believers are being targeted for their beliefs in Western Democracies and as counterintuitive as it sounds, this may actually be good news for the church. According to a study by Nilay Saiya and Stuti Manchanda, published in Society of Religion, an academic journal, there is a strange anomaly in Christianity where it does better in places where it’s not the favoured religion and even faces active persecution, than in countries where it is embraced. The authors came to this conclusion after studying the growth and acceptance of Christianity in 166 nations between 2010 and 2020. The authors noted that of the ten countries with the fastest growing Christian populations today, seven of them involve nations that have low acceptance or even resistance to the Christian faith: Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Madagascar, Liberia, DR Congo, and Angola. Only three nations, where Christianity was politically and culturally accepted, made it in to the top ten: Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya. Saiya and Manchand added …