Obama State Department to blame for rising Christian persecutions, Tony Perkins says

(Reuters/Fayaz Aziz)Pakistani Christians hearing mass.

The policies of the Obama State Department were found to be responsible for the increasing number of Christian persecutions in a global scale, according to the head of a leading Christian conservative group.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in an interview with The Christian Post last week that persecutions faced by Christians from different parts of the world can be tied to the department's "misplaced priorities." Perkins noted that certain policies of the Obama State Department such as the promotion of abortion and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) movement in other countries resulted in the curtailment of religious freedom.

"You cannot look at this spread of anti-Christian persecution toward Christians absent of the policies of this administration. To a large degree, not exclusively, the problem is as acute as it is because of the way this State Department has been operating," Perkins explained.

Perkins scored the Obama administration's efforts of funding the legalization of abortion in African countries and promoting the LGBT agenda. He stated, "Barack Obama has bragged about it. Hillary Clinton bragged about it. It's all been to the detriment of its statutorily defined role of promoting religious freedom as a part of their foreign policy."

Perkins' statements came in the wake of the 2017 World Watch List released by persecution watchdog, Open Doors. The organization names the top 50 countries where Christians suffer atrocities, with 2016 being the worst year, statistically.

Last April, Perkins also published a commentary titled "Will We Stand With Persecuted Christians?" wherein he criticized the former U.S. president for showing little interest in international religious freedom. He noted that the administration failed to show enough interest in a number of instances like when the ISIS beheaded 21 men in Libya, when a Taliban faction attacked Christians during Easter in Pakistan, and when close to 150 Christian students were murdered by an Islamist group in Kenya's Garissa University College.

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