Across the Maghreb, Christian converts and religious minorities live double lives, terrified of exposure as governments quietly enable their persecution
The video was shaky, probably shot on someone’s phone. A baptism in Mauritania, nothing more. But within hours of going viral last December, fifteen Christians were behind bars. The world got a rare glimpse into something that usually stays hidden across North Africa, what happens when you practice the wrong faith.
This isn’t some distant crisis. As at the time of this report, across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, thousands are living double lives. There are Christians who pretend to be Muslim. Ahmadi Muslims who keep their heads down. Religious minorities who’ve learned that survival means invisibility.
And it’s getting worse.
Take Algeria. Since 2017, they’ve been shutting down Protestant churches—seventeen at last count. By May this year, only one evangelical church was left open in the entire country. Just one. The government calls it paperwork problems, missing permits, “illegal worship.” Everyone knows better.
“They make the registration requirements impossible to meet, then punish you for not meeting them,” says a religious freedom advocate who asked not to be named. “It’s persecution with a bureaucratic face.”
But the real story isn’t just about buildings. It’s about people like the Algerian convert whose nightmare reads like something from a spy thriller. Back in 2016, he was arrested for “insulting Islam”—basically for being Christian—and got five years. When they pardoned him in 2018, he ran. Made it to Tunisia, got refugee status, thought he was safe.
He wasn’t.
In August 2021, Algerian secret police grabbed him off the streets of Tunis and dragged him back across the border. International law? Due process? Forget it. They gave him another trial in December 2022—if you can call it that—and slapped him with three more years for supposedly backing Berber separatists. He finally got out this past September, but his case shows how far these governments will go. Even crossing borders won’t save you.
Amnesty International called it what it was: kidnapping. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom agreed. Nobody seemed to care.
Living the Lie
What gets to you, reading these accounts, is how ordinary it all sounds until it isn’t. A Moroccan convert goes to a Bible study. His relatives beat him up and run him out of town. A Tunisian shares some Christian content online and gets arrested for “insulting Islam.”
In Mauritania, where converting from Islam can technically get you executed, a few thousand Christians meet in living rooms and basements. They’ve turned house church into an art from different locations, careful timing, watching for informants. One wrong move and you’re done.
Libya is a special kind of hell. No real government means militias run wild, and if they decide you’re a Christian, well, good luck with that. People get tracked through their social media posts. Wrong tweet, wrong Facebook like, and you might just disappear.
The Ahmadi Muslims have it just as bad. Mainstream Sunni authorities consider them heretics, and that’s all the excuse anyone needs. Algeria has arrested dozens since 2016. Families get ostracised so completely they have to keep moving, city to city, looking for somewhere they can breathe.
Even the Sufis in Libya aren’t safe. Salafist groups smash their shrines, harass their followers. Centuries of spiritual tradition, gone.
When Your Own Government Hunts You
Here’s what’s really sick about this: these governments don’t usually do the dirty work themselves. They just make it legal, or look the other way, or create the conditions where persecution flourishes.
Algeria’s got Ordinance 06-03, which supposedly regulates non-Muslim worship but really just gives them tools to harass Christians. Morocco talks a good game about tolerance while its intelligence services monitor church activities. Tunisia disappoints most, after the Arab Spring, people hoped for better, but converts still get arrested for social media posts.
The pattern is always the same. Neighbours report Christians to police. Police question the Christians.
Sometimes it gets more direct. That Algerian convert who got kidnapped? His family reported him in the first place. Imagine living with that.
Fighting Back, Sort Of
International Christian Concern keeps documenting this stuff, publishing reports that probably get filed away somewhere. Open Doors ranks these countries among the world’s worst for Christian persecution, Algeria is at number 15, Mauritania at 20, Morocco at 24. Numbers on a list that might as well be invisible.
In Britain, MP Fiona Bruce keeps pushing for action on religious freedom. She’s introduced bills, held debates, referenced that 2020 Bishop of Truro report on global Christian persecution. Credit where it’s due, she’s trying. Whether anyone is listening is another question.
Social media activists do what they can. Hashtags like #ReligiousFreedomTunisia trend for a day or two. People share stories, start petitions. Then the news cycle moves on.
Some local voices try to speak up, usually anonymously. A Tunisian human rights lawyer exposed a convert’s arrest in 2023, got some international media attention. Small victories in a very big war.
The Price of Faith
You want to know what this really costs? It’s not just the arrests and church closures, though those hurt. It’s the convert who loses his kids in a custody battle. The woman who gets written out of her family’s will. The guy who has to move three times because neighbours keep figuring out he is a Christian.
It’s living with the constant mathematics of survival. Can I attend this gathering? Is this person safe to talk to? What happens if someone sees me with this book? Every day becomes a risk assessment.
Some make it to Europe, join the growing diaspora of people who fled for their faith. Others stay and build these incredible underground networks, careful, paranoid, necessary. They help each other, share resources, maintain hope. It is beautiful but at the same time tragic.
The ones who choose to stay, create elaborate lies to explain why they were not at Friday prayers, why they do not fast during Ramadan, why they appear different from others. They become actors in their own lives, playing roles just to stay alive.
What Comes Next
The trends are not good. More church closures, more arrests, more families torn apart. International attention comes in waves, a viral video here, a particularly brutal case there but it never lasts. These governments have perfected how they can do pretty much whatever they want as long as they don’t do it all at once.
What of the converts and minorities? They keep adapting, getting better at hiding, creating more sophisticated networks. But adaptation has limits. Every closed church, every arrest, every family that gets split up brings them closer to a choice nobody should have to make.
Stay and live a lie, or leave everything behind.
Will there ever be a day when they would be free to practise their faith without fear? The answer depends on what the rest of us to about their plights.
The video from Mauritania is still out there somewhere, a few minutes of ordinary people doing something that got them arrested. It’s a reminder that in too much of the world, faith isn’t free. And for too many people, it never will be.
