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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, June 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen on why our future will resemble small-town America. Madeleine Long speaks to the detransitioner whose case could change the legal game for gender surgery medical malpractice lawsuits. Spencer Klavan on the scientific breakthrough that deciphered a 2,000-year-old scroll. And much more.
But first: The Christians held hostage by the Iranian regime.
Inside Iran, a quiet war has been waged against the country’s Christian community for decades. Pastors have been assassinated, Farsi-language Bibles are banned from print, and many Christians are forced to practice their faith in secret. Muslims who convert are treated as national security threats.
An estimated 1.2 million Iranians have converted to Christianity anyway, making Iran the fastest-growing Christian nation in the Middle East by some counts. They worship in living rooms, apartments, and underground house churches, trying to stay out of sight of a regime that sees their faith as an act of subversion.
The regime had always refrained from going after the oldest Protestant church in Iran out of fear of what America might do in retaliation. But according to the sources I spoke to for my latest story, that fear is gone. They say that Iranian officials showed up last week at St. Peter’s Evangelical Church in Tehran, threatening church leaders and telling the families living there to leave. The Iranian government said that it is seizing the property.
“I will tell you the literal words they used,” Sasan Tavassoli, an Iranian Presbyterian pastor in the U.S. with direct contacts at St. Peter’s, told me. “We were concerned about America all these years. America came. They slapped us on the face. We slapped them on the face back. And then America withdrew. So we are no longer afraid of America.”
I spoke with a former pastor of St. Peter’s, who now lives in exile and advocates for the Iranian Christian community in the West, about why the regime sees Christianity as an existential threat and its strategy for exterminating other churches in Iran. Read my story for a sense of how high-level geopolitics is changing the lines for some of the most vulnerable Iranians.
—Maya Sulkin
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Great Americans
Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school. He grew up milking cows in ups