ICC Note:
Although Sunday’s suicide bombing of All Saints Church in Pakistan was the deadliest single attack against Christians in Pakistan’s history, this is not the first time Christians there have suffered persecution. For decades, Christians have been discriminated against by Pakistan’s Muslim majority population. Christians in Pakistan really started to endure intense levels of persecution with the rise of Islamic extremism. Now Christians are forced to live in a state of constant fear. Please pray for these persecuted brothers and sisters.   
9/26/2013 Pakistan (PBS) – Pakistan’s churches, like their congregants, are not numerous but they’ve been drawn into the U.S.-led war on militants in this region, becoming both frontier and collateral damage. When news breaks — whether a drone strike here or an obscure pastor in Florida attempting to burn Qurans, Christians, fewer than 2 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million, brace themselves for consequences on their doorstep.
“We always live in a state of tension,” Joseph Coutts, the Roman Catholic bishop of Pakistan’s commercial capital, Karachi, said in a story to be broadcast on Monday’s PBS NewsHour. “What’s going to happen next and where is it going to happen?”
Sunday’s suicide bombing that killed 78 at the All Saints Church in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, was the latest in a string of attacks in recent months and years. In March, two churches and about 100 Christian homes were ransacked in the eastern city of Lahore.
As adherents to a faith long linked to the West, and America in particular, Christians and churches make convenient proxies and targets for retaliation, he said, compounding an already second-class citizenship many have endured for decades.
Pakistan was created in 1947 by the departing British colonial rulers to be a haven for the Muslims of India. Unlike Hindus who left after the Indian sub-continent’s bloody partition, Christians remained in the regions that became Pakistan. Most were natives or had migrated here generations earlier and they were reassured by Pakistan’s revered founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, that they’d be treated as equal citizens.
However, his successors — notably Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the military dictator Zia ul Haq in the seventies — ushered in changes that reflect a strict conservative brand of Islam. Today, Christians say the discrimination they face is not just social and economic but also constitutional. Non-Muslims cannot serve as president, prime minister or federal judges, for example. It is illegal for a Muslim to convert to any other faith.
Discrimination has long been a way of life for Christians in Pakistan according to human rights activists. Even with affirmative action-like programs to provide public sector jobs to religious minorities, few are able to rise in the ranks.
Most frightening to Christians and other minorities — including minority sects within Islam — is a blasphemy law, reworked under ul Haq, which prescribes the death penalty for insulting Islam’s Prophet. The law is invoked easily — often to settle property or business disputes — by, say, accusing someone of burning pages of the Quran. Vigilante justice swiftly swings into action, long before any legal process can sort out if there’s truth to the allegation.
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