Most Sudanese Christians are Roman Catholic or Protestant. There is a small number of Greek Orthodox Christians there. Click here for information about their community.

“Christians Continue to Suffer Amid Ongoing Civil War in Sudan,” International Christian Concern, September 3, 2024:

9/3/2024 Sudan (International Christian Concern) — The ongoing war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed thousands and displaced many million more. Estimates suggest that about 8.2 million civilians have been displaced since fighting between the groups broke out in April 2023, including many religious minorities who have long struggled to survive in the country.

Only about 5% of Sudan’s population is Christian, while about 91% identify as Sunni Muslim. The state of religious freedom in Sudan has been bleak for decades, with Christians severely persecuted during the 30-year reign of dictator Omar al-Bashir and the Sharia-based legal system he imposed.

Transitional Government When Bashir was overthrown in 2019 in a military coup, it was unclear how the coup would change the fortunes of the county’s religious minority communities.

Initially, conditions seemed to be improving for religious freedom in Sudan. The new transitional constitution removed Bashir-era references to Sharia, and new Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok publicly promised to promote peace and tolerance. Sudan was quickly removed from the U.S. Department of State’s Countries of Particular Concern list of the world’s worst countries for religious freedom.

Hamdok managed to get Sudan removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, making it eligible again for loans from the International Monetary Fund after a flurry of reforms, both political and civil. In his campaign to have Sudan removed from this list, Hamdok even invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to set up offices around the country—an attempt to demonstrate his confidence that the reforms would create real, lasting change on the ground.

Two years after the coup, in 2021, the Department of State even removed Sudan from the less severe Special Watchlist of countries with concerning states of religious freedom. The move indicated the international community’s confidence in the country’s reforms.

However, despite a few highly publicized overtures by the transitional government to human rights, including the repeal of the country’s apostasy law, the reality for Christians on the ground never improved during this time. According to the Tahir Institute for Middle East Policy, “Muslims who converted to Christianity continued to be prosecuted and tortured, even though the “crime” of apostasy officially no longer existed in the statute books.”…