Persecution

Persecution is the mistreatment (bad treatment) of an individual or group by another group. People can be persecuted for any reasons. Persecutions tend to be carried out on the basis of religious, ethnicity, politics, sexuality, gender or gender identity.

A Christian Dirce, by Henryk Siemiradzki. A Christian woman is martyred under Nero in this re-enactment of the myth of Dirce.

Introduction

Religious persecution is the persecution of people who belong to a religion, or who are not part of a religion followed by others. The most important organization to persecute people was the Christian Church.

Examples

For about three hundred years there was persecution of Christianity in the Roman Empire. During the next three hundred years, the Christian Church started to have a great effect by becoming the most important persecuting organization in human history. Persecution by Christians began in the 4th century AD, and the Christian Church was the most important persecuting organization for 1,500 years.

The Christian Church was very active in the persecution of Christians – especially Christians the Church said were heretics – and in the persecution of Jews. In classical antiquity, the Roman Republic started to control the religion of Bacchus in 186 BC. Although the Roman Senate did not make the religion illegal, it stopped some parts of the cult. The Roman Empire's persecution of Christians, and then its persecution of non-Christians were both motivated by the religions of the persecutors, either paganism or Christianity.

Related pages

• Bias
• Racism
• Oppression
• Antisemitism
• Antiziganism
• Discrimination
• The Holocaust
• Bosnian Genocide
• Cambodian Genocide