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New research indicates that religious conversion is at historical levels in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). For more than a decade a large conversion trend in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been percolating. The Arab Spring, and the Syrian and Iraqi crises, ISIS, genocide, and the persecution of minorities precipitated humanitarian disasters and the mixing of Christians and Muslim communities in new ways with record levels of migration. The COVID-19 pandemic, resource scarcity, wars, and natural and man-made disasters also added to the social upheaval and instability.

While this chaos led to a mass exodus of traditional Christians and other minorities like the Yazidi from their homes, with serious population declines, conversion growth to Christianity seems to have increased. Colleague Grant Porter and I sought to gauge the quantitative scale of what many churches and religious non-profits have been saying. Our study, just published open-access in the International Journal of Frontier Mission, is the first to attempt a broad quantitative analysis of the scope of the phenomenon. We remark: “Given that the historical Christian population has reportedly declined to less than 150,000 in Iraq and 300,000 in Syria, the genesis of some 270,000 new Christians in the MENA region is extraordinary.”

Until now, there has not been much research on the size and scale of the phenomenon. It used to be quite rare that anyone would convert to Christianity from a Muslim, Druze, or Yazidi background, but in the last 10 years or so anecdotal stories and estimates indicated conversion was becoming more commonplace. We utilized a survey of churches, denominations, and non-profits in the MENA region and compared it with another larger dataset that included media organizations with religious programming on satellite TV and social platforms in the region. If these numbers are somewhat accurate, conversion to Christianity of this scale is at a historic level not seen in the Levant since the 1st century.

Our study, being from a Christian missiological perspective (the inter-disciplinary academic study of the mission of the Christian church) also sought to understand why and how people were converting and what the needs of new converts are. In what follows here however I’ll focus on 6 implications for religious freedom in the MENA region.  Religious conversion in the MENA region seems to have reached a scale that makes freedom of religion or belief—especially the right to change one’s religion—an unavoidable policy and governance issue.

First, some of the major findings of the research:

• The religious conversion phenomenon started around 2013-14 and is of historic proportions, with over 270,000 new converts in the last 10 years.
• This population (albeit spread across the MENA region) is larger than the total historical Christian population left in Iraq and about the same size as the demographic in Syria.
• Reversion (back to Islam) seems to be quite low at ~26% compared to what was previously studied in other time periods (former studies indicate upwards of 90% reversion) indicating community assimilation and non-coercive conversion.

What does this mean for religious freedom? I see 6 things that scholars, policymakers, and practitioners should pay attention to in the MENA region:

1. Conversion Is No Longer Marginal — It Is a Structural Reality

The scale and persistence of conversion from Islam to Christianity indicated by this research suggests that religious conversion in the MENA region can no longer be treated as rare, anecdotal, or exceptional. With hundreds of thousands of converts spread across multiple countries and low reversion rates, conversion is emerging as a durable social phenomenon. This challenges legal and political systems that continue to treat conversion as an aberration or a threat to public order rather than as a legitimate exercise of freedom of conscience. States that criminalize or penalize conversion (or permit social oppression of converts) are increasingly out of step with lived religious realities, raising the likelihood of systematic rights violations rather than isolated incidents.

2. Legal Prohibitions on Conversion Could Become Mass Rights Violations

Most MENA states formally or informally restrict conversion from Islam through apostasy laws, family law courts, civil status exclusions, or more broadly, through a permissive stance towards familial/tribal/social enforcement. When conversion involved only a small number of individuals, these restrictions were often exceptional. At the scale identified in this research, however, such frameworks may become more widespread and ongoing violations of internationally protected rights. What were once framed as culturally specific or narrowly applied limitations increasingly may amount to large-scale denial of freedom of religion or belief, especially the right to change one’s religion.

3. Security-Based Justifications for Restricting Conversion Are Weakening

States often justify restrictions on conversion by invoking social stability, anti-extremism, or national security concerns. Yet the research indicates low reversion rates and patterns consistent with non-coercive, community-based assimilation rather than volatility or violence. In addition, research indicates a convincing number of extremists have deradicalized and renounced violence through religious conversion. This undermines claims that conversion itself generates instability. Studies consistently show that religious repression in the name of “security” tends to actually undermine security. Treating peaceful religious conversion as a security threat risks misdirecting state resources, inflaming grievance, and reinforcing the very instability governments seek to avoid.

4. Protection Gaps for Converts Are Likely to Widen

As conversion becomes more visible, converts face heightened risks: loss of legal identity, family separation, violence, economic exclusion, and lack of access to state services. Many converts are doubly exposed as refugees with fragile legal status and as religious minorities. Existing religious freedom protections in the region are often designed around historic minority communities, not converts from the religious majority. Religious freedom frameworks that protect “recognized minorities” but not converts are increasingly inadequate and may exacerbate vulnerability.

5. Conversion Challenges Communal and State-Centric Models of Religion and Belief

Many MENA governance systems implicitly treat religion as a fixed communal identity tied to birth, ethnicity, or national belonging. Large-scale conversion disrupts these assumptions and demonstrates limits to coercion by asserting individual conscience over communal inheritance. This creates tension not only with religious authorities but with state systems of civil registration, family law, and citizenship. States face growing pressure to reconcile individual religious freedom with systems built on collective religious identity without defaulting to repression.

The persistence of conversion despite intense social, legal, and sometimes violent pressure illustrates a broader truth: belief cannot be fully controlled through coercion, laws, or communal norms. Attempts to do so often push religious life underground, distort data, and increase insecurity. Long-term stability is more likely to be achieved by creating space for religious diversity.

6. Risk of Backlash and Instrumentalization

When conversion becomes visible at scale, it may provoke backlash from religious authorities, political actors, or nationalist movements. There is also a risk that conversion will be politicized, either by states framing it as foreign interference or by non-state actors exploiting it for ideological ends. Failure to protect the rights of converts and deal proactively with escalating communal tensions increases the risk of both social violence and state repression.