Christianity is the third-largest religion in Pakistan, with the 2023 Census recording over three million Christians, or 1.37% of the total population in Pakistan. A majority of 90-95% Pakistani Christians are Dalits from the Chuhra caste who converted from Hinduism or from Mazhabi Sikh community. The province of Punjab has the largest population of Christians in the country. The majority of Pakistan's Christians are members of the Catholic Church or the Church of Pakistan, with the remainder belonging to other Protestant groups.
Around 75 percent of Pakistan's Christians are rural Punjabi Christians, while some speak Sindhi and Gujarati, with the remainder being the upper and middle class Goan Christians and Anglo-Indians.
Punjabi Christians Punjabi Christians are mainly Dalit Christians, descendants of lower-caste Hindus who converted during the colonial era in India. Their socio-economic conditions facilitate religious discrimination. Blasphemy allegations have led to several cases of mob violence against Christian households and churches.
History
Saint Thomas Christian crosses (Mar Thoma Sleeva) have been found all over the subcontinent, including one near the city of Taxila in what is now Pakistan.
In 1745, the Bettiah Christians, the northern Indian subcontinent's oldest surviving Christian community, were established by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin under the patronage of King Dhurup Singh; the Hindustan Prefecture was raised in 1769 at Patna and later shifted to Agra, which was elevated to the status of a Vicariate in 1820. The Capuchins, through their Agra Diocese and Allahabad Diocese, expanded their ministry and established in the 1800s Catholic churches in colonial India's northern provinces including Rajasthan, UP, CP, Bihar and Punjab, the latter of which now includes Pakistan.
In 1877, on Saint Thomas' Day at Westminster Abbey, London, Rev. Thomas Valpy French was appointed the first Anglican Bishop of Lahore, a large diocese of the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon, which included all of the Punjab, then under British rule in colonial India, and remained so until 1887; during this period he also opened the Divinity College, Lahore in 1870.An Heroic Bishop Chapter VI. His Fourth Pioneer Work: The Lahore Bishopric.Beginnings in India By Eugene Stock, D.C.L., London: Central Board of Missions and SPCK, 1917. Rev. Thomas Patrick Hughes served as a Church Missionary Society missionary at Peshawar (1864–84), and became an oriental scholar, and compiled a 'Dictionary of Islam' (1885).
Independence movement The Christians of colonial India were active in the Indian National Congress and the wider Indian independence movement, being collectively represented by the All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC), which advocated for swaraj and opposition to India's partition. The meeting of the AICIC in Lahore in December 1922, which had a large attendance of Punjabis, resolved that clergymen of the Church in India should be drawn from the ranks of Indians, rather than foreigners. The AICIC also stated that Indian Christians would not tolerate any discrimination based on race or skin colour.
Following the death of K. T. Paul of Salem, the principal of Forman Christian College in Lahore S. K. Datta became the president of the AICIC, representing the Indian Christian community at the Second Round Table Conference, where he agreed with Mahatma Gandhi's views on minorities and Depressed Classes. On 30 October 1945, the AICIC formed a joint committee with the Catholic Union of India that passed a resolution stating: "In the future constitution of India, the profession, practice and propagation of religion should be guaranteed and that a change of religion should not involve any civil or political disability."
This joint committee enabled the Christians in colonial India to stand united, and in front of the British Parliamentary Delegation "the committee members unanimously supported the move for independence and expressed complete confidence in the future of the community in India." The office for this joint committee was opened in Delhi, Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University M. Rahnasamy served as president and B.L. Rallia Ram of Lahore served as General Secretary. Six members of the joint committee were elected to the Minorities Committee of the Constituent Assembly. On 16-17 April 1947, a AICIC and Catholic Union of India committee prepared a 13-point memorandum that was forwarded to the Constituent Assembly of India, calling for religious freedom for both organisations and individuals.
Post Pakistan Independence When Pakistan was created on 14 August 1947, the organization and activities of the Christian community changed drastically; the Catholic Union of India granted independence to its branches in Sindh and Balochistan in its Second Annual General Meeting in Bangalore in October 1947. Some Christians in Punjab and Sindh had been quite active after 1945 in their support for Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League. A few Indian Christians like Pothan Joseph had rendered valuable services as journalists and supporters of the All India Muslim League.
Jinnah's repeated promise that all citizens of Pakistan have complete equality of citizenship was disregarded by his successors. Pakistan became an Islamic Republic in 1956, making Islam the source of legislation and cornerstone of the national identity, while guaranteeing freedom of religion and equal citizenship to all citizens. In the mass population exchanges that occurred between Pakistan and India upon independence due to conflict between Muslims and followers of Indian religions, most Hindus and nearly all Sikhs fled the country. Pakistani Punjab is now over 2% Christian, with very few Hindus and Sikhs left.
Christians have made contributions to Pakistan society. Pakistan's first non-Muslim Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court was Justice A. R. Cornelius. Pakistani Christians also distinguished themselves as great fighter pilots in the Pakistan Air Force. Notable other Christians are Cecil Chaudhry, Peter O'Reilly and Mervyn L Middlecoat. Christians have also contributed as educators, doctors, lawyers and businessmen. One of Pakistan's well-known cricketers, Yousuf Youhana, was born Christian but later converted to Islam, taking the Islamic name Mohammad Yousuf. In Britain, the Bishop Emeritus of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, is a Pakistani Christian.
In 2016, it was reported that Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) had banned all of the Christian television stations. PEMRA doesn't allow broadcasting rights for religious content, allowing airing of Christian messages only on Easter and Christmas.
Since 1996, the small community of Eastern Orthodox Christians in Pakistan was placed under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the newly formed Orthodox Metropolitanate of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia that was set up by the decision of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.Official page of the Eastern Orthodox Metropolitanate of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia In 2008, the Diocese was divided, and Pakistan came under the jurisdiction of newly formed Eastern Orthodox Metropolitanate of Singapore and South Asia.Eastern Orthodox Metropolitanate of Singapore and South Asia
Since 2020, a community of The Old Catholic Church is also serving the Christians in Pakistan. On November 20, 2020, first Pakistani Bishop of The Old Catholic Church, was consecrated and elevated to the Archbishop of the first Archdiocese of The Old Catholic Church in Pakistan.
Deterioration of relations
According to journalist Pamela Constable, in the 1980s and 1990s tensions between Christians and Muslims in Pakistan began to "fester". Constable credits the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the rise of military dictator General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and the influence of stricter religious teachings from the Gulf states as catalysts for the change. After the 9/11 attacks on the US, things grew worse, with many Pakistani Muslims seeing the American response to the attacks "as a foreign plot to defame their faith."
Pakistan's Christian community developed a "growing sense of concern", particularly over the strict blasphemy laws, that prohibit any insults against Muhammad and make the crime punishable by death. In the 1990s, some Christians were arrested on charges of blasphemy, and for protesting that appeared to insult Islam. John Joseph, the Catholic Bishop of Faisalabad, committed suicide to protest the execution of a Christian man on blasphemy charges.Jones, Owen Bennett (2003). Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. p. 19. .
In 2009, a series of attacks killed eight Christians in Gojra, four women, three men and a child. In 2013, a suicide bombing at a church in Peshawar left more than 100 people dead, and a series of attacks at churches in Lahore in 2015 left 14 dead. On 27 March 2016, over seventy people, mostly Muslims, were killed when a suicide bomber targeting Christians celebrating Easter attacked a playground in Lahore.
On 16 August 2023, rumours began to spread in the Punjabi city of Jaranwala, Faisalabad, that a Christian had desecrated pages of the Quran. The resulting riot led to the destruction of 26 churches in the Christian quarter of the city, and thousands of Christians fled, with some spending the next few nights in open fields, afraid of returning to their homes. Local Christians complained of inaction by security forces in Jaranwala, but eventually reinforcements were called in and around 100 Muslims were arrested for participating in the violence. No Christians were killed in the riots, as most managed to flee due to warnings from Muslim neighbours.
On the Sunday after the riots, Mass was celebrated in the street outside the burned-out St. Paul's Catholic Church. The Pakistani Catholic Bishops' Conference denounced the act and asked that the Government bring the culprits to justice, regretting that "the Christian community has been terrorized and frightened by a small group of miscreants to make them believe that Christians are in fact second-class citizens of Pakistan and will remain so". Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need helped address the emergency needs of those whose livelihoods was destroyed, providing a support package for 464 families, including replacement rickshaws and motorcycles for drivers who had lost their vehicles.
Demographics
Christianity in Pakistan is growing fast, going from 1.27% in 2017 to 1.37% in 2023, making it one of the religions in Pakistan growing faster than Islam, alongside Hinduism. Today, most Pakistani Christians live in Northern Punjab.
Apart from Catholics, Christians of other denominations re-organized themselves, in India, into the Churches of North and South India respectively, and as the Church of Pakistan in 1970. Politically, groups like the Pakistan Christian Congress have arisen. The New Apostolic Church also has followers in Pakistan.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) reports over 4,000 members in 13 congregations throughout Pakistan. LDS members are most prevalent in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.
According to a Minority Rights Group International report published in 2002, the average literacy rate among Christians in Pakistan was 34 percent compared to the national average of 46.56 percent.
1901 census
According to the 1901 census, the Christian population in Pakistan comprised roughly 59,387 persons or 0.3 percent of the total population. With the exception of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, all administrative divisions in the region that composes contemporary Pakistan collected religious data, with a combined population of 17,633,258, for an overall response rate of 99.6 percent out of the total population of 17,708,014, as detailed in the table below.