Our News Has a Blind Spot, and It Is Shaped Like 388 Million People

This week a scholar did something uncomfortable. He counted.

Greg Cochran, a fellow at International Christian Concern, ran searches across the big Christian news outlets to see how often they cover the persecution of Christians, compared with everything else they cover. He is upfront that the counts are indicative, not scientific. But indicative of what, exactly? Here is a sample from one leading magazine’s archive: about 105 articles mentioning Taylor Swift, and 17 about Leah Sharibu, the Nigerian schoolgirl held captive for her faith since 2018. Around 1,454 stories touching ICE agents, and 76 on the Fulani militants responsible for much of the deadliest anti-Christian violence on earth. At another outlet, “persecution” as a category sits with 19 entries, between sports at 12 and education at 37, while politics clears 133.

Before anyone reaches for a stone, hear the part of Cochran’s essay that stopped me. He does not conclude that Christian media are failing us. He concludes that they are reflecting us. These outlets live on clicks, and the clicks are ours. “More than anything else,” he writes, “these media reflect our appetites.” The blind spot is not in the newsroom. It is in the reader. Which means it is in me.

Two witnesses make the point sharper, and neither is an evangelical with a fundraising letter. Regis Debray, the French philosopher who once fought beside Che Guevara, warned that anti-Christian persecution falls squarely into the political blind spot of the West. And Dennis Prager has told the story of his years crisscrossing America for persecuted Soviet Jews: Christian clergy showed up at every rally he addressed, faithful allies for suffering Jews, and almost none of them knew or spoke about suffering Soviet Christians. A Marxist could see us. A Jew could see us. We could not see ourselves.

Cochran reaches for a driving metaphor: persecution coverage is not the windshield of Christian media, not even the rearview mirror. It is the little convex mirror glued to the side mirror. Present. Occasionally consulted. Never the view we actually drive by.

Scripture does not allow the persecuted church to be a side mirror. When Jesus describes the last judgment, He identifies Himself with the prisoner so completely that visiting the cell counts as visiting Him: whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. Paul told the Galatians to do good to all, especially the household of faith. The writer of Hebrews assumes a congregation that remembers prisoners as if chained beside them. The early church did not treat news of suffering believers as a niche interest. It was the family news.

So here is the honest question this piece exists to ask, and it is aimed at no one who is not currently reading it: what did you and I click on this week? Because 388 million believers now live under high levels of persecution, one in seven Christians alive, and the algorithm goes where our fingers go. The outlets are not withholding the story. The five stories this site published in the last three days, a birthday party that became a prison sentence, a pastor’s nine mile road home, a prison with 106 crosses in it, were all sitting in public sources, waiting for readers. The information was never the missing piece. The appetite was.

Appetites can be trained. That is one of the oldest Christian claims there is: that attention is a discipline, that you become what you behold. Nobody acquires a taste for the Psalms or for prayer in a day, and nobody acquires a taste for the suffering church in a day. You acquire it one story at a time, one name at a time, until one morning the little side mirror has quietly become the windshield, and you cannot drive without it.

Start today. It costs nothing. The story below this one is free too.

This piece is free, and so is the challenge in it: read one story about the persecuted church every day this week, and send this one to a friend who thinks nobody covers this. Somebody covers it. The question is who reads it. If you want it on your doorstep every morning at 6:30, that is exactly what The Red Lighthouse is for. Join us, and train the appetite with us.

Sources

• International Christian Concern: A Look at How Christian Media Outlets Cover Persecution, by Greg Cochran, PhD (August 3, 2026)
• International Christian Concern: The Blind Spot of Christian Persecution (December 18, 2024)
• Dennis Prager: Why Don’t Christians Help Christians? National Review (2011)
• Open Doors 2026 World Watch List, 388 million figure