Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke on Friday to the American Association of Christian Counselors meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.The
full text of his remarks titled "Being a Christian Leader" are featured on the State Department's website, along with a video of his remarks. Pompeo said in part:
... I’m especially telling the truth about the dire condition of religious freedom around the world. America has a proud history of religious freedom, and we want jealously to guard it here. But around the world, more than 80% of mankind lives in areas where religious freedom is suppressed or denied in its entirety.
The Chinese Communist Party ... is detaining and abusing more than one million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in the Xinjiang. ...
So Christian pastors today are being unlawfully arrested, beaten, detained inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. We need to speak about this.
Christian areas in northern Iraq that I’ve had the privilege to visit have been ravaged by ISIS, part of a greater trend of Christian persecution all across the Middle East.
And so the truth – for the past two years we’ve spoken the truth. We’ve hosted ministerials.... We’ve told the world about these shortfalls and the success of nations when individuals are given their basic human dignity to practice their conscience, their faith, or to choose no faith if they so choose all around the world.
