Religious persecution in Nicaragua

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the persecuted church in Nicaragua.

Last week, the United Nations reported on increasing persecution against churches and nonprofits in the Central American nation.

Days later, the Nicaraguan government released 135 political and religious prisoners. Thirteen of those freed are associated with an evangelical ministry based in the United States known as Mountain Gateway.

MARY RECHARD, HOST: Does this mean more religious freedom for Nicaraugans, or the calm before the storm? WORLD’s Paul Butler has the story.

PAUL BUTLER: When Britt Hancock got the news that team members in Nicaragua had been arrested and their electronic devices seized, he was shocked.

HANCOCK: At first I was like, there has to be some mistake. We had a really good, I thought, relationship with the government.

Hancock is the founder of Mountain Gateway, a Texas-based ministry with a branch in Nicaragua. Beginning in 2013, the ministry started planting churches in rural villages.

HANCOCK: We purchased a coffee farm in 2017 and sort of expanded our activities into fair labor, fair trade practices to engage in a broader footprint for working and doing community development and expanded reach from a church planting standpoint.

When hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Nicaragua only fourteen days apart in 2020, Mountain Gateway provided disaster relief. Then the ministry took on a bigger project.

HANCOCK: And so we planned and conducted in 2023, eight mass evangelism campaigns.

Those campaigns involved some 6,000 churches. About a million people attended the eight gatherings. In the beginning, Mountain Gateway had the full cooperation of the Nicaraguan government. But that didn’t last long. On December 1st, Hancock and his family left Nicaragua for a trip back to their home base in Texas.

HANCOCK: And then on December the 12th, they arrested our main coordinator. He's the guy that sort of was key, did all the logistics planning.

Within a week, authorities arrested the coordinator's wife and nine other pastors. The government also jailed two lawyers who had helped them comply with the laws of the country.

HANCOCK: And, and then kind of things went from bad to worse, they seized all of our assets, about $5 million worth of assets, 47 vehicles, four or five pieces of property.

The eleven ministry leaders and two lawyers were charged with money laundering and organized crime. The accused watched the trial proceedings from a video livestream with no audio feed from their side, meaning that they couldn’t offer any evidence or testimonies. They were sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison apiece…

HANCOCK: …and $80 million each in fines, that's over a billion dollars collectively. And that's essentially a life sentence for everybody because it’s not even in the realm of possibility, you know.

After spending 9 months in the notorious La Esperanza and La Modelo prisons, the 13 ministry leaders and attorneys were freed and sent to Guatemala. 

KRISTINA HJELKREM: And actually the female religious leader, she had just given birth two months prior to her detention, so she's been able to be back with her baby.

Kristina Hjelkrem is a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom International who represents Mountain Gateway. While there’s much to celebrate, she says the good news is bittersweet.

HJELKREM: Of course from a human perspective we are really glad and grateful to God that these people are no longer deprived of their freedom for arbitrary and unjust reasons. 

It doesn’t necessarily signal that things will improve for Nicaraguan churches and nonprofits.

STEPHEN SCHNECK: Despite the release of those 135 prisoners, there remain many, many more people imprisoned or otherwise detained by Nicaraguan authorities on the basis of their religion in the country.

Stephen Schneck is the Chair for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom or USCIRF. —

SCHNECK: USCIRF currently recommends Nicaragua as a country of particular concern to the State Department, and this is our highest category of concern there. You know, this would be at the same level that we have countries like China, North Korea, Iran and so it’s a country we have a tremendous amount of concern for.

He says that the Nicaraguan Church has faced persecution since that country’s current president first came to power in the 1980s. But the recent crackdown traces back to protests against the government in 2018. Audio from PBS.

PBS: They started in April after the government of President Daniel Ortega introduced changes to the nation’s pension system. The protests turned violent after a government crackdown, and more than 300 people - nearly all of them civilians - have since died in fighting on the street.

That’s when churches stepped in and started providing safe haven for protestors. Since then, Nicaragua’s government has seen Christianity as a threat. This past August, the Sandinista government shut down more than 1,600 churches and nonprofits…accusing them of failing to properly report their finances.

SCHNECK: What we see is an authoritarian country that really does not want to provide or allow for its citizens to have any source of appeal or authority, or, for that matter, measure of what is right and wrong, than what the authoritarian regime itself sets up.

Back in Texas, Pastor Britt Hancock and his family can’t return to Nicaragua without risking arrest. Neither can the 13 pastors and lawyers who were just set free. For those churches that remain in Nicaragua, it’s unclear what the future holds. But Hancock is confident that human governments can not stop the work God is doing in the country.

HANCOCK: There's a famous quote from the kingdom of France from years ago, and I can't remember who said what, and I think it was Louis XIV that wanted to try to stamp out Christianity. And his advisor said, “Sire, The gospel is an anvil that's worn out and broken many hammers...

Bekah McCallum wrote and reported this story. For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

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