Sometimes government indifference is just as dangerous as government overreach.
Apparently, even just conducting a Christian worship service can “shake the faith of a Muslim,” which is a criminal offense in Algeria. And so the guardians of this most fragile of all faiths have to conduct raids of this kind: Morning Star News reported Monday that “special force police in Algeria raided a worship service at a residential building on Sept. 4, arresting all 12 Christians present on suspicion of holding an unauthorized, non-Muslim religious service.”
The report added that “Christians fear the detainees could be charged under Ordinance 06-03 governing non-Muslim worship in Algeria, which heavily criminalizes collective worship outside the officially approved state framework or any action deemed to ‘shake the faith of a Muslim.’ The restrictive law exposes them to heavy fines and substantial prison sentences.”
The Algerian government adopted Ordinance 06-03 back in 2006. It stipulates that any building meant to be a house of worship had to be registered with the state, and that Algerian authorities had to approve any proposed renovation of an existing house of worship. The U.S. State Department noted that the ordinance also stated that “worship may only take place in structures exclusively intended and approved for that purpose.” The body that was designated to give that approval was the National Commission for the Exercise of Religious Worship, which the State Department noted at the time the law was adopted was “yet to be created.”
This allowed the Algerian government to have sweeping control over Christian worship: “This gives the Government the power to regulate the locations of all non-Muslim worship and monitor participation. Effectively, the Government can now shut down informal Christian religious services that take place in private homes or in secluded outdoor settings.”
Twenty years later, Open Doors stated that “in practice, this legal framework has gone beyond regulation to become a tool of persecution, leading to the closure or sealing of nearly all Christian places of worship.”
A church leader lamented: “This law is a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.” This was because the National Commission for the Exercise of Religious Worship, not yet created when Ordinance 06-03 was adopted in 2006, did not seem to exist in any functional way even in 2026.
Open Doors pointed out that while this commission alone could approve applications for permission to modify a house of worship, “not a single application for registration submitted by churches has been approved.” In addition, Protestant Church of Algeria (EPA) officials stated “This Commission has never convened to approve any application for the registration of an EPA church.”
Did the National Commission for the Exercise of Religious Worship even exist? Or was it simply a bureaucratic device designed to ensure that there could be no increase in the number of churches in Algeria? Christian Post reported in October 2019 that “since 2017, waves of church closures have been carried out by authorities in the Muslim-majority country on the basis of a 2006 law that requires all non-Islamic places of worship to be authorized by a national government agency. Critics say that that agency, the National Commission for Non-Muslim Worship, does not actually meet, and therefore, applications to build new churches are not considered.”
Algeria does not fully implement Sharia, but its constitution does designate Islam as the state religion, and Sharia forbids subject Christians from building new churches or renovating old ones, so that the Christian community is in a perpetual state of decay and decline.
A manual of Islamic law states: “The subject peoples … are forbidden to build new churches.” (Reliance of the Traveller o11.5) Some Islamic authorities teach that Islamic law also forbids Christians to repair old ones. IslamWeb.net explains why Muslims should never help build churches, and then quotes the fourteenth-century Egyptian Islamic jurist Taqi al-Din al-Subki explaining why Christians may not do so, either: “It is also forbidden for non-Muslims to build or repair a church because no true religion had ever approved building the places of Kufr (disbelief). All the Devine [sic] laws are agreed that Kufr was never allowed. Since Kufr was not allowed, it means that building the places of Kufr was also forbidden. In fact, at present, churches are not built but only for committing Kufr. Therefore, building them or repairing them is forbidden.”
Clearly, Imam al-Subki’s view has prevailed in Algeria. And Ordinance 06-03 further limited the growth of Christianity in Algeria by stating: “Anyone who incites, coerces, or uses means of seduction aimed at converting a Muslim to another religion, or who distributes documents intended to shake the faith of a Muslim, shall be punished with imprisonment from two to five years and a fine.”
And so, twelve Christians were just arrested in Algeria, and they will not be the last victims of a nonexistent government office.
Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer
