Distance is the reason most Christians give for not caring about persecution abroad, and it is the reason Kori Porter finds least convincing. Porter, who does human rights work with Christian Solidarity Worldwide, argues that the persecuted are neighbors in exactly the sense Jesus meant in Luke 10. She also argues that Black Christians in America are unusually well placed to speak for them. They know what it is to be targeted, and they have access to power that the persecuted do not. Ordinary believers can act on that through their voices, signatures, giving and sustained attention.
That claim deserves to be examined rather than applauded. It has two parts, and the second part is the one people tend to skip.
What Exactly Is Porter Claiming About the Black Church?
Porter makes the claim plainly. Speaking to an audience she describes as primarily Black church listeners, she says, “We are so qualified to be able to look into the international suffering because of our domestic suffering here as black people.” The word that matters is qualified. She is not saying Black Christians owe the world something because of their past. She is saying their past has given them a capacity that others may lack.
She speaks from inside the community she is addressing. “I love being a black woman in the United States,” she says, and she describes how quickly she responds when the issue is poverty, schools or access to education at home. She points to the public energy that followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Her request is not to redirect that energy but to extend it: “I also want us to realize that we need to have that same energy for the continent and for the diaspora.” She names Haiti and the whole of the African continent as places where that energy belongs.
Then comes the second half of the argument, the half that turns a sentiment into a strategy. “As much as we are disenfranchised here,” she says, there is also a kind of privilege. Black Americans still have something that a schoolgirl in northeast Nigeria does not: “We have access to the halls of power in the United States.” They can press their own government, and through it other governments, to act.
So the claim is not simply that suffering produces sympathy. Porter joins two things: memory, which helps a community recognize targeted suffering when it sees it, and access, which gives that community the means to do something about it. Either one alone is incomplete. Memory without access can only grieve. Access without memory tends not to notice.
Why Does She Start With a Girl Named Leah?
Porter’s campaign, Sing for Freedom, was built around the story of a Nigerian schoolgirl named Leah. As Porter tells it, Leah was 14 when an armed faction that split from Boko Haram attacked her school and took her and her classmates. Porter says about 110 girls were taken and that five died in the ordeal. Under international pressure, the Nigerian government secured the girls’ release. When Leah reached the vehicles that would take her home, the captors stopped her. In Porter’s account, they told her, “Before you leave, you have to denounce Christ.”
Porter asks listeners to slow down at this point. Leah had watched classmates die. She knew what captivity would likely mean. Porter says her classmates urged her to pretend to renounce her faith and believe privately once she got home. “And instead of denouncing him, she actually chooses Christ.” At the time Porter spoke, she reported that Leah was 18, still held, likely forced into marriage and the mother of two children. Those details are Porter’s report as an advocate, and readers should treat them as such. They are also the reason the story grips people.
Porter’s account includes rape, forced conversion and forced marriage. If reading it stirs up your own experience of abuse, you are not overreacting, and help is available.
RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
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Porter is careful not to let Leah become a single sad exception. “She’s representative of so many children in Nigeria,” she says. She points back to the April 2014 abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls that prompted the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, and says a significant number of those girls were never returned. She describes a more recent attack on a Baptist school in which children and staff were taken in the middle of the night. She cites reports estimating that more than a million Nigerian children would not go to school that year out of fear. Her analysis of the pattern is blunt: “If you crop off the head of a next generation, you’re able to really control that populace.”
This is where the cultural argument gets its teeth. Porter is betting that a community with its own long memory of children taken, schools under threat and families left with nothing but grief will recognize the shape of what is happening, even across an ocean. She said so directly about why she chose Leah: “if they can see themselves in Leah,” then they might begin to see themselves in others too.
Does Suffering Really Make a Community More Compassionate?
Not automatically, and the conversation itself admits this. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, told a story she read in the book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes about Mother Teresa bringing rice to a hungry family. The mother split the rice and left at once to share it with neighbors who were also hungry. Fields called the story convicting because it runs against the usual pull of pain. When we are suffering, she said, “We’re focused on our own.”
That is the honest counterpoint. Suffering can make people generous, and it can also make them guarded. A community that has carried injustice for generations has every human reason to say it has enough to deal with at home. Porter does not pretend otherwise. She admits that many people “have no concept” of the work she does. She describes the global turn as something “starting to naturally happen,” connected to Black Americans tracing their heritage back to the continent. That is a description of a movement still underway, not a claim that all Black Christians already think this way.
So the strongest version of her argument is not that Black suffering produces global compassion by default. It is that the experience gives a community the raw material for recognition, and the community still has to choose to use it. That choice is what Porter is pressing for.
Scripture draws the same line. Paul describes God as the one:
“Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2 Corinthians 1:4).
In Paul’s argument, the equipping does not come from the trouble itself. It comes from comfort received from God in the trouble. A church that has been sustained by God through its own suffering has something to pass on. A church that has only been hurt has a wound, which is not the same thing.
Is This Identity Politics With a Bible Verse Attached?
It would be, if the argument started with race. It does not. Porter grounds the work first in Luke 10, before she says a word about the Black church. A lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The answer is to love God:
“With all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27).
The lawyer then asks, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29), and Jesus answers with a story in which the hero is a Samaritan, the outsider the lawyer would least want to count.
Porter reads the parable as a command to move toward the other and see dignity in them. That is why her organization defends both a persecuted Christian in Nigeria and a Uyghur Muslim in China. Both bear the imago Dei, the image of God. She describes the organization’s mission as advocating “for those who are not able to have their faith of their own or no faith,” and gives the reason in a separate phrase: “We do so because the gospel compels us to.”
That order matters. The foundation is the gospel and the image of God in every person. Black history is not the foundation. It is the equipment. This fits a distinction the Jude 3 Project holds plainly: before any adjective, we are Christian. Porter’s argument works because it keeps that order. Her identity as a Black woman does not create the obligation to the persecuted. Her faith creates it. Her history helps her see it and gives her a place to stand while she acts on it.
The order also guards against a quieter mistake: caring only about suffering that resembles our own. Porter chose Leah because people could see themselves in her, but her stated goal was to widen the circle further, to people with whom her audience shares no ancestry and no religion. Recognition is where the work begins, not its boundary.
Scripture also keeps a particular concern for fellow believers inside that wider love. Paul writes, “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Porter echoes this when she speaks of people “particularly in the household of God” taking a moment to act for Leah. Concern for all and special concern for the family of faith are not in competition. Leah is both a person bearing God’s image and a sister in Christ.
Doesn’t Looking Overseas Take Energy From the Needs at Home?
This is the most practical objection, and Porter answers it directly. “It doesn’t take away from what we do,” she says. She argues that looking outward strengthens work at home. People who sacrifice for others, she contends, become more effective in their own field because they carry the influence of voices and places outside their own. She is also emphatic that the local work is not up for negotiation. She says nobody should shy away from it, and that her community should push even harder on it.
Her answer is an argument from experience, not a measured study, and it should be weighed that way. It does fit the logic of her two-part claim, though. If memory and access are what equip a community, using them abroad does not use them up. A church that learns to bring its public voice to a Nigerian school abduction is practicing the same skills it needs at a school board meeting or a city council hearing down the street.
The New Testament also does not treat the church’s suffering as divided by geography. Paul writes that in the body of Christ, “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Hebrews goes further:
“Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body” (Hebrews 13:3).
The writer is not asking for a feeling. He is asking believers to treat a prisoner’s situation as if it were their own, which means acting as though it touches them, because it does.
What Can an Ordinary Christian Actually Do?
Porter came to human rights work after years in campus ministry, and she admits her first impression of the field was that it felt boring. The people were not boring, she says. Their stories were being buried under technical language. Sing for Freedom was her attempt to make advocacy accessible. The campaign asked people to record short clips singing or lip-syncing “Hold On” by Sounds of Blackness, a Christian group she chose because it pushes for social change, while holding signs that pointed to Leah’s story. It also asked them to sign a petition to the U.S. president on school insecurity in Nigeria and to give to the organization. That campaign had an end date, but the pattern behind it still holds: learn the names, add your voice where it can be heard and fund the people who do the slow technical work.
The biblical anchor Porter found for this came at a low point. She describes lying on her floor, exhausted and afraid the campaign would fail, and opening to 2 Chronicles 20. Judah faces a vast army. King Jehoshaphat is afraid, calls the people to fast and seeks God. The answer comes through a prophet:
“Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s” (2 Chronicles 20:15).
In the narrative that follows, the people go out to the battlefield and appoint singers to praise God at the front, and God defeats the enemy. Porter put the lesson in her own words: “Don’t be afraid because the battle is not yours, but it is mine.”
Her use of the passage needs careful handling. 2 Chronicles 20 is narrative. It describes what God did for Judah at a specific moment. It does not promise that every petition will free every captive. Porter treated it as a source of courage and a pattern for her calling, which is a fair use of narrative, but she did not claim it guaranteed the outcome. She said plainly that she feared the effort might not work and that she would be heartbroken. What the passage does teach is that the people’s part was to trust and to show up, and that the result rested with God. That frees an ordinary person from thinking the outcome depends on their own strength, without excusing them from going out at all.
Her closing appeal to listeners was simple: join the work. She promised that people who did would see God’s glory more fully when he moves. She did not promise that every name on the list would come home.
Quick Answers
Why should I care about persecution so far away? Because Jesus defined a neighbor as the one you would not naturally count, and both the persecuted Christian and the persecuted person of another faith bear the image of God.
Why does Porter point to the Black church in particular? She argues that Black Americans’ own experience of targeted suffering helps them recognize it elsewhere, and that their access to American political power gives them influence the persecuted lack.
Does a history of suffering automatically produce compassion? No. Pain can turn people inward. The experience provides recognition, and the community still has to choose to act.
Should Christians advocate only for persecuted Christians? Porter’s organization advocates for people of every faith and none, while Scripture also gives special concern to the household of faith. The two fit together.
What if I speak up and nothing changes? 2 Chronicles 20 places the outcome with God and the obedience with his people. That is a call to faithfulness, not a guarantee of results.
The most useful thing in Porter’s argument is the word privilege, spoken by someone who also insists her community is disenfranchised. Both are true at once, and holding them together changes the question. The question is not whether a hurting community has room to care about anyone else. It is what that community will do with the voice it has, now that it knows how much a voice can matter to someone who has none. For a girl who was told to deny Christ to go home and refused, that voice may be among the few that reach a room where decisions get made.
