Reform Movements
Supporting Christian-led reform movements striving for human rights and democracy in countries around the world
Two hundred years ago only 6% of countries in the world were broadly democratic, the rest were dictatorships. Today 72% of the world’s nations are democratic. There have been similar dramatic improvements in human rights and reduced corruption. These amazing changes have overwhelmingly been driven by peaceful, bottom-up reform movements of ordinary people demanding change within their nations. And Christians have so often played a central role within these movements.
Working with others, Christians successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; for political and prison reform and improved worker rights in nineteenth century Britain; for the first welfare states in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. They stood with indigenous communities against colonial exploitation across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and protected Jewish communities in Nazi occupied Europe in the mid twentieth century.