Iran’s secret revolution: the crown prince who says Christianity is exploding underground
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, has been working for most of his life to replace the oppressive Islamist regime of Iran. Pahlavi walked onto the stage at Liberty University this week and told thousands of young American Christians something the Islamic Republic desperately does not want the world to know: the faith it has spent 46 years trying to eradicate is not dying in Iran. It is multiplying. The nation that once sheltered the Jewish people under Cyrus and helped the Jews return from exile and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem is today sheltering the Christian faith in its own basements and living rooms, at mortal risk, and its crown prince came to Lynchburg, Virginia, to bear witness.
Pahlavi is the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, whose monarchy was toppled by the Islamist revolution of 1979. He has lived in exile ever since, training as the youngest fighter pilot in Iranian history at Reese Air Force Base in Texas before studying political science at the University of Southern California. For more than four decades, he has been the most prominent voice of Iran’s opposition, uniting his people from exile. This week, Liberty University President Dondi Costin introduced him as “a freedom fighter.”
Pahlavi’s cause has become a light in the darkness of despair that has swallowed his country. Between January 8 and 9 alone, more than 30,000 protesters were killed by the regime. Women were beaten to death in the streets. Students were dragged from classrooms and executed. Families were forced to pay for the bullets that killed their own children. The youngest victim whose name he read aloud was three years old.
For 33 days, 90 million Iranians lived without internet, deliberately blinded by a government trying to strangle a revolution before the world could see it.
“We speak often in this world about injustice. You are charged by your professors and your pastors to fight against it. But what is happening in Iran demands a stronger word; evil,” he told the students. Because what else do you call a system that murders its own children? What else do you call a regime that wages war both on enemies abroad and on its own people? In recent years, tens of thousands of Iranians have been killed in wave after wave of repression.”
Pahlavi went on to describe some of the horrors in detail, charging the students to support the fight against the Islamist regime. He framed the conflict as a Christian imperative.
“For those of you grounded in faith, there is another truth,” he said. “In Iran today, Christianity is not fading. It is rising quietly, powerfully underground. In homes, in whispers, in hidden gatherings, Iranians are finding faith at great cost. Pastors are imprisoned. Bibles are confiscated. Believers are hunted. Converts are threatened with execution. Families are torn apart. But still they gather.
“Still, they pray. Still, they believe,” Pahlavi said. “Because faith that survives persecution is unbreakable. Because the light shines brightest in the darkest places.”
Christianity is indeed growing in Iran. Multiple ministry organizations tracking Iran report it has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations on earth, with millions of secret believers meeting in homes across the country. The regime knows it, and the arrests and executions of Iranian Christians have accelerated in recent years precisely because the authorities are terrified of what they cannot stop.
“You study stories of persecution in history,” Pahlavi told the students. “Christians have often faced this. In Iran, they are happening every day. There was a time when Iran stood for something very different. Over 2500 years ago, Cyrus the Great, a Persian king, freed the Jewish people from captivity. He restored their rights. He respected their faith. He is remembered in scripture not as a tyrant but as a liberator. This is Iran’s true legacy. A nation of tolerance, a nation of dignity, a nation that once stood on the side of freedom.”
