What hardships would you endure in order to practice your religious beliefs? Would you risk the possibility of arrest or even going to prison to publicly profess your faith?

These are questions very remote in the lives of Americans. Religious liberty is among our “first freedoms” in the United States guaranteed by the Constitution. We are free to publicly profess any religious belief without fear of persecution by the government.

But this is not the case for millions of people in the world — a reality that should awaken us, at the very least, not to take our religious liberty for granted.

China is one country where Christians, as well as members of other faiths, have suffered — and continue to face restrictions and repression — for their beliefs. Two recent articles in The Record about the Catholic Church in China have related the extent of this religious repression.

Sister Peter, a 90-year-old member of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, spent time in jail, was beaten and was forced to do manual labor in the years following the communist take over of China in 1949. Following that takeover, churches were closed, and Sister Peter suffered again during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. “God gave me the grace” to make it through the tough times, she said.

Bishop Pius Jin Peixian, 83, spent 10 years in prison and was later sent to a work farm. And Cecilia Tao Beiling was just 19 in 1966 when she was sent to a work farm for “re-education” for more than eight years because she was a Catholic. Today, she works for the Shanghai Diocese research center.

Chinese Catholics also face the decision to join the government-approved Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which rejects Vatican ties, or to secretly maintain their allegiance to the pope and the universal church in China’s “underground” church.

Despite persecutions and pressures, the number of Catholics in China is growing, according to the Vatican. A recent Vatican statement recognized “the shining witness offered by bishops, priests and the faithful who, without giving in to compromise, maintained their fidelity to the see of Peter, sometimes at the price of great suffering.”

But China is not the only place where religious freedom is restricted. The annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was released last week, designated 11 nations as “countries of particular concern” for their blatant denial of religious liberty. Besides China, the countries listed were Burma, North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Regarding China, the commission said abuses include “imprisonment, torture and other forms of ill treatment. Prominent religious leaders and others continue to be confined, imprisoned, tortured, ‘disappeared’ and subjected to other forms of ill treatment.”

In Saudi Arabia, the commission said, the government “persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government’s own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam and interfering with private religious practice.”

Besides “countries of particular concern,” the commission also has a “watch list” of countries with less severe restrictions on religious freedom. The eight countries on this list include Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the commission mentioned two major concerns: the Iraqi government has “engaged in human rights violations through its state security forces,” and the government “tolerates religiously-based attacks and other religious freedom abuses carried out by armed Shia factions.”

Also, the commission noted the “grave conditions” for non-Muslim groups, such as Christians, who “suffer pervasive and severe violence and discrimination at the hands of the government and non-government actors.” Thousands of Christians, including Caldean Catholics, have fled Iraq.

Speaking to a congressional subcommittee last year, Bishop Thomas G. Wenski, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Policy, said religious freedom “lies at the heart of human rights.” And he called on the U.S. government to make religious liberty central to its foreign policy in “both policy and practice.”

That’s not asking too much of a country where religious freedom is considered to be among peoples’ “first freedoms.”