Foreign workers are gathering their families, packing their bags and leaving Brunei, where a ban on celebrating Christmas has been enforced since 2014 by an authoritarian regime happy to impose stiff penalties for any breaches of the law.

Fearing Muslims would be led astray and convert to Christianity, the sultan of Brunei imposed full Sharia law in April, a culmination of an all-imposing Islamic legal system that was introduced step by step over the last six years.

In a move that bears striking similarities to Biblical stories from the Roman occupation of the Holy Land, Christians are only allowed to celebrate Christmas within the privacy of their own homes and only after they have notified authorities.

Any breaches can result in jail terms of up to five years and fines of up to US$20,000, or both, following the growing influence of Wahhabism, a harsh brand of Islam followed by the likes of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that has its roots in Saudi Arabia.

“The people in Muslim-dominated Brunei are quite tolerant and very easy to get along with, but the government is fearful of outside religions,” said one Western expatriate who fears Brunei’s harsh defamation laws and declined to give his name.

Increasingly, foreign Christians working in Brunei spend Christmas time outside the Islamic country and return only in the new year, the expatriate said.

“Leaders here don’t have the oil money they once did and are trying to impress and win foreign aid dollars from Saudi Arabia. The only way to enjoy the festive season is to get out for a vacation.”

The Muslim chief minister of Sabah in Malaysia has ramped up the celebratory mood among Christians in the state by adding Dec. 24 or Christmas Eve as a new public holiday.

The neighbouring state of Sarawak is also thinking of declaring Christmas Eve a holiday, local reports said.

“The additional public holiday will enable those celebrating Christmas to return home earlier,” Sabha Cheif Minister MohdShafieApdal said when launching the five-day Kota Kinabalu Christmas Carnival in the state capital on Dec. 11.

The state is the first in Malaysia to add the Christian celebration to the list of two-day public holidays accorded to significant festivals in the country after Eid al-Fitr and Chinese New Year.

For many Christians in Malaysia, Christmas celebrations can be a minefield. Decades of Islamization and the steady rise of Islamic conservatism in the South-East Asian nation has led to anti-Christian rhetoric forcing restraint when observing such religious events.

The sudden deterioration of the security situation in Sri Lanka has come as a shock to its people. Five days after a series of suicide bombings on Easter Sunday killed more than 250 people, injured over 500, wrecked three Christian churches and caused substantial damage to three five-star hotels, Sri Lanka continues to be in a state of siege. A night-time curfew has been declared and there is vastly reduced traffic on the usually packed Colombo roads.

Rumours of further attacks are spread wildly and widely, forcing the government to ask people only to listen to official police warnings. The little-known National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), which has been identified as the source of the suicide bombers, has about 150 members. It is feared that many of them might be potential bombers. There is a high-priority security search for them. Until they are all found, the danger of another suicide bombing will remain.

Christian groups in Pakistan are trying to stop the government closing their bank accounts as part of a process it says is in-tended to throttle foreign funding to terrorist organizations.

The government has revoked the licenses of thousands of non-governmental agencies and thus prevented them receiving foreign funding, including from Christian non-governmental agencies.

“The future of our workers is at stake. We are still being accused of working on a Western agenda and labelled as anti-national groups,” said Cecil Chaudhry, who heads the Catholic Church’s National Commission for Justice and Peace.

He was speaking at a Dec. 16 meeting of right civil groups at the Lahore Press Club organized by the Joint Action Committee for People’s Rights (JAC), a form of human rights groups and journalists union. Speakers expressed concern over the military’s increasing involvement in governance, attacks on liberal news agencies and closure of non-governmental agencies.

Chaudhary told the meeting that commercial bank accounts in three of the country’s seven dioceses had been closed.

The Church’s human rights organization employs 40 Christian activists and they were now struggling to pay staff salaries, he added.

Mary Nguyen closes the door carefully and says evening prayers with her two children in her room whenever her husband comes home late from work.

And Nguyen, who lives in the house of her Buddhist parents-in-law, quietly takes them to weekend Masses once or twice a month at a church near her own parents’ home in Vietnam’s southern Ho Chi Minh City.

“I have to pretend to her parents-in-law that I take the children to visit my parents so that we can go to church,” the mother said in a low, strained voice.

Her husband and parents-in-law do not want them to embrace Catholicism before they turn 18, when they say the children can decide for themselves what religion to follow. They have threatened to turn her out of their home if she takes the children to church.

Nguyen said they do not know their grandchildren are Catholics as she had them — a girl and a boy — baptized while she was living for months at her parents’ home after she gave birth to them.

She tries to help instill faith in Catholicism while their grandmother regularly takes them to Buddhist temples.

Nguyen, who works for a local printing company, said her husband, a Communist Party member, converted to Catholicism when he married her. However, he subsequently jettisoned the Catholic faith and often checks on whether the children have secretly gone to church.

“I forgive him and try to be a good Catholic so that I can bear witness to the Good News,” said Nguyen, who regularly joins Catholic friends and family members in attending church services and feasts.