As a child growing up, I would occasionally hear about the
ultimate in Christian travel—the Holy Land tour. And the tour would be followed up by a slide
show showing where its members had gone. The slides featured ancient stone
buildings, panoramic views of Jerusalem, and sunglass-wearing tourists standing
atop of the Mount of Olives with the golden Dome of the Rock in the background.
But I don’t remember anyone ever talking about the Christians living there.
There were pictures of churches, sure, but did anyone actually go to church
there?
This empty space in the Christian imagination opened up for
me again when recently I read about the controversial comments made by Senator
Ted Cruz at the In Defense of Christians (IDC) conference in Washington, D.C., which was
organized to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide of Christians that has
been unleashed by radical Muslim groups such as ISIS or more properly DAIISH. “If you will not stand with Israel and the
Jews, then I will not stand with you,” Cruz said. But the conference wasn’t
about Israel. It was about the ongoing slaughter of Middle Eastern Christians.
When Cruz announced that he would not stand with them because they did not
stand with Israel, he essentially consigned these people and their families and
flocks to slaughter because they did not share his politics on the most
controversial state in their region.
I was similarly struck when the Arabic letter nun (“N”) for
Nasrani (“Nazarenes”) began to take over the profile pictures of many friends
on social media. The West had learned that Iraqi Christians were being targeted
by ISIS and that this letter was being painted on their homes to mark them out
for extermination.
And yet while I wondered at people waking up to the fact that
there are Christians in Iraq (or, increasingly, were), I wondered why my fellow
Christians here don’t seem to realize that the whole Middle East is home to
Christians. At roughly 18 million
strong, Christians constitute 5 percent of the total Middle Eastern population
(though no one is sure of the real number), a little less than the population
of Florida. Ten percent of Syrians and Egyptians are Christian. Forty-one
percent of Lebanese are Christian. Americans are used to thinking of the Middle
East as Muslims surrounding an island of Jews that it rarely occurs to them
that there might be Christians in the birthplace of Christianity.
I had a good friend of Lebanese ancestry. People sometimes
asked me if that meant he was Muslim. He was not. He was an Orthodox Christian.
His father was an Orthodox Christian and his father was an Orthodox Christian.
And so on. They were actually not really sure how far back their Christianity
went, but the family originally came from Antioch (which is now in Turkey and
was a major Syrian capital in the Roman Empire). I once asked when the family
became Christian. The answer: “When Jesus rose from the dead.” There’s a good
chance that that’s correct.
When the Apostles made their missionary journeys to the
uttermost parts of the earth, history doesn’t say that they skipped the rest of
the Middle East and headed straight for Europe. No, they immediately began
founding Christian Communities right in their own neighborhood. Two major
Syrian cities—Antioch and Damascus—figure quite large in early Christian
history. They are mentioned in the New Testament and are still home to
Christians.
Granted, when many American Christians think of “the Holy
Land,” they don’t usually think beyond the borders of Israel. But Jesus went
beyond those borders (e.g., to Tyre and Sidon, both Lebanese cities, as well as
to Egypt in his youth), and the Apostles certainly did. And who can forget the
Hebrew heritage in Egypt? Or that Abraham was from what is today Iraq? The
Middle East is the very cradle of Christianity and its Jewish inheritance.
But even if we have a hard time wrapping our heads around the
presence of Christians in the Middle East, we can look for them right here in
America. The most numerous ethnic group of Middle Eastern people—those
identifying as “Arabs”— number 1.7 million. Of those, 63 percent are Christians. (Muslims
account for only 24 percent of Arab Americans.) The average Arab in America is
a Christian.
So why is the Middle Eastern Christian voice so unheard and
so unknown in America? It may be that
their local spokesmen are not very well-organized. It may be, as some say, that
they are “too Christian for the Left and too foreign for the Right.” And it may
also be because of moments like Senator Cruz gave us at the IDC conference,
where he effectively announced that he did not care that they were being
slaughtered because they didn’t share his position on Israel—“speaking truth to
the powerless,” one commentator put it.
But their voice needs to be heard, and it needs to be heard
now. American Christians’ inability to see Middle Eastern Christians for who
they are—not just fellow Christians, but human beings who are suffering and
dying—contributes to the marginalization of some of the most persecuted people
in the world, hastening their erasure from history.
Will we notice before the last Christian liturgy is held in
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, that comes miraculously every Easter, is no
longer greeted by “Christ is risen”? Or
will this generation witness the end of Christianity in the place where it
began?
