Over my Spring Break as a Bowdoin tour guide learning the subtle art of marketing, I comfortably experienced Catholic Holy Week. I easily strolled down to St. John the Baptist, a charming parish with a distinctively French interior, for Palm Sunday. Its Easter Vigil service lasted over three hours, but I was well rewarded as I likely heard many of the same readings and hymns as my ancestors from France, Spain and Ireland. On Easter morning, I was invited to join a generous elderly couple for a feast of ham, sweet potatoes and green beans. As Holy Week came to a conclusion, however, I was reminded that the Christians of the Middle East do not have the luxury of commemorating biblical events in peace. They are indeed reliving the Gospels, sharing in the persecution, isolation and abuse endured by the man they proclaim as Messiah.
In mid-March, the State Department finally concluded, after a considerable and troubling delay pointed out by the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea, that the actions of ISIS constituted genocide against Yazidis (by far the region’s most vulnerable group), Christians and other religious minorities. No doubt countless Syrians of all creeds have suffered at the hands of the Islamic State, but it is indisputable that these minorities face more severe persecution, experience far less protection from competing international powers and risk not only continual losses of life but their very survival as intact communities. The final genocide designation against Christians was certainly due after continual reports of the destruction of ancient monasteries and churches, the kidnapping and murder of clergy, the placement of both Christian and Yazidi women into sex slavery and the wholesale destruction of Christian communities.
We would be mistaken if we assumed this persecution of Christian communities was limited only to the hands of the Islamic State. With honorable exceptions such as Jordan, sincere religious pluralism is becoming all too rare throughout the region. Pew Center surveys have found substantial majorities in countless Middle Eastern countries favoring the criminalization of apostasy (i.e. the free conversion of a person out of Islam into another faith). Over the past century, thanks to policies pursued from Ataturk to Erdogan, the once enormous Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul has dwindled to 2,000. The Arab Spring and subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was hardly good news for Egypt’s Coptic Christians. The United States’ Quixotic scheme and execution of “nation building” in Iraq unleashed sectarian conflict that has seen the flight or death of two-thirds of country’s Christian population since 2003.
The potential end of a vibrant Christian faith in the Middle East, where liturgies can still be heard in Aramaic and churches trace their origins to Saint Paul, is more than a humanitarian tragedy. It holds profound geopolitical implications. Notwithstanding the discrimination faced under second class citizenship, Middle Eastern Christians used the historic tolerance of the Islamic world to become a creative and prosperous minority. Historians like Bernard Lewis have long recognized the role of the region’s Christians as catalysts for liberalism, reform and economic development. Both the Spanish Inquisition and the post-1948 persecution of Jews by Arab Nationalist states are obvious examples of how a loss of cultural and religious pluralism undoubtedly holds back freedom and prosperity. Furthermore, the existence of strong, flourishing Christian minority is the best empirical reply to the “clash of civilizations” narrative peddled by both our own Islamophobes and the Islamic State, of a total, irreconcilable demarcation between the “Christian West” and “Muslim East.”
The pressing need to protect the Middle East’s Christians and religious minorities while also creating a semblance of regional order will be the next great challenges of American foreign policy. As President Obama made obvious in his recent interview with The Atlantic, even partial steps towards a potential resolution are unlikely to come from his administration, given his reflexive, nearly ideological dismissals of more interventionist American proposals in Syria as simply false hopes of a Washington “establishment” unable to share in his grand view of history. Still less can arise from our country’s growing flirtation with isolationism, in either the peacenik or Jacksonian nationalist varieties offered by Sanders and Trump. Nor can it come from Ted Cruz’s schemes of apocalyptic carpetbombing. The last hopes for Middle Eastern pluralism and stability may indeed lie with either John Kasich or, barring my own personal delusions with a rational look at presidential betting markets, Hillary Clinton. Let us hope they and their Secretaries of States do not react to the collapse of Syrian Christianity—and Syria or the very region itself—with crocodile tears.