This article is from the December-January 2024 issue of The Critic. To receive the full magazine, why not subscribe? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10..
NOTNovember saw widespread marches for “Free Palestine” in the streets of Britain and around the world. Those who demonstrated were not deterred by the unabashed demands for the elimination of Israel or by the fact that the organizers included Muhammad Kathem Sawalha – whose history as a top Hamas commander was, curiously, not known. , revealed no barriers to obtaining British citizenship. Weeks of media coverage of bombed homes in Gaza have also not softened the views of Israel’s supporters who see it as a necessary price for demolishing the nest of ruthless terrorism.
Christians were forced to flee their historic homelands in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and the Holy Land itself.
Such demonstrations show that we have rightly not forgotten the Palestinian people – displaced and made stateless for decades – nor the plight of Jews around the world, attacked, mistreated and threatened, forced to post security guards in front of every school and synagogue.
But other conflicts and injustices, equally or more terrible, receive much less attention. Gaza is sometimes referred to as an “open-air concentration camp”. Regardless, more than a million Muslims are held in concentration camps in Xinjiang, subjected to forced labor, re-education, removal of their children and compulsory sterilization. In the most systematic act of ethnic cleansing in recent history, the birth rate in Uyghur-majority regions has collapsed by more than 60 percent in just three years.
But there is no BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement targeting China. Chinese students are not asked to defend the conduct of their government. Muslims are not marching for their Chinese brothers, Labor advisers are not resigning over Britain’s China policy and the new Foreign Secretary’s history of opening doors to Beijing suggests his conscience is not agitated. You can add to this list Kurds, Syrians, Yemenis, Sahrawis, Indians and Rohingyas massacred, displaced and discriminated against.
But a religious minority subjected to the worst treatment, with 360 million people persecuted, receives even less attention in the West. With one in seven adherents under threat, Christianity is one of the most oppressed religions in the world.
While Jews in the Middle East have a homeland to flee to, carved out of the old Ottoman Empire, the supposed homeland of Christian Arabs, the Republic of Lebanon, is today a failed state, dominated by Islamist groups such as Hezbollah. Since 2012, Christians have fallen from 40 to 32 percent of Lebanon’s population, with many fleeing to the West.
The Middle East’s other Christian enclave, Armenia, faces constant hostility from its more powerful neighbor Azerbaijan, which recently dealt a devastating blow in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabkh, displacing thousands of Armenian Christians.
Christians were forced to flee their historic homelands in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and the Holy Land itself. From 13 percent of the region’s population at the start of the 20th century, they now represent only 5 percent.
The world is poorer because of the displacement from their homelands of those with Syriac, Coptic and Chaldean cultures – indigenous peoples whose presence long predated the Arab conquest of their lands – to an uncertain life seeking refuge in the secular West. It is a loss of civilization.
Yet, in the face of this global agony, the West remains silent this Christmas. Where are the sanctions, weapons and cultural solidarity for the millions of Christians facing an existential threat? The war against Christianity is being furiously waged by Marxist atheists in China, by Hindu nationalists in India and even, piquantly, by Jewish fanatics in Israel.
But its worst perpetrators, who are triggering a wave of violence in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, are Muslim extremists. The collective softness of the West in the face of this cultural “other” has undoubtedly alleviated concern about Christians for this reason. But the bigger problem is that Christian suffering does not fit easily into our current political narratives.
Palestine appeals to the left for obvious reasons. Palestinians are stateless non-white victims (by their curiously racist definitions), part of the global “subaltern,” unpolluted by power. On the other hand, Christians do not deserve such sympathy, because their religion is that of the West, of imperialism and oppression. Their victim status is invisible to the progressive worldview, even though, by the left’s definition, they are also mostly non-white.
The indifference of the right, which claims to defend Christian “heritage” and oppose Islamism, is on the other hand apparently inexplicable. But because they treat politics as an essentially secular project, even among national populists, Christianity plays the same role as it does for the left: a religion for white people, a code for Western civilization.
Israel attracts support as a Western-style, right-wing liberal democracy threatened by Islamist terrorism. However, religion being reduced to a “Judeo-Christian” cultural heritage, Christianity can therefore be reduced to simple symbolism, used in national battles, but without imposing real demands on political decision-makers. And even less abroad.
The West’s total indifference to Christianity is a sad gift that offers no joy for this year.
Christian concern subtly and implicitly runs counter to left-wing globalism and right-wing nationalism. Rather, it belongs to an increasingly forgotten civilizational politics, both realistic and idealistic; one that was the last to intervene in the Cold War struggle against the “evil empire” of Soviet Russia and has declined since the catastrophic follies of the War on Terror.
Rediscovering civilizational politics and establishing solidarity with Christians around the world is not a matter of crusading interventionism (a lesson carefully learned after Afghanistan and Iraq).
Rather, it is about everything that is missing from liberal multiculturalism; real dialogue and engagement with other cultures and religions without the patronizing assumption that we are all on the same two-way road to Western secular modernity. Western religious leaders have done far more on this front than all the Western armies and drones.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s leading Muslim cleric, is a salutary example of an Islamic leader promoting a third way between secularism and sectarianism. A staunch critic of the US occupation, he has spent the past 20 years seeking to curb violence between Sunnis and Shiites, and met with Pope Francis, issuing a statement in which he called for the protection of Iraqi Christians and their rights . Interfaith dialogue is a more powerful force than a secular human rights agenda without cultural precedent.
In the Middle East, of course, democracy and secularism are fundamentally opposed. In many Muslim countries, there are more restrictions on Islamic expression, both in thought and dress, than in the West. The vital task of building a tolerant and humane Islamic polity has been entirely neglected by most Westerners.
Yet it is a process in which Christian leaders and thinkers have a profound role to play. For it is secular modernity that has been sustained by bombs, dictatorship, invasion and occupation, thus intensifying the political tragedy of the Middle East.
“End of history” liberalism, after two bloody decades, has proven to be a dead end. It is sad to note that, despite its cruelties, prejudices and hierarchies, the Ottoman Empire was a more hospitable place for religious minorities than the modern nation-states that Western leaders fashioned out of them. The great forces of the liberal tradition have broken away from traditional religion and culture, to their mutual detriment.
Ultimately, what the West does, or fails to do, elsewhere is only a reflection of what it does at home. Christianity is not simply a religion for – or of – the West. But the West’s total indifference to Christianity is a sad present that offers no joy for this year, or many others to come.
