Syria’s Christians

Philip Jenkins wonders why “the United States seems so determined to eradicate Christianity in one of its oldest heartlands, at such an agonizingly sensitive historical moment.”

Jenkins surveys Syria’s bewildering religious mixture, and notes that “Christians have done very well indeed in modern Syria.” During the 1990s, a majority of Hafez al-Assad’s closest advisers were Christians. Over the past two decades, Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, pushing the Christian population of that country up to around 15%, 3 million people. Despite the Ba’athist brutality, “it has sustained a genuine refuge for religious minorities, of a kind that has been snuffed out elsewhere in the region.”

Syria’s Christians know that there are worse things than Assad:

“a successful revolution would almost certainly put in place a rigidly Islamist or Salafist regime that would abruptly end the era of tolerant diversity. Already, Christians have suffered terrible persecution in rebel-controlled areas, with countless reports of murder, rape, and extortion.”

US intervention could turn this anguish into a nightmare: “If the U.S., France, and some miscellaneous allies strike at the regime, they could conceivably so weaken it that it would collapse. Out of the ruins would emerge a radically anti-Western regime, which would kill or expel several million Christians and Alawites. This would be a political, religious, and humanitarian catastrophe unparalleled since the Armenian genocide almost exactly a century ago.”