Lebanon's Invisible Christians
As the sun sets behind Mount Lebanon, Maronite Capuchin friars and an Armenian Orthodox priest stand on a makeshift altar, their backs to the valley below. They pray the Roman rite liturgy in Arabic for perhaps a hundred faithful, a mix of Catholic and Orthodox -- Lebanese, Chaldean, and Assyrian. In mountain retreats such as this, and in the monasteries burrowed into the forbidding terrain of the Qadisha Valley, Christianity has taken intermittent refuge during times of persecution over the past millennium.
Father Andre thanks a prayer group that has been fasting some weeks in the hopes that the war in Syria will not spread to Lebanon. Lebanon's own civil war (1975-90), devastating in its impact, is an event in living memory for many here. It was Muslim against Muslim and Christian against Christian -- but predominantly Muslim against Christian. "We must love Muslim people," says George, an Orthodox Christian. "They are our brothers." Not all in the region share his fraternal sentiment.
A few dozen miles to the north and east is the Syrian city of Homs, whose Christian inhabitants have reportedly fled by the thousands from the rebel forces seeking to topple the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad. Though Assad is not remembered fondly by Lebanon's Christians, should his Alawi government fall, Syria's two million Christians will likely fare no better than Egypt's roughly ten million Coptic Christians, who have seen dozens killed and many churches destroyed during the Arab Spring. They may even face as tragic a fate as Iraq's Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, who until 1991 numbered more than a million and today are less than half that.
After Mass, an Assyrian woman takes me to meet a Capuchin friar, Brother Antoine. He tells me with pride of two friars from his order who were martyred by the Turks during what is called "the genocide of 1915." That genocide, which included roughly a million Armenian Christians, was prompted by the Allied invasion at Gallipoli. The Turkish retaliation against the Christian communities in the Levant in 1915 was swift, systematic, and ruthless. It was perfectly foreseeable, yet was not foreseen by the western Allies. Nearly eighty years later, this tragic story was repeated following the American invasion of Iraq. Many Muslims viewed the invading western forces as latter-day crusaders, a fact with grave consequences for the region's Christians.
As expert observers of Lebanon have remarked, and as a friend warned me before my trip, "When things go bad, they go bad quickly." The same could be said for U.S. involvement in this region in recent decades, where America's foreign policy has tended to vacillate between shrewd realism and naïve idealism. Throughout this time, America has consistently regarded the Christians in the Muslim world with what may best be described as indifference, a fact not lost on the Christians themselves.
"The French, even after they left, would look out for us, but no longer," says George. When I ask him why this is, he responds, "Because they are no longer Christian." This is why, he believes, America does nothing to protect Middle Eastern Christians. "They don't practice Christianity," he says. "The churches are empty." I tell George that unlike France, there are still many practicing Christians in America, but that most are only vaguely aware of Christians in the Muslim world, if they are aware at all. Upon hearing this, he sits in silent incredulity, unable to process this possibility.
Whether this indifference is the consequence of socio-cultural or historical ignorance, a tacit anti-Christian animus among policymakers, or the absence of a united and effective foreign policy lobbying apparatus for Middle Eastern Christians matters little to the region's Christians. They remain, for all practical purposes, invisible.
For Brother Antoine, the prospect of martyrdom one day is very real, though if there is any fear, his eyes do not show it. As the candles and incense dissipate and the night wears on, the Capuchins retire, and those gathered return to their homes -- many in Beirut, just an hour away.
In Beirut, there are two cathedrals named for St. George, a Roman soldier martyred by the emperor Diocletian for refusing to renounce Christianity. One St. George's is Orthodox, the other Catholic. Each is overshadowed on the downtown skyline by the towering Muhammad al-Amin Mosque. The ornate interior of St. George Orthodox cathedral has been largely restored from near complete destruction during the early days of Lebanon's civil war. Only bullet holes now remain in two otherwise restored murals of Christ: One set in the garden of Gethsemane; the other depicting his trial before Pontius Pilate. After admonishing me to take no photos, the curator scribbles an explanation on a pad: "Palestinians -- 1976."
The theological disputes that bitterly divided Latin and Greek Churches for more than a thousand years are all but forgotten as the region's diverse Christians band together to survive. I speak at length with a Greek Orthodox Cypriot businessman, who travels throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East and deals closely with the Christians in those countries.
"In a few months, this trouble will come to Lebanon," he says matter-of-factly. We discuss the war in Syria, the Arab Spring, and the region's dwindling Christian population. "A friend in Jordan recently told me, ‘We are the last generation of Christians here.'" He shakes his head in exasperation before adding, "And he's right."
In Beirut's Nejmeh Square, I sit at a café and read in the International Herald Tribune that the U.S. is conducting "secret" operations in the region, supplying arms to the rebels in Syria. That al-Qaeda is fighting alongside the same rebels the U.S. is arming apparently strikes no one in America as ironic. Though a scandal about supplying arms to questionable groups dominates headlines in the U.S., it seems to occur to none of the politicians thousands of miles away that the arms being ushered into Syria may one day be used against Americans or their allies. As with many ill-advised American actions in the Middle East, any analysis of the consequences may be performed too late. That these arms may be used against Christians, however, is not likely to be part of any analysis at all.
I tell George that many Americans are trying to understand this part of the world. He smiles wryly and says, "They will not." It may be that this is the first lesson for American policymakers to grasp about the Middle East.
What does seem clear is that the Christians of the Muslim world will have few, if any, advocates in America. Their existence increasingly imperiled, many of them will leave with their families for the West. Of those who remain, many will be forced to take refuge, as the Christians of earlier centuries, in the catacombs of the Levant.
