As someone interested in U.S. policy in the Middle East and a contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, I read Onsi A. Kamel’s recent post about the disconnect between American and Middle East Christians with fascination and appreciation. While Kamel strikes me as directionally correct—U.S. Christians ought not be so sanguine about Israeli West Bank settlement expansion, supportive of violence wielded against their coreligionists in Gaza, or blasé about the rhetorical hypocrisy of Trump administration officials—there are two main overgeneralizations in the piece that invite more clarification.
The Problem with "Betrayal"
To start, Kamel’s primary claim regarding American Christians’ “betrayal” of Middle Eastern Christians requires more nuanced elaboration than is offered in his essay. He states, “It is hard to explain widespread conservative American Christian support—Protestant and Catholic—for the mass slaughter of civilians and deliberate targeting of their fellow Christians,” before knocking down several surface-level explanations for such attitudes including Christian Zionism, Israeli claims to represent the only democracy in the region, and the use of human shields by Hamas. Kamel is right if indeed these are the only factors informing the attitudes of American Christians. However, the political dynamics animating the relationship between U.S. and Middle East Christian communities are far more complicated than the simple image of a unidirectional “betrayal” suggests.
Namely, there are many countervailing historical, situational, and political reasons for why the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians—particularly Arab Christians, who are the main subject of Kamel’s piece—are not viewed with more salience by American Christians. I will briefly outline five.
Revolutionary Political Ideologies
There is a long history of Arab revolutionary political movements, which tended to be informed by Communist, Marxist, Ba’athist, and Arab Nationalist ideologies, to align with enemies of the United States on the global stage. This presented an obvious challenge for pan-Christian solidarity during the Cold War, especially after the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. American Christian skepticism makes sense if one considers the (sometimes prominent) roles played by Middle Eastern Christians in regimes in Iraq and Syria when these countries were signing treaties of friendship with the Soviet Union. Moreover, far before intersectionality was a buzzword, grassroots leaders in both Palestine and the United States adopted a strong sense of solidarity with revolutionary left-wing movements around the world.
As I detail in my recent book while drawing on the excellent work of Pamela Pennock, Arab-American leaders like Ibrahim Abu-Lughod announced their opposition to Zionism, imperialism, racism, and American foreign policy in a broad brush; as he declared in a 1969 speech, “We stand with the gallant fighters of Vietnam and with all other groups valiantly struggling… We have perceived the inextricable link which the [Palestinian] Revolution has with other wars of national liberation, particularly but not exclusively in the Third World.” Given this rhetorical ecology, it is understandable if lamentable that many American Christians responded by adopting a degree of indifference toward Middle Eastern Christians and instead begun (over)identifying with Israel, which became a strategic U.S. ally under Reagan.
The Very Different Situations of Distinct Christian Communities
What appears in the original essay as a unified crisis facing Middle Eastern Christians writ large is, to my mind, a series of challenges very different in character facing distinct Christian communities that share a regional but harbor quite a few confessional, ethnic, and historical differences. To oversimplify, there are three broad kinds of communities facing distinct forms of persecution or challenge.
First are Christians, like the Chaldeans of Iraq, who face annihilation or the outright extinction of their existence in the region due to the jihadi violence and the mass outmigration unleashed by the War on Terror.
Second are groups like the Copts in Egypt, who are substantial minorities embedded within broadly Islamic or Islamicizing national communities and often face the diminishment of their political rights and the occasional terrorist attack as a result.
Finally are Arab Christians subjected to Israeli military or extrajudicial violence alongside Muslim members of their national community in places like the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria.
The appropriate spiritual and political response to each of these situations on the part of American Christians is not uniform. Like Kamel, I find the comfort many American evangelicals feel with Arab civilian casualties in Gaza to border on bloodlust, but this seems to me a different kind of obstacle to unity in the body of Christ than other situations unfolding across the Middle East–one perhaps more akin to the perennial problems that arise when Christans in one nation are by virtue of their temporal citizenship engaged in warfare against Christians in another nation.
Instrumentalized Faith
The profound suffering of recent decades notwithstanding, both American and Middle Eastern Christians have been willing to instrumentalize their faith to gain short term favor and use the other for political ends. Kamel notes that American Christians are Janus-faced in their attitudes toward the suffering of unjust violence: “when Middle Eastern Christians remain steadfast in the face of Islamist terrorism, their historic witness is celebrated. When they protest the destruction of churches by Israeli bombs, they are morally confused, like ‘battered wives.’” He is no doubt correct on this count. Yet the wider context must also be recognized here too—historically speaking, Middle Eastern Christians have also been quite willing to instrumentalize their confessional ties with Christians in the United States to secure an advantage over their local political rivals. For example, in the 1950s Lebanese Prime Minister Camille Chamoun, a Maronite Christian, called on the Eisenhower administration to make good on its promise to defend Middle Eastern nations against Soviet-backed aggression by sending troops to support his government. Yet, as the U.S. Marines who came ashore in Operation Blue Bat quickly realized, Chamoun faced no such Communist threat, and the operation squandered the goodwill Eisenhower had earned in Arab countries for supporting Egypt in the Suez Crisis. More recent examples of this dynamic might include how Lebanese Christian leaders Michel Aoun or Samir Geagea deployed their faith to help gain an audience with U.S. policymakers as they advocated for changes in U.S. policy toward Lebanon that would leave them more empowered in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Similar examples could be found of Chaldean or Coptic Christian leaders lobbying U.S. leaders. There are also many examples of Arab Christians in the United States (especially Lebanese, who have comprised a sizable diasporic community for nearly two centuries) leveraging their faith to shape public opinion, influence immigration policy, or accomplish other political objectives.
The point is not that bad actions in the past justify bad actions in the present, but rather that the relationship is much more nuanced than the all-encompassing label of “betrayal” would signify. That is not to justify indifference; rather it is to implore American Christians to care for their Middle East brothers and sisters in the faith, to pray for them, and to advocate for U.S. policies to alleviate their suffering–and also to recognize that accusations of instrumentalization could flow both ways.
The Difficulty of Policy Questions in the Middle East
Kamel rightly notes that entire Middle Eastern Christian communities have seemingly evaporated overnight in the wake of the violence unleashed by the U.S. war(s) on terror, a calamity for Christian witness in the region that may take centuries to reverse. I agree. The frame of “betrayal,” however, overly simplifies what is an undoubtedly painful ethical quandary of whether Middle Eastern Christians should stay in the face of extrajudicial violence or leave for safer soil in Europe or the Americas. Beyond the fact that both Middle East and American Christians have agency in the face of this awful reality, the question of what policies ought to be supported is far from clear and much debated.
If American Christians push to allow more persecuted Middle Eastern Christians to be resettled in the United States, as many have done quite successfully, then the Christian communities in their ancient homelands are devastated. Yet if one cuts off the mechanism of resettlement with the effect of helping preserve these communities, then they instead face genocidal violence.
The label of betrayal belies the deep difficulties of arriving at a satisfactory answer to this issue (and it’s also worth remembering that the regimes overthrown by U.S. forces in the early 2000s were hardly friendly to Christians too). Kamel highlights a vital issue; it’s evident we American Christians ought to pray for our brothers and sisters who suffer persecution; it is less clear what this means in terms of public policy
The Relative Powerlessness of American Evangelicals
Contrary to public impression in some circles, conservative American evangelical Christians have very little say in the day-to-day running of U.S. foreign policy, most commonly leveraging their political influence in the realm of foreign affairs through their humanitarian and missionary efforts as well as by voting for presidential candidates sympathetic to their point of view. While this fact does not excuse the attitudes of American Christians highlighted by Kamel who view Middle Eastern conflicts through a simplistic prism of a “battle of good versus evil that has been waged against Israel and its supporters in the West,” it does mean that there is a dearth of deep awareness, expertise, and nuance when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the American Christian communities to which Kamel ostensibly directed his essay. It should not be surprising that superficial interpretations of international affairs obtain in such places that are far removed from the higher echelons of national security and foreign policy deliberation, and I suspect the correct tone to take is one of exhortation and education rather than polemical judgment.
These factors in my estimation ought to be weighed in navigating the relationship between Christians in the Middle East and in the United States, and Kamel’s work would be stronger if he considered these elements more fully in his future characterizations of it.
The Rhetorical Critique
The second generalization that caught my attention was the focus on a rhetorical response by American Christians. He condemns American Christians for collectively having an attitude that “fails to take their plight seriously” and asks “As American bombs have fallen on churches and American bulldozers have razed homes in Gaza and the West Bank, why haven’t more Christians spoken out?”
Several things strike me about this line of reasoning. For one, I’m not sure that there aren’t many Christians speaking out, even if they aren’t the Christians one sees on TV, reads online, or hears on the news.
To cite several examples local to Abilene, where I live: (1) my university hosted a roundtable of scholars and students, all of whom would be confessionally identified as evangelical, to discuss the war in Gaza in which several participants reminded audience members of Palestinian Christians and exhorted them to pray for their protection; (2) multiple churches in my city held prayers nights over the conflict in which participants asked God for the protection of Palestinian Christians; (3) a local evangelical traveled to Jerusalem to deliver aid to Arab Christians forced to flee due to the conflict. I recognize these are not exactly headline-earning efforts, but I suspect that Abilene is not a unique case and that there is a much greater degree of nuance and care across Catholic, mainline, and evangelical communities than is perhaps legible online or in a northeast university setting.
Second, it is not clear what “to take their plight seriously” means in this context. While I agree with Kamel that the volume could certainly be louder, it is not as though all American evangelical voices are silent on the suffering of Christians at Israeli hands. The National Association of Evangelicals issued a press release a year ago announcing that 90 percent of evangelical leaders they polled believed Israel should allow more aid to enter Gaza, quoting multiple pastors by name as well as the NAE president as stating “war crimes by one side do not justify producing humanitarian crises by the other.” Evangelical nonprofit Open Doors asked Christians, “please stand with your family in the region. Whether Palestinian or Israeli, in Gaza or in Israel, people who claim the name of Christ are joined as one in the Church.” It is also worth remembering that 98 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are not Christian, which plays a role in the lack of identification with Christians in Gaza felt by American Christians, even if we are scripturally commanded to overcome these barriers. Like Kamel, I wish there were more voices calling for the relief of Middle Eastern Christians, but I am also quite wary of deploying a subjective sense of “seriousness” as a metric to gauge how faithfully some Christians are taking the suffering of other Christians.
Beyond these issues, a larger question looms—what exactly is the appropriate relationship for the United States to assume with Middle Eastern Christian communities, especially at a time when Christian influence within the GOP coalition is at an ebb? Put differently, what line of action, rhetoric, or policy should American Christians advance? Does he wish for the United States to assume an informal role as the guardian of Middle East Christians, perhaps in an echo of how France served as Protector of the Holy Places and claimed the unofficial role of caretaker of Christians in the Ottoman Empire? Does that mean a more expanded and interventionist U.S. policy in the Middle East is the goal we should be working for? Or does he want American Christians to promote U.S. withdrawal from its alliance with Israel and the wider regional disengagement that such a move would precipitate, even at the cost of impotence at the eruption of anti-Christian violence?
I suspect Kamel has insightful responses to these questions. I thank him for raising the vital topic of Middle Eastern Christian suffering due to U.S. foreign policy to our shared awareness, and I applaud him for highlighting what Christians are already doing, and indeed must continue to do: pray. Let us not stop there.
