Their lives have turned to shit since the US Invasion. Do you know if any American evangelicals are aware of this? What do they make of it?
They are probably sending over bibles.
One of the most prominent American evangelical publications has written on this topic, so they’re by no means unaware.
Alas, “Christianity Today” doesn’t get big media attention, or even a lot of attention from the multitude of pew-sitters.
What do I make of it? One of those “Unintended Consequences” situations where the cure for one problem (Saddam Hussein’s tyranny) causes a host of other problems. What to do? The article has some good suggestions as starters. Unfortunately, what will probably be needed to keep any minority religion group there safe is another strong-man in charge who won’t put up with his people killing each other over religious differences.
I disagree. What will keep them safe is to expand (which they are doing, take over the majority in time, and garner the respect of their neighbors. Strongmen do not solve problems. They only delay them, and usually worsen them in bargain.
There’s a theologically conservative Lutheran publication called, um, Christian News, I think, that my grandfather subscribed to before he died. They ran an article before the invasion wherein Christian churches in Iraq were pretty much begging the USA not to come in & depose Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. (He as a secularist protected them from the raging religious authority nonsense that is suffered in say, Saudi Arabia.) I read it & pooh-poohed it at the time, thinking that they thought had to say that, or that the writer had an axe to grind. I was suckered by all the anti-Saddam propaganda in the US mainstream media (& more so in the partisan Weekly Standard) over the previous twelve years. But the CN article was right.
So at least a few Christians in this country get it. But they got outshouted by the hawks, & many of us were too happy to believe in W Bush as a modern mix of Peter the Hermit, Prester John, & Julian Hospitaler. I include myself in that, regretfully.
What makes you think that a Christian takeover of Iraq is even remotely likely to happen ?
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I spent two years in Iraq and I can tell you that lives for Chistians in Iraq has gotten much, much worse. Saddam had Christians in some prominent positions in his government, now they are largely cut out. They are not a big or powerful enough group to be courted by other factions and they are frequently targeted. I remember when the current Pope made a comment on Islam that was incindiary (I believe he was a cardinal at the time), the Christian leadership in Iraq tried to distance themselves and said it wasn’t at all helpful.
I had an Iraqi Christian colleague I tried to help out. I put him in touch with a Christian charity that I thought might be able to help. The Christian charity offered to send him some clothes and other stuff and my colleague wrote back essentially: “are you crazy? I need to get me and my family the hell out of here, I need a visa, a place to stay and some money, help!” The Christian charity concluded he was just looking for some money and dropped him. He’s still around, but a lot of his family has been slaughtered.
“I’m a martyr, they’re a martyr, he’s a martyr, she’s a martyr, wountcha like to be a martyr too?”
My Iranian girlfriend hosted a “Persian cuisine” event a couple of weeks ago for several members of her church (she grew up Muslim, but converted to Christianity a few years ago). Post-dinner conversation was mostly driven by their curiosity about life in the Mideast, and, being church people, they asked a lot of questions about day-to-day religious practice. They were astonished to learn that while Islam is of course the majority faith, there is still a not-inconsequential minority of non-Islamic religious adherence across the whole region: Jewish, Zoroastrian, Coptic Orthodox, and a variety of “conventional” Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, not to mention the division between Shia and Sunni. They had never heard the phrase “the People of the Book” and struggled to understand it even after it was explained. Their naivete was a little embarrassing, to be honest; it was as if they had absolutely no conception of the possibility that the people of the Mideast were anything but a monolithic block of singular religious belief. And these were ostensibly well-educated upper-class “liberal” Christians.
It’s dangerous to generalize too much from limited data, but I found this rather revealing.
We may begin to see evangelicals be more concerned about Iraqi Christians now that Obama is President. But when Bush was in, Falwell, Robertson and the rest of that ilk didn’t care in the least.
Also there really aren’t any evangelical Christians in Iraq. At least in the American sense of evangelical. Christians in Iraq belong to churches like the Assyrian, Chaldean, Syrian Orthodox, & Latin Rite. Given the dress, language and appearance of these Iraqi Christians, your average Baptist in the US would hardly consider these groups to even be Christian.
In Iraq? As a (nominal) Lutheran I’m concerned about my co-communicants in Palestine.
Do you have any basis for making any of these outrageous claims?
Have you ever discussed this with any kind of Christian that you know personally?
It’s far more likely that none of the people you named were aware then, or even now, that there are still sizeable (but diminishing) Christian communities in Iraq. That idiot, George Bush, certainly didn’t know and I seriously doubt that he’d ever been briefed on the subject by any of the career diplomats in the US State Department.
Bush the Younger didn’t even know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia Muslim until two weeks before the invasion of Iraq. How could you possibly imagine that he or, for that matter, any of the ‘expert’ career diplomats in the US State Department would be aware of any details about the endangered Christian minorities in Iraq or even think such information to be of any relevance.