Published April 3, 2025
Unlike the majority of Christians in the United States, Middle Eastern Christians are not going to live relatively peaceful lives. It’s true that our culture hates us, scorns Christian morality, and desires to usher in an age of the anti-good. After all, we are not greater than our master; we should expect the hatred of the world. Yet, the Christians of the Middle East have lived, and continue to live, in acute suffering, enduring hard and soft persecutions that we Americans cannot comprehend.
My Syrian friend, of whom I wrote a few years ago in these pages and who fled to the U.S. with her family, still can’t return to Damascus. Following the recent wave of violence, our Syrian extended family reported that members of the Islamist terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have given at least one Christian village the following message: “You have two choices: Either we move Muslims down from Idlib to take over the houses in the village owned by rich Christian expats who live primarily overseas, or you pay Jizya to help the homeland and ask the American government to lift sanctions against Syria.” Jizya is an Islamic tax that historically was levied on non-Muslims—but of course, what’s really going on here is extortion.
The population of these villages is entirely Christian—Syriac and Aramaic—and they have existed for generations before there was such a thing as the Syria we know of today. These people are part of the original Christian inhabitants who didn’t convert to Islam when the region was conquered by Muslims in the seventh century. These villages are peaceful, honorable people who only want to live and raise families in the land to which they belong. It’s hard to imagine what these communities are going through right now with HTS threatening to import Muslims to dilute and displace their population. This insatiable desire of Islamists to erase other ethnicities, cultures, religions, and civilizations is unfathomable to us Americans (and others in the West), which is why so many in this country refuse to believe it. Some call it a conspiracy theory or Islamophobia.
Unlike the Druze, the Kurds, and the Alawites, these Christian villages do not keep arms or create militias. So what are they to do? It is not surprising that a population broken by fourteen years of civil war, a population that is hungry, greedy, and angry, will use the opportunity to plunder the Christian communities.
Nadine Maenza, president of International Religious Freedom Secretariat, has worked for years in the Middle East. In her latest report she writes: “Some Christian leaders urged the West to stop advocating for them to be protected as minorities, warning that this continues the dangerous narrative Assad used that divided Syria into majority and minority. Instead, they seek recognition as equal components of Syrian society (Mokawwinaat in Arabic), even if their numbers are fewer.” It is true that when the West has attempted to help Christians in Muslim majority countries, either by advocating for them as minorities, or as in 2017 when the first Trump administration wanted to give Christians refugee priority, it put them at risk for harsher treatment from Muslims. But as I’ve written before, when Christian leaders make this argument, they sound like abuse victims, essentially telling others: “Don’t help us, they’ll increase our persecution.” This mindset is self-defeating and self-destructive. It is a mind game Muslim majority countries use to control their dwindling Christian communities.
However, we finally have someone in the White House who is willing to make Christian persecution around the world a priority. This is not the time to refuse help. This is the time to cry out all the more for it. Vice President JD Vance, in his speech at the International Religious Freedom Summit, said:
Part of our protecting religious freedom initiatives means recognizing in our foreign policy the difference between regimes that respect religious freedom and those that do not. The United States must be able to make that distinction. We must be able to look at the catastrophes like the plight of Iraq’s Christians over the past three decades and possess the moral clarity to act when something has gone wrong.
I’ve been writing about Christians in the Middle East and immigrant life for almost eleven years. During that time, the Christian communities in the region have continued to decline, and displaced Syrians are beginning to lose hope that anything will ever change. As I see it, the current administration has the opportunity to rectify the hurt caused by previous foreign policy decisions by lifting sanctions against Syria under two conditions: that Christian and other minority populations are safeguarded, and that displaced Christians are allowed to safely return. Now is the time for the United States to openly and unabashedly stand for Christians in Syria.
Luma Simms, a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies the life and thought of immigrants. As a humanist writer, she publishes on a broad range of topics, with a focus on the human (individual and communal), ethical, religious, and philosophical dimensions of immigration. She is particularly concerned with the crisis of rootlessness, identity, and dehumanization.
