But do Christians have a future there?
Recent headlines provide ample evidence for skepticism. It’s hard to ignore the depravity of ISIS beheading 21 Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya. Nor can one shake off stories of women and children among the 262 Christians captured by ISIS in Syria, one of several horrors faced by Christians in that nation and neighboring Iraq.
They’re not just feeling the heat from Islamic extremists: Just this week, police in Jerusalem said they suspected radical right-wing Israelis were to blame for defacing a Greek Orthodox seminary in Jerusalem with slurs maligning Jesus.
All this strain, all this chaos has shrunk the percentage of the Middle East’s once-sizable population of openly practicing Christians.
While no one is saying what’s happening — especially given the savagery of ISIS — isn’t alarming, that doesn’t make it surprising. The Middle East has changed a lot since the first millennium A.D. for Christians. It has also changed a lot over the past century: The percentage of Christians relative to the Mideast’s overall population has gone from 13.6% in 1910 to 4.2% in 2010, and it’s expected to drop even further, according to religious demographers Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo.
“What we’re seeing right now,” said Baylor University historical theologian Philip Jenkins, “is the latest phase of something that has been going for 100 years, pretty much.”
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“You appeal to religion both to legitimize what you’re doing and to mobilize people,” Esposito said.
So what can be done about Christians’ plight in the Middle East?
Some of it likely can’t be helped, according to Zurlo. With or without ISIS, their number will continue to fall — something the Massachusetts-based religious demographer asserts is “not very unusual in the history of Christianity.”
“Christianity has a serial nature: It goes in an area and it thrives, then it (declines),” Zurlo said. “It thrived in the Middle East for a very long time.”
According to Esposito, one key to slowing this drop or, at least, to making life easier for those Christians who want to be in the Mideast is changing the Muslim world. A vast majority of Muslims denounce extremists like ISIS, but there are still enough who join such groups because they’re angry at their government or others and do not feel they have any better outlet or purpose. When that happens, it’s bad for Christians.
“To prevent the recruits, you have to get at the root causes,” said Esposito, a former consultant to U.S. and other governments. “And even if you wipe out ISIS, unless those conditions change, you’re going to have other groups that emerge.”
