The Closing of the Christian Womb

A century ago, Christians dominated the intellectual and commercial life of the Levant, comprising more than one-fifth of the 13 million people of Turkey, the region's ruling power, and most of the population of Lebanon. Ancient communities flourished in what is now Iraq and Syria. But starting with the Armenian genocide in 1914 and continuing through the massacre and expulsion of Anatolian Greeks in 1922-1923, the Turks killed three to four million Christians in Turkey and the Ottoman provinces. Thus began a century of Muslim violence that nearly has eradicated Christian communities in the cradle of their religion.

It may seem odd to blame the Jews for the misery of Middle East Christians, but many Christian Arabs do so - less because they are Christians than because they are Arabs. The Christian religion is flourishing inside the Jewish side. Only 50,000 Christian Arabs

remain in the West Bank territories, and their numbers continue to erode. Hebrew-speaking Christians, mainly immigrants from Eastern Europe or the Philippines, make up a prospective Christian congregation of perhaps 300,000 in the State of Israel, double the number of a decade ago.

The brief flourishing and slow decline of Christian Arab life is one of the last century's stranger stories. Until the Turks killed the Armenians and expelled the Greeks, Orthodoxy dominated Levantine. The victorious allies carved out Lebanon in 1926 with a Christian majority, mostly Maronites in communion with Rome. Under the Ottomans, Levantine commerce had been Greek or Jewish, but with the ruin of the Ottomans and the founding of Lebanon, Arab Christians had their moment in the sun. Beirut became the banking center and playground for Arab oil states.

A truly excellent analysis of the problem. Samir is a left-wing ideologue, IMHO, and it’s unfortunate that he’s advising the Pope on this matter. It was a great joy to all when Michel Sabbah left the scene.

One thing that Spengler does not take into account are internal Church dynamics. The impact of the so-called Liberation Theology of the 60s and 70s was enormous and completely perverted Christianity not only in Latin America, where it originated, primarily with left-wing, often European Jesuits, but in other parts of the developing world. It’s your typical grudge-laden, revanchiste leftist theory dressed up with a few religious words. But even in places where it didn’t result in the clergy taking up arms (FARC and ELN are full of former priests, and the latter was even founded by one), it resulted in a highly politicized, fundamentally left-wing religious life. In the Arab world, it joined with the old Arab nationalist approach which Spengler so well explains.

The other factor was Vatican II in general. While Pope Paul VI came out definitively against artificial birth control, he was simply ignored by just about all of the heirarchy and clergy and, consequently, the people. Vatican II, with its radical changes to the liturgy and just about everything else, gave them the feeling that all bets were off. They wanted to be modern, with-it, and just like everybody else in the modern liberal world. The Church went in a few years from an environment that welcomed and encouraged children to one like any other, where children were an anomaly and merely got in the way of one’s self-realization. And while the developing world may not have thought of it in quite the same way, they obviously wanted to emulate the “modern” countries and not having children was one way in which they did so (not to mention the effect of the enormous pressure from Western aid agencies).

Finally, Vatican II compromised the Church’s attitude towards the Faith. The misunderstood emphasis on “ecumenism” (which initially referred only to attempts to deal with Protestant churches on a friendlier basis) became inter-faith indifferentism. Catholic religious institutions were particularly bad in this area, giving up their doctrinal requirements in teaching and curriculum, and also taking in huge numbers of non-Catholic students with no requirement that they have anything to do with Catholic teaching. I stopped giving money to a Catholic Middle-Eastern relief agency after I realized that all their publications were proudly chirping about the fact that they educated primarily Muslim students, making no effort to expose them to Christianity while doing so, and in fact taking every step to create an environment that was very little different from a Muslim school, except for the fact that many of the teachers were women.

The traditional understanding of marriage throughout Christendom—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—and of sexuality within marriage, was that its divinely ordained purpose was threefold, in descending order of importance:

1. Procreation of children

2. Love, companionship, and mutual help

3. Assuagement of lust

Remove the first, confuse love with lust, and take away the sanctity of marriage, and you turn all of this upside down. And it has often been seen that healthy marriage and family are the foundations of a healthy society.

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