Author: Daniel Philpott

These days I and my colleagues at Notre Dame and at Georgetown are busily preparing for a major international conference in Rome on December 10-12 on Christian responses to persecution.  It arises from a research project that is sending fourteen leading scholars of global Christianity out to over 30 countries to look at these responses.  I anticipate that responses will be highly varied, ranging among heroic resistance; fleeing for life; diplomatic accommodation to repressive regimes; forgiveness; taking up arms; interreligious peacebuilding; and martyrdom. We want to be careful and even-handed even though — well, in fact, because — we also work out of moral concern and a desire for solidarity.

Sometime, though, I come across a response to persecution that stops me in my tracks and I stand in awe.  That is what happened when I read about the Archbishop of Saigon, Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, who was imprisoned in 1975 and held there for 13 years, nine of these in solitary confinement.  Here is his story.

Take note of a fascinating symposium on religion and world order now presented online by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

From Berkley’s website: “In advance of a workshop on religion and world order held at the Berkley Center on September 18, 2015, Center director Tom Banchoff circulated a discussion paper that served as a starting point for debate. His main argument is excerpted below, along with a range of responses. The workshop, cosponsored by the Chumir Ethics Foundation, was convened in the run up to the Congress of Vienna 2015, a gathering of global thought leaders to discuss and develop principles for a stable and just world.”

Here is my own response.  I take issue with Tom’s argument that international norms have become secularized and argue that they are more religious than they at first appear.

Here’s the excerpt of Banchoff’s piece:

“In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity…”

So began the General Treaty of the Congress of Vienna two centuries ago.

The role of religion in world order has changed markedly since. The forces that dominate international affairs today—nation-states, market economies, and international institutions—interact outside of any religious frame. The recent 109-page nuclear accord with the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, is free of religious language.

It does not follow that religion plays no role in world politics. In fact its domestic salience has grown over the past several decades. Examples include the Religious Right in the United States and Israel, Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in Asia, and political Islam across parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Even in Europe, a bastion of secularism, a growing religious pluralism is impacting the political scene.

Nevertheless, religion’s influence continues to be felt within an international system that remains strikingly secular.

For most of human history political legitimacy has rested on some sacred foundation. The Mandate of Heaven in China, the caliphate within Islam, the Divine Right of Kings in the West—all are examples of rule legitimated in terms of some supernatural, transcendent, or timeless foundation. This religious frame also applied to external affairs. Relations among empires, kingdoms, and principalities—the closest analog to today’s international relations—unfolded within a higher, cosmic or sacred order. For most of recorded history it was routine to invoke God, or gods, in both the conduct of war and the negotiation of peace. The Congress of Vienna participated to a considerable degree in this age-old tradition.

By 1815, however, the religious frame was beginning to fade. The emergence of states out of the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire, the waning of ecclesial power and the Reformation, and the end of the religious wars in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) were critical milestones. The democratic and nationalist ideologies advanced by the American and French revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century reinforced the secularizing trend. Against this backdrop the Holy Alliance that followed on the Congress of Vienna appears as a failed effort to revive the idea of Christendom—to forge a Europe of God-fearing rulers committed to “justice, love and peace.”

The world order that eventually emerged after two cataclysmic world wars, the onset of the Cold War, and decolonization was deeply secular in its foundations. The United Nations system has been built upon the principles of national sovereignty, national self-determination, and non-interference in the affairs of other states. It does not invoke God, gods, or any particular religious tradition. Today interstate diplomacy, transnational trade and finance, and international law have largely remained a realm of material interests and secular rules and norms.

This is not, of course, to argue that the institutions, rules, and norms that constitute the international system have nothing to do with religion. As recent scholarship has shown, principles of sovereignty and norms of human rights and humanitarianism have a considerable historical debt to religious ideas and practices. It does not follow, however, that those institutions are religious today in any meaningful sense. International leaders in politics, business, and civil society, are able to think, talk, and act across a range of transnational issues without reference to God or any particular religious tradition. That represents a significant historical break, the outcome of a centuries-long evolution.

There is no guarantee that this configuration will persist into the future. One can imagine a transformative turn in globalization—long awaited by many—that will take us beyond the nation-state to a global civil society, in which religious and other social and political forces can somehow forge a world polity. A more global civil society and emergent global polity would certainly allow more of a role for religion in the (re)construction of world order. Whether the result would ultimately be more harmony or more conflict is a matter for speculation.

Another, opposed set of changes to the international system would also allow a potentially transformative role for religion—not the formation and integration of a global polity but varieties of global disintegration. One can envision a range of transregional catastrophes, ranging from wars and pandemics to ecological disaster, that might have the double effect of unraveling the existing international system and generating large-scale religious awakenings. It is not hard to imagine that the intolerant and violent currents within those traditions would flourish in such apocalyptic scenarios.

The specter of such disasters, perhaps more real than often acknowledged, is reason enough to encourage a positive role for religion in the reform of world order today and in decades to come. The overlapping ethical principles of peace, justice, and solidarity articulated across major religious traditions will always be in some tension with norms of state sovereignty and economic self-interest that now ground the international system. Given that tension, one can imagine the emergence of a powerful, transnational coalition of religious and secular forces mobilized around ethical principles that works through governments, markets, and international organizations to advance basic civil, political, economic, and social rights, and peace on a global level. Such a development might gradually transform our existing world order from within—and for the better.

Over the past few days, a couple of good pieces have appeared making the case for rescuing Christians – and, I would echo the point here — other religious minorities who are victims of ISIS.

Chloe Valdary at the Wall Street Journal makes an analogy of Christians in the Middle East to the Vietnamese “boat people” whom the U.S. rescued in 1975.  See here.  Here is her opening:

In 1975, as desperate Vietnamese sought to escape Communist rule, the U.S. embarked on what remains one of the greatest humanitarian rescue missions in history. Over the span of several weeks, Operation Frequent Wind, Operation Babylift and other missions by air or on sea saved and resettled tens of thousands of Vietnamese in the U.S., where they would become thriving American citizens.

Now another desperate population needs rescuing: persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Could there be an Operation Frequent Wind for them?

Then in The Weekly Standard, Elliott Abrams makes a similar case.  For him, the Jews are the right analogy:

The rescue of threatened Jewish communities has been a central public purpose of Jews living in safety. American Jews pressed their government to push back against repression in Morocco in the 19th century and in czarist Russia in the early 20th. They failed to get the doors open for many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but they tried​—​despite rampant antisemitism, not least in the State Department. They succeeded in opening the doors of Soviet Russia, whence a million Jews fled to Israel.

It is in that context that the failure of the United States and the countries of Western Europe​—​all of which have overwhelming Christian majorities in their populations—​to protect or to accept as refugees many Middle Eastern Christians (and other minorities, such as the Yazidis and Baha’i) is worth exploring. To be sure, Jews have been an oppressed and endangered minority for a couple of thousand years, so the habits of rescue are deeply ingrained in liturgy and in communal life. Christians have had two pretty good millennia, and the idea that there are Christian communities being destroyed, and Christians being enslaved, raped, and murdered because of their faith, may be hard for many Christians in the year 2015 to understand.

I’m persuaded.

Almost exactly a year ago I posted a couple of pieces on the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong and its Christian, especially Catholic, influence.  Several pieces came out around that time with similar themes.  See here and here.

My colleague here in the political science department at Notre Dame, Victoria Hui, dissents.  See her interesting piece here.

 

Seventeen years ago, in 1998, the U.S. Congress mandated religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy through the International Religious Freedom Act. In recent years, Canada, Britain, Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway have adopted foreign policies of religious freedom in one way or another. Might these democracies cooperate in their religious freedom policies?

This coming Thursday and Friday, October 8th and 9th, 2015, a policy dialogue will be held at Georgetown University to explore the potential for transatlantic cooperation in religious freedom policy. The first day will feature a keynote address by Peter Berger, the famous sociologist of Boston University, with comments by David Brooks of The New York Times and Walter Russell Mead, a prominent commentator on foreign affairs and professor at Bard College. Then, a succession of panels will explore issues surrounding cooperation across the Atlantic. The day will close with a keynote address by U.S. Ambassador for Religious Freedom David Saperstein. The second day will focus on how religious freedom plays in regions of the world, including the Middle East, India and the Far East, and Eastern Europe and the Orthodox world. If you’re in the area and want to come, please RSVP here.

Cooperation across the Atlantic, in my view, would be a good thing. Although I am a strong supporter of the U.S. promoting religious freedom around the world, the policy has had its flaws. Perhaps the best fruit of it is the annual reports on religious freedom around the world put out by the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. These reports give exposure to the violation of this precious human right and provide a critical commodity for policymakers, activists, and scholars — namely, good information on what is happening on the ground around the world.

A more difficult question, though, is: How much more religiously free is the world today because of U.S. foreign policy? Is a single country more religiously free than it otherwise would be because of this policy? Maybe so; I would welcome positive examples. I doubt there are many, though.

I do not at all wish that religious freedom policy would fade. I want there to be more religious freedom and less religious repression in the world and I want the U.S. to be a force for freedom. I propose, though, that religious freedom policy would be much more effective were it multilateral — coordinated in a common front of western democracies. Together, they could wield more hard power — economic sanctions, for instance — as well as more soft power — diplomatic and institutional influence — for religious freedom.

The proposal is not without its difficulties. Would multilateral cooperation water down the pursuit of religious freedom so as to make it meaningless? Would there be fractiousness over strategy? Would there be all talk and little action?

Deeper differences will arise over different religious profiles among western democracies. Populations of Western Europe, Canada, and the European Union tend to be more secularized than that of the United States. They do not offer the same level of popular support for religious freedom (in the U.S., IRFA was passed with strong popular support and grassroots mobilization, as detailed here). Will there be resulting differences in how religious freedom is promoted? The European Union and some western European democracies often use the term Freedom of Religion and Belief (FORB) which is wider in its content, and arguably more watered down, than religious freedom. Western European countries have far more statist approaches to religion, often having government bureaucracies that manage religion as well as state churches, whereas the United States practices a more robust institutional separation between church and state. Would this difference affect what sort of laws and regimes western countries seek elsewhere? Western European states like Britain, France, and Germany host more distinct and less assimilated Muslim communities than the United States, where Muslims are more integrated. Will this affect cooperation in promoting religious freedom towards Muslim majority countries?

Still another challenge comes from a group of intellectuals, mostly American, arguing that religious freedom is a western invention and confined to western history and should not be spread to other countries. (See previous ArcU pieces here and here.) Even if one does not agree and sees religious freedom as a universal principle, as I do, we are still left to ask how a united western religious freedom policy will be received around the world. Will it foment a schism between the West and the Rest?  Or are there factions favorable to religious freedom that can be secured as allies in India, Indonesia, and Russia?

One of the most interesting aspects of the conference is its formidable coalition of sponsors. These can be understood as the confluence of two streams. The policy dialogue on transatlantic religious freedom policy is the brainchild of an international relations professor at Sussex University in the UK, Fabio Petito, who has long been a leader in the study of religion and international relations. He managed to secure a “Bridging Voices” grant from the British Council, which seeks to promote transatlantic dialogue on policy issues. The Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame teamed up with him on the grant and they took on as additional partners the European University Institute and the University of Milan. This will be the second of two policy dialogues on transatlantic religious freedom policy, the first having been organized by Petito and taken place at Wilton Park, United Kingdom in February 2015. Generously co-sponsoring the dialogues are the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (BYU) and McGill University’s Birks Forum on the World’s Religions. All of these constitute the first stream of sponsors. 

If that is not enough for you, this entire coalition joins a second stream of sponsors led by the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University, who is hosting the event. RFP is taking on the event as the first in a year-long series of events on policy associated with the International Religious Freedom Act, which will produce a revised edition of The Future of U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy. RFP sponsors this series together with its partner, the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, and is also teaming up with The Review of Faith & International Affairs at the Institute for Global Engagement, and the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs at Boston University.

Got all that?  Wait, there is more. Selected presentations will appear in the Review of Faith and International Affairs. The dialogue is also part of a semester-long exploration of the Global Future of Governance, under the auspices of Georgetown University’s Global Futures Initiative. 

Whew!  The sponsors themselves are a transatlantic coalition, and their ability to cooperate to bring about this promising event bodes well for the ability of governments to cooperate on religious freedom policy!

Here at ArcU, we’ve been following the case of Egyptian human rights activist Yara Sallam, a former student of the Center for Civil and Human Rights here at Notre Dame.  After being held in jail since June 2014 by the regime of el-Sissi, she has just been released.  We celebrate this joyful news.  See here for the story.

Last week, The New York Times published a long article by Rukmini Callimachi on ISIS and the systematic cruelty that the group has imposed upon Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority, including the sexual enslavement and rape of women and girls and the massacre of men and boys. The article is excellent reportage, giving front-page attention to the similar findings of human rights groups, and deepens the world’s understanding of ISIS and the atrocities that it has been perpetrating.

The story also buttresses some running arguments that we have been making here at ArcU. First, political theology matters. ISIS’ atrocities stem from its members’ religious beliefs. One of the piece’s central themes is that ISIS’ atrocities flow from very specific theological justifications. The title of the article is indeed, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.” Theology explains why ISIS has singled out the Yazidis for particularly harsh treatment: the Yazidis’ beliefs are especially heretical. ISIS has pursued no similar campaign towards the women of other religious minorities. Theology explains the kind of treatment to which ISIS has subjected the Yazidis and how it has gone about administering this treatment. ISIS uses its theology to recruit young men whose own beliefs makes them sympathetic to join.   It is for reasons of theology that ISIS has abducted 5,270 Yazidis and continues to hold 3144 of them.

It is an important finding in light of an intense debate running among academics, journalists, and other analysts over whether theology explains ISIS’s motivations.   Such a debate took place after the publication of Graeme Wood’s piece on ISIS this past February in The Atlantic. And it has taken place in episode after episode involving Islam at least as far back as the attacks of September 11^th, 2001. Is it theology that explains the behavior of the attackers or is it economic dislocation, resentment over colonialism and present-day imperialism, weak states, the desire for adventure, and other alternative causes? Of course, most who think that religious beliefs play a strong and independent role, as I do, also believe that these myriad factors are commingled and contributory. It is also the case that members of ISIS will hold their beliefs with greater and lesser intensity. Some are very bad Muslims. But the behavior and tactics of the group cannot be explained apart from the theology that governs it and is promulgated within it. This is what is denied by a striking number of analysts writing today. See only the reaction to Wood’s piece.  The critics are dismissive of religion altogether and hold that theology is almost entirely a rationalization, not a driver or a motive.

Some of the critics take to task views like Wood’s and mine for “essentializing” Islam and holding that Islam is the cause of behavior like that of ISIS. That is not my view. With respect to Islam as a whole, ISIS is a tiny sect whose theology is highly particular, not shared, and indeed condemned by most Muslims. Still, it is a theology and it motivates the behavior of its members. Those who deny this, I ask them to read Callimachi’s NYT piece – and let’s have a conversation.

The second argument has to do with religious freedom. Is it a western value, derived from western experience, unlikely to be accepted outside the West, and one that should not be imposed through western power? Or is it a universal principle, attendant upon human dignity, as the international human rights conventions would suggest? Previous ArcU pieces (see here and here) have engaged a group of scholars who are highly critical of religious freedom, which they believe is a product of power and culture that emerged contingently in the West. They published a set of pieces at Immanent Frame (the vast majority, but not all, of which took this point of view) that the University of Chicago has just printed as a book.

One of the things that struck me about ISIS’ behavior as reported by the New York Times piece is that it involves what are obviously and straightforwardly human rights violations – cruelties that anyone from anywhere can recognize as a cruelty without difficulty.  They are violations of bodily integrity, sexual integrity, the dignity of women, the right not to be enslaved, and the like.

These cruelties are also quite obviously and straightforwardly violations of religious freedom. Acting on its theology, ISIS is perpetrating horrible deeds upon the Yazidis because of their theology. It is because of what Yazidis believe and how they practice their faith that ISIS enslaves and rapes their women and girls and massacres their men. Why, then, would religious freedom, not be a part of the set of principles and the dimensions of human dignity that are violated by ISIS’ behavior? Why could not anyone affirm that, whatever may be right or wrong about what Yazidis believe, there is not even remote warrant for them to be treated as they are because of what they believe?

Do those who think that religious freedom is a western value also think that the principles and the dignity that are violated when Yazidis are raped, enslaved, and massacred are also culturally contingent? I doubt it, but if they do, then I recommend the NYT piece to them. If they would agree that prohibitions of slavery and rape are properly universal values, then why would they not also agree that religious freedom is a universal value? That Yazidis are violated because they are Yazidis is part and parcel of the cruelty being inflicted upon them. Is it not wrong everywhere that people should be treated as ISIS does the Yazidis on account of their religious beliefs? On what grounds ought we to stress the cruelty of rape, slavery, and massacre – as we should vociferously – but leave out the religious dimension of human dignity?

John Allen has published a typically excellent column on remembering Christians and Yazidis who were massacred one year ago by ISIS and offering reflections on American involvement there.  He writes:

[August 6] marks the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest calamities to fall upon Christians anywhere on the planet in the early 21st century — an ISIS offensive in the Plains of Nineveh in northern Iraq that broke out on Aug. 6-7, 2014, and left thousands of Christians and Yazidis dead.

It also drove an estimated 120,000 Christians into exile either inside the country, in places such as Kirkuk and Erbil, or outside in refugee camps in nations such as Turkey and Jordan.

During the assault, churches and monasteries were destroyed, centuries-old Christian manuscripts were burned, and scores of Christians were killed, often in staggeringly brutal fashion: flogged to death, beheaded, and, in at least a few cases, reportedly crucified. They often died cheek-by-jowl with Yazidis, who practice an ancient syncretistic form of monotheism, in a grim reminder that it’s not just Christians at risk.

He makes a case for the U.S. coming to their aid:

First of all, coming to the aid of Iraqi Christians and other minorities is not merely a humanitarian or confessional imperative. There’s also a clear strategic logic for doing so.

To begin with, if Iraq and Syria are emptied of their Christian populations, then any lingering hope for democracy and development will likely go with them. Two of the premier hotspots on the planet would become even more dangerous.

Not only do Christians operate the most significant private networks of schools, hospitals, and social service centers across the Middle East, but their higher-than-average educational and occupational levels generally make them a force for stability. They also serve as a natural bridge between the Muslim world and the West.

If you want peace in the Middle East, in other words, then make sure Christians have a home there.

In addition, the makeshift camps in which Christian exiles are now crowded have the potential to become breeding grounds for both political resentments and criminal enterprises, to some extent like what happened in Palestinian refugee camps after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Granted, Christians generally stand a much better shot at eventually resettling in the West, but that’s not true of all. The potential for mayhem increases the longer people are forced to remain in the camps, despairing of ever returning home.

Given what’s at stake, one hardly needs to be a Christian, a Yazidi, or even a humanitarian activist to grasp that doing something for these refugees deserves to be an urgent geopolitical priority.

He also points out that what is happening now is a direct consequence of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003:

For Americans, the one-year anniversary of the assault in the Plains of Nineveh also invites an examination of conscience.

Whatever one makes of the moral legitimacy of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, it’s empirically undeniable that the war ripped the lid off pre-existing sectarian tensions and created a context in which the country’s minority groups, above all its Christians, today find themselves in the firing line.

St. John Paul II’s political prescience was never clearer than when he dispatched the late Cardinal Pio Laghi to meet with US President George W. Bush in a vain effort to head off the invasion, telling Laghi to warn the Americans that Iraq’s minorities, beginning with its Christians, would be its first victims.

Perhaps the whole world has something to gain from making it possible for those 600,000 Iraqi Christians, along with the Yazidis and others, to go home and to live in peace and security. Americans, however, also carry a moral responsibility to work for that outcome, quite apart from matters of self-interest.

In December 2013, Patriarch Louis Sako of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Church articulated what his people were feeling at that point, sentiments that can only have intensified after last year’s disaster.

“We feel forgotten and isolated,” Sako said.

“We sometimes wonder, if they kill us all, what would be the reaction of Christians in the West? Would they do something then?”

That’s a question well worth pondering today, perhaps especially in the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

Not to be missed is journalist Eliza Griswold’s landmark piece in The New York Times Magazine on the fate of Christians in Iraq and Syria.  The fact that it appeared in the NYTM itself is news, for it helps to establish that the persecution of Christians is not a special interest or parochial issue.  Griswold combines riveting stories with factual and policy analysis in a compelling read.

Here is one strong passage:

The Arab Spring only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. Now, ISIS is looking to eradicate Christians and other minorities altogether. The group twists the early history of Christians in the region — their subjugation by the sword — to legitimize its millenarian enterprise. Recently, ISIS posted videos delineating the second-class status of Christians in the caliphate. Those unwilling to pay the jizya tax or to convert would be destroyed, the narrator warned, as the videos culminated in the now-­infamous scenes of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians in Libya being marched onto the beach and beheaded, their blood running into the surf.

The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is now uncertain. ‘‘How much longer can we flee before we and other minorities become a story in a history book?’’ says Nuri Kino, a journalist and founder of the advocacy group Demand for Action. According to a Pew study, more Christians are now faced with religious persecution than at any time since their early history. ‘‘ISIL has put a spotlight on the issue,’’ says Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, whose parents are from the region and who advocates on behalf of Eastern Christians. ‘‘Christianity is under an existential threat.’’

Moving into the policy discussion, she writes:

This spring the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the plight of Iraq’s religious minorities. ‘‘If we attend to minority rights only after slaughter has begun, then we have already failed,’’ Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for Human Rights, said. After the conference ended, there was mounting anger at American inaction. Although the airstrikes were effective, since October 2013, the United States has given just $416 million in humanitarian aid, which falls far short of what is needed. ‘‘Americans and the West were telling us they came to bring democracy, freedom and prosperity,’’ Louis Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon who addressed the Security Council, wrote to me in a recent email. ‘‘What we are living is anarchy, war, death and the plight of three million refugees.’’

Of the 3.1 million displaced Iraqis, 85 percent are Sunnis. No one has suffered more at the hands of ISIS than fellow Muslims. Other religious minorities have been affected as well and in large numbers: the Yazidis, who were trapped on Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq last summer, as ISIS threatened them with genocide; as well as Shia Turkmen; Shabak; Kaka’i; and the Mandeans, who follow John the Baptist. ‘‘Everyone has seen the forced conversions, crucifixions and beheadings,’’ David Saperstein, the United States ambassador at large for religious freedom, said. ‘‘To see these communities, primarily Christians, but also the Yazidis and others, persecuted in such large numbers is deeply alarming.’’

On U.S. policy, she has this to say, quoting two ArcU contributors, Tim Shah and myself:

It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents — Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal — to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing. In 2007, when Al Qaeda was kidnapping and killing priests in Mosul, Nina Shea, who was then a U.S. commissioner for religious freedom, says she approached the secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, who told her the United States didn’t intervene in ‘‘sectarian’’ issues. Rice now says that protecting religious freedom in Iraq was a priority both for her and for the Bush administration. But the targeted violence and mass Christian exodus remained unaddressed. ‘‘One of the blind spots of the Bush administration was the inability to grapple with this as a direct byproduct of the invasion,’’ says Timothy Shah, the associate director of Georgetown University’s Religious Freedom Project.

More recently, the White House has been criticized for eschewing the term ‘‘Christian’’ altogether. The issue of Christian persecution is politically charged; the Christian right has long used the idea that Christianity is imperiled to rally its base. When ISIS massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya this winter, the State Department came under fire for referring to the victims merely as ‘‘Egyptian citizens.’’ Daniel Philpott, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, says, ‘‘When ISIS is no longer said to have religious motivations nor the minorities it attacks to have religious identities, the Obama administration’s caution about religion becomes excessive.’’

Last fall, Obama did refer to Christians and other religious minorities by name in a speech, saying, ‘‘we cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.’’ When ISIS threatened to eradicate the Yazidis, ‘‘it was the United States that stepped in to beat back the militants,’’ Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says. In northeastern Syria, where ISIS is still launching attacks against Assyrian Christian villages, the U.S. military recently come to their aid, Baskey added. Refugees are a thornier issue. Of the more than 122,000 Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States, nearly 40 percent already belong to oppressed minorities. Admitting more would be difficult. ‘‘There are limits to what the international community can do,’’ Saperstein said.

Eshoo, the Democratic congresswoman, is working to establish priority refugee status for minorities who want to leave Iraq. ‘‘It’s a hair ball,’’ she says. ‘‘The average time for admittance to the United States is more than 16 months, and that’s too long. Many will die.’’ But it can be difficult to rally widespread support. The Middle East’s Christians often favor Palestine over Israel. And because support of Israel is central to the Christian Right — Israel must be occupied by the Jews before Jesus can return — this stance distances Eastern Christians from a powerful lobby that might otherwise champion their cause. Recently, Ted Cruz admonished an audience of Middle Eastern Christians at an In Defense of Christians event in Washington, telling them that Christians ‘‘have no better ally than the Jewish state.’’ Cruz was booed.