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So shocking were the purges that they demanded new legal vocabulary. Some months afterwards, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin used the cases of the Assyrians, and the Christian Armenians before them, to argue for a new legal category of Crimes of Barbarity: "acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious, or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.)." A great humanitarian, Lemkin developed this theme over the following years, and in 1943, he coined a new word for this atrocious behavior, namely genocide. The modern concept of genocide as a uniquely horrible act demanding international sanctions has its roots in the thoroughly successful movements to eradicate Middle Eastern Christians.

Christians did fairly well under the secular and nationalist rule of the Ba'ath Party, which rejected Muslim domination. In fact, Christians had originally helped found the Ba'ath, and long remained among its greatest supporters. Saddam's foreign minister and deputy Tariq Aziz was by origin a member of the Chaldean church, and bore the purely Christian name of Mikhail Yuhanna, "Michael John." Reportedly, 20 percent of Iraq's teachers, as well as many of its doctors and engineers, were Christian then.

But international events took their toll. The nation's economy was devastated by two wars, against Iran in the 1980s and against the U.S.-led Coalition in 1990-91, and the painful international sanctions that followed. These events provoked the exodus of everyone who could leave easily, which usually meant those professional groups, among whom Christians were well represented.

The second invasion of 2003 proved the final straw by unleashing Muslim militancy, both Sunni and Shi'ite, while removing any central policing authority. In the ensuing anarchy, Christians became primary targets of mobs and militias. Since that point, the story of Iraq's Christianity has been a catalog of persecution and martyrdom. Just between 2003 and 2007, two-thirds of Iraq's remaining Christians left the country, and the population will certainly shrink further in coming years, probably to a vanishing point.

What we are seeing then is the death of one of the world's greatest Christian enterprises. Certainly, its glory days were far behind it. Recall what William Wordsworth wrote when the Republic of Venice was snuffed out after centuries of dominating the Mediterranean world:

And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay?
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reach'd its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

How could we mourn dying churches less than dead republics?

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008)

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Recent articles on Iraq are available on our site.

Jenkins is also the author of God's Continent, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing in the Bible in the Global South, and other books.

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December (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 53