The satirical 2003 film James’s Journey to Jerusalem tells the story of a naive young African Christian visiting Israel. Like many Christians through the ages, James is desperately anxious to visit the holy city that stands of the roots of the faith, but he can never quite find what he’s looking for. In the land of its birth, Christianity has ceased to be a significant presence. But currents in global trade and migration are raising the question, does God really allow his churches to vanish without a trace?

Actually, the truth is more complex, and so are the implications for theology. While some churches certainly have disappeared, the Holy Land today contains far more Christians for James to encounter than in many years past—and most of these are from new and rising Christian communities around the globe. However astonishing this may seem, people like James are themselves building a foundation for renewed Christian growth, even in a landscape as hostile as the Middle East.

Christianity has a very long history in the Middle East, and for centuries after apostolic times, churches and monasteries flourished as strongly in countries like Syria and Palestine as they did anywhere in the world. Nor did this success story end suddenly in the 630s, with the coming of the Muslims; Islamic regimes by and large tolerated other faiths. Only very gradually did the Middle East come to have a Muslim majority, and only long after the conquest—after 1100 or so—did Christians come under significant pressure.

From the 1200s, though, Middle Eastern Christian populations began a steep decline, largely due to political circumstances. As rapid climate change devastated the world, so different countries looked for scapegoats to blame for the resulting agricultural and natural disasters. In Europe, Christians blamed and persecuted their Jewish communities. In the Middle East, Muslims persecuted Christians, whose numbers soon shrank to a small fraction of what they had once been. The final blows came in modern times, especially during the turmoil and massacres of the First World War era. Millions of Christians were slaughtered or expelled, leaving countries like Turkey virtually free of any churches.

In our own time, ancient communities are still being wiped out before our eyes. Christian minorities survive and even thrive in Syria and Egypt, but the Arab population of Palestine, fifteen percent Christian a century ago, is about two percent Christian today.  Iraq, once the home of a significant Christian minority, will probably have at most a few thousand believers within another decade or two. This is a cultural and religious catastrophe of historic proportions, and nothing can minimize its horrors, or make it any more acceptable to victims who have lost everything.

But during the First World War—at the exact time that the most ancient churches were being rooted up across the Middle East—Christianity began its rapid spread across Asia and especially black Africa. By the end of the century, the number of Christians in Africa and Asia vastly exceeded the membership of the churches in the Middle East. Just as significant, globalization drew these newer African and Asian Christians to migrate around the globe, and they brought their faith with them. In the process, they brought a startling new birth of Christian faith to those ancient Christian heartlands, where pessimists might have thought the faith dead or dying. After reaching the furthest corners of the world, Christianity began to come home.

Photo: courtesy of HarperCollins
The U.S. government’s CIA Factbook is the place to go for many kinds of demographic trends. But because the Factbook largely reports official data, it reflects what particular countries want outsiders to believe, leaving big gaps when it comes to religion. To take a stunning example, the Factbook lists Saudi Arabia, a land of 28 million people where Islam is the only permitted religion, as 100 percent Muslim—no minorities of any kind. In reality, Saudi Arabia is only one of many Middle Eastern countries that over the years have imported millions of poor foreigners to do their menial jobs. Many of those immigrants are African and Asian Christians, including many Filipinos. Saudi Arabia’s Christian population, as a result, is really around five percent of the whole, perhaps 1.4 million people.

A similar story can be told of other Gulf nations, although some of these are more honest about just how religiously diverse they are. Christians—mainly poor immigrants and guest workers from the Global South—probably make up seven percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, ten percent of Bahrain or Kuwait. Those nations, amazingly, have far larger Christian minorities than they did a hundred years ago.

The most startling story of all is Israel itself, which according to the same CIA Factbook has just 30,000 Christians, or 0.4 percent of its people. But this figure is ridiculous, leaving out as it does thousands of Global South immigrants, often illegal residents, who are heavily Christian—real-life equivalents of the fictional James. The estimate also omits perhaps 80,000 Russian Christians who claimed to be Jews to enter Israel in the 1990s. In short, if we take Israel together with the occupied West Bank, we have a country of ten million people, of whom no less than half a million—five percent of the population—are Christians.

Now, these abundant Christians represent the full kaleidoscopic spectrum of the faith. The older survivor churches are heavily liturgical and formal in their worship style, and have also become well used to the restrictions of living under Muslim power. In contrast, the newer immigrant groups believe in freer expression of the faith, in the doctrine that the Spirit blows where it wills, and it can’t easily be subjected to official restraints. Charismatic newcomers meet old-established liturgical congregations. Each, though, in its own way, represents an ancient and thoroughly authentic expression of faith. The two forks of Christian history meet once again, in the land where the faith began. The story of what happens next remains to be written.

Meantime, what does this re-introduction of Christianity into the Middle East mean to any understanding of God’s plan or providence? Despite all the disasters of recent times, Middle Eastern Christianity not only survives, but it is on the upswing in a way that nobody could have foreseen half a century ago. Looking at this story, we might adapt a famous remark once made about Russia. Christianity is never as strong as it appears; but nor is it ever as weak as it appears. In God’s terms, words like strength and weakness can have very surprising meanings. And we also need to be cautious about making statements that claim to understand the goals or directions of history.

As the Psalmist declares, “a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night.” Perhaps only our limited awareness of time leads us to think that something like the ruin of a church has happened “forever”, when all we mean is that, by our mortal standards of historical time, we can see no chance of it being reversed. God works on a different time-scale.

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 (HarperOne).