A profound series of crises has overtaken Middle Eastern Christianity in modern times. Displacement by war, genocide and interreligious conflict, leading to loss, emigration and exile are the main experiences of its followers. Some observers have even suggested that there is a "Christian barometer" that provides the world with an accurate measurement of the political atmosphere in the Middle East, according to how the Christian minorities are treated.

The theory goes that as the Middle East becomes more free and prosperous, linked to the West and hospitable to minorities and women, the higher the probability that the Christians will continue to live there. The most highly educated and multilingual Christians, who are part of a large diaspora in Europe and North America, may even return. But if Christians sense that things are getting worse, if the  Arab countries they live in lose their commitment to political, economic and religious freedom, they tend to emigrate from the Middle East.

A major testing ground for the future of Christians in the Middle East is Iraq since the fall of the Baathist regime in 2003, and the extent to which they are tolerated today is being watched closely by the Maronites of Lebanon, the Copts of Egypt and other non-Muslim populations of the region.

So far the outlook is troubling. Christians in the country are deeply worried by the rise of radical Islamic tendencies in both the majority Shia and the former ruling class, the Sunni minority. Church bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations have led to large numbers of Christians leaving.

An estimated 200,000 have fled Iraq since the downfall of Saddam. Some are refugees elsewhere in the Middle East region, including around 60,000 in Syria and 40,000 in Jordan. Some states have welcomed these newcomers and hope that they will stay and that their presence will add to a diversity in society, which in turn will help support "moderate" politics. In fact previous generations of displaced Christians, particularly Armenians and other oriental Christians, arrived in Lebanon and made that country (before the civil war of 1975 to 1990) a leading cultural and economic space for the region. Now there are large numbers of Christians (Orthodox and Catholic) in Galilee and south Lebanon who are caught, like so many others, between Israel and Hezbollah.

Elsewhere, numbers are falling. In the last days of the Ottoman Empire, Christians made up 20-30 per cent of the population. Since then, the Armenian genocide in 1915, the massacre of the Syriac Christians near the end of the First World War and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey (there is still debate about numbers but approximately 1.5 million Orthodox Christians and half a million Muslims) have taken their toll.

Today there are barely 200,000 Christians in Turkey's population of 70 million, although there might be up to two million people of Armenian descent who issue from the large numbers of Christians taken as slaves or forced into Islam at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. A number of these each year retrace steps to their, more often than not, grandmothers' original Christian faith. Christians in Syria are down from 20 per cent before the Second World War to fewer than 10 per cent, around 800,000, today.

During the Lebanese Civil War, some 670,000 Christians were displaced, compared with 160,000 Muslims. Hitherto Lebanon had always had a Christian majority, but not now, which has allowed Shia Muslims to emerge as the majority community, and its political organisations, such as Hezbollah, to try to capture the state and challenge traditional Maronite Christian dominance.

In Iraq, since the beginning of the 1960s and the internal war against the Kurds, some one million Christians have emigrated from their northern mountain homelands, with Baghdad gaining large numbers of them and the Chaldean patriarchate relocating there in 1950.

In Egypt, although several hundred thousand mainly Greek, Armenian and Syrian Christians left in the 1950s, the large Coptic Christian population has traditionally not migrated until very recent times; now one estimate is that maybe 12 per cent of Copts live abroad. Meanwhile the Holy Land has seen some 230,000 Christians leaving since 1948, with the Christian population in Jerusalem alone dropping from 30,000 to as few as 5,000 today. In Iran, there may be fewer than 150,000 Christians left after many departed following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Christianity in the Middle East is often obscured, especially from the West. Its history has been a contested one, with followers - Assyrians, Chaldeans, Copts, Maronites - caught between an Eastern Christian identity and a rich, diverse, Arab Christian one. It is frequently forgotten that it was initially the Syriac Christians (and not Arab Islam) who handed on the heritage of science from the ancients through their translations into Arabic.

The Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries produced a three-way split among the Christian Churches that still continues to this day, although it is only among the Churches of Syriac liturgical tradition that all three doctrinal positions are represented. The divisions were originally caused by controversy over how best to describe the relationship between the divinity and the humanity in the incarnate Christ. For the Orthodox and Catholic traditions the matter had been settled by the carefully balanced doctrinal formulation produced by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but this had not been agreed by the Churches of the Middle East by the time of the Arab invasions of the seventh century, at the birth of Islam, when they were politically cut off from those of the Byzantine Empire and the West.

Centuries of Muslim Ottoman domination fossilised the Middle Eastern Churches in their divisions. Initially the Ottoman rulers centralised all Christian authority in their lands within the Patriarchate of Constantinople (followed a few years later by an Armenian Patriarchate). It was not until the nineteenth century that reformist measures allowed these ancient Churches to be formally recognised. Now a combination of contemporary crises and ecumenism are beginning to bring down the barriers. In recent years there have been agreements on many levels, from permission for partial mutual participation in sacraments, to the formation of future priests, catechesis. Christian theologians have been calling for a new evaluation of meaning to this innovative kind of communion that is growing among the Churches of the Middle East. The Christian Churches have become part and parcel of each other in some mysterious way.

One example of this agreement is "The Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East" (the two principal Iraqi Christian communities) issued by the Holy See in 2001. This allows for a Chaldean Catholic or a member of the Church of the East to take Communion at each other's liturgy if "pastoral necessity" required, "as there cannot be a priest for every local community in such a widespread diaspora".

Although large-scale emigration out of the Middle East has been disastrous from the point of view of the life of the indigenous Christian Churches in the Middle East, there have been at least two good consequences. Emigration to Western countries has provided the possibility of publication without censorship, and it has brought the existence of non-Chalcedonian Churches more into the awareness of the Western Churches, thus providing an opportunity and incentive for theological dialogue.

The rich pluralism of traditions in the ancient Patriarchate of Antioch (covering the territories of Lebanon and Syria) has suffered many divisions in the course of history. As a result, today five patriarchates bear the title of the See of Antioch. During the past decades, a growing awareness of the absurdity of this situation has induced new efforts to re-establish communion among the different traditions. The Greek Orthodox patriarch Ignatius IV Hazim has sought to revive a synodical process involving all the Churches of the region, meeting and working together on a regular basis in the social and pastoral fields.

The most remarkable initiative in this area is the pastoral agreement between the Greek Orthodox and the Syrian Orthodox patriarchates of Antioch in 1991. As far back as 1974, meetings took place between the synods of the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholic patriarchates with a view to re-establishing unity on the local level, without waiting for an agreement on the universal level. However, this alarmed the Holy See and representatives of Eastern Orthodox authorities, who reminded these Churches that theological exchange must not be limited but instead involve the wider Catholic and Orthodox confessions to which they belong.

Despite this, both Churches continued to develop relations. When the Syrian Government allocated areas in a recent new urban development for the construction of a mosque and a church, Christians were presented with an awkward problem: which Christian community would build the church and who would be the owner? In February last year, the Church of St Peter and St Paul in the Doummar quarter in Damascus was jointly consecrated by the two Churches' patriarchs.

Modern times have brought about a profound change in Christianity in the Middle East. The Christian communities have lost many of their most educated and young members, and in some places more men than women have left. Christian women then marry Muslim men, fracturing the Christian population and diminishing it, with implications for property rights and children's education.

Yet, despite the many millions lost to emigration, other diaspora communities have grown correspondingly. Today large numbers of non-indigenous Christians have come to live and work in the region, brought in by the global economy. Around 250,000 Christian workers are estimated to be in Israel, made up of Eastern European (for example 60,000 Romanians) and Asian workers. There are large numbers of mainly Catholic Filipinos, and increasingly Sri Lankans, Indians and Africans in the area. Around 140,000 Asian workers live in Lebanon, 80 per cent of whom are women. At times the traditional Churches are slow to provide for them.

In this changing situation, patterns of authority have altered, somewhat marginalised by secular politics, and the patriarchs of the different Churches have emerged as significant voices for Christianity in the political public square. In the context of the profound social and economic dislocation created by modernity, political upheaval, lack of legitimate political structures, and religious revival that have brought these traditional loci of authority to the fore, we think of the public role of the Coptic Patriarch Shenouda in Egypt, the Maronite Patriarch Sfeir in Lebanon, and Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch in the Holy Land, to name but some.

Christianity has its historic roots in the Middle East. Now, against a background of displacement, newcomer Christians have arrived. However it is still, at this point, difficult to predict the future configuration of Christianity in the region. 

Anthony O'Mahony is director of the Centre for Christianity and Interreligious Dialogue at Heythrop College, University of London, and has recently edited Christianity in the Middle East (2006) and Christianity and Jerusalem: Theology and Politics in the Holy Land (2006).

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