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From Wikimedia Commons: Rome, from the Vatican (J.M.W. Turner, 1820)

The story of Christianity, from its birth in persecution to its global witness today, is one of triumph through suffering. The Church was conceived in martyrdom and strengthened by the blood of those who refused to deny Christ. Across two millennia, it has known both glory and exile, power and abasement. Yet its endurance has never rested on wealth or empire but on the courage of believers who acted — who built, sheltered, defended, and bore witness in the face of mortal danger.

Today, the question of Christianity’s survival bears both the weight of history and the anguish of the present. Across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, Christians face violence, dispossession, and the deliberate erasure of their faith. Churches are burned, families displaced, children kidnapped, and entire villages emptied. To be Christian in parts of the Muslim world is to live one’s faith under siege. In the secularized West, the threat is different but no less grave: the slow amnesia of God, the polite apostasy of comfort. The Church thus confronts a double peril — annihilation by the sword and corrosion by neglect.

From the seventh century onward, Arab-Islamic conquests reshaped the religious landscape of the Old World. Lands that had been vibrant centers of Christianity — Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and later Asia Minor — fell under Muslim rule. Christians endured centuries as “dhimmis,” tolerated yet subordinated, their survival purchased through tribute and silence. Over time, conversion, migration, and persecution reduced once-flourishing Churches to remnants. The vast Church of the East (i.e., the Nestorian Church), which stretched from Antioch to China, was nearly extinguished. By the twentieth century, only scattered enclaves remained, living relics of the faith’s earliest centuries. 

This tragic decline is put down to savage warfare, genocidal-scale massacres, and deculturation. The fate of Christian communities established long before the upheavals of Islamic expansionism amounts to a disaster for humanity.........

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