The years of bloody conflict still raging across the Middle East in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and other failing states have made headlines for the mass migration of Muslims out of the region, but there is another side to this story: the largest Christian exodus in modern history.
As the fellows at the Center for American progress point out, Christians, now faced with murder on a genocidal scale, have abandoned their ancestral homes across the Middle East under intense pressure from not only from civil wars, ISIS and other Islamic extremists but also from increasingly discriminatory legal codes and institutions in Muslim countries.
Threatened with discrimination, enslavement and death at the hands of Islamic radicals, millions of families are forced to make a desperate choice to leave behind everything they know and seek safety in the West.
Since 2011, genocide and the accompanying exodus of Christians from the region have proceeded at an alarming rate. In 1910, Christians accounted for 13.6% of the population of the Middle East, according to Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.
Over the next 100 years, this number plummeted to only 4.2%, according the data gathered by researchers in 2010. Today, projections for the Christian population in 2025 put the number at just over 3%, yet even this number now seems high considering the ISIS-led near-total depopulation of Christian populations in parts of Iraq and Syria, alongside the continued campaign of violence in terror in Egypt and across the region.
The Christian genocide in the Middle East is one of the great human tragedies of modern times. The cradle of civilization and many of the most significant sites of the faith is now lost to Christianity in a region dominated by Islamic theocracy that rules nearly unopposed.
The future promises to bring only more conflict between rival Islamic sects and a hardening radicalism that rejects modernity, other cultures and belief systems distinct from Islam.
The moderating effect that minority religious groups, Christians and Jews in this case, can have on a society will be removed and both Sunni and Shiite sects will grow increasingly strict and absolutist.
Pushed into exile, Christians from the region will watch from afar as their homes become the breeding ground for new generations of Islamic fundamentalism and theocratic despotism.