Christianity's empty cradle?

While this article is not concerned with Protestant Christianity, it does offer some interesting history of the church in this region:

"In Turkey, where the 1915 Armenian genocide is still a painful memory, other Christians were forced from their ancestral homes in the last decades of the 20th century during Turkey’s suppression of the Kurdish rebellion, as Dalrymple explains in From the Holy Mountain. Caught between the Turkish military and Kurdish rebels, Anatolia, the ancient Christian heartland, has been depopulated of Christians. In Istanbul, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, only 2,000 Orthodox Christians remain.

In sum, “the cradle of Christianity” is under enormous pressures from demographic decline, the growth of Islamic militancy, official and unofficial discrimination, the Iraq war, the Palestinian intifada, failed peace policies and political manipulation. Political conditions, including Lebanon’s sputtering recovery from its civil war, have accelerated this decline. U.S. policy has had an indirect but decidedly negative impact, especially in Iraq, but in its neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and ambivalence toward Lebanon’s political and economic recovery as well. To the degree that “the war on terror” has inflamed relations with Middle East Muslims and spurred the growth of Islamic militancy, it has also aggravated the situation for the region’s Christians."

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