As we march toward Christmas, following the “pa-rum-pa-pum-pum” beat of commercialism to the schlocky versions of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ piped into shopping malls or blaring in public squares this time of year, here is something to reflect on.
This scene of a local boy called by the Magi, or wise men from the East, to honor the newborn Jesus was set in a shepherd’s field on the edge of the town of Bethlehem, in what is today often referred to as the occupied West Bank. More than 2,000 years ago that little town of Bethlehem was part of a land that the Hebrew Bible refers to as Judea and Samaria, but what the then-occupying army of the Roman Empire referred to on its maps as Palestine.
So these very first followers of Jesus were coming to the faith in the context of Second Temple Judaism. And now, in the land where the Christian faith was born, that living presence of Christianity and its 2,000 years of history is disappearing. This solidarity with the struggles of the indigenous Christians of the Middle East is at the heart of the reason why the newly elected Pope Leo chose Lebanon and Turkey for his first international trip as the first American pope.
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For a quarter century, I have been researching and writing about the layered history of the indigenous life of Christianity in the Middle East and the many complex reasons contributing to the vanishing of the Christian population in the Holy Land. I wrote a book in 2001 about this called “The Body and The Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace.” From Christmas 1999 through Easter 2001, I traced the path of Jesus’ life through Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth and other places he is believed to have visited, reporting from Jordan and Egypt as well as Lebanon. The journey reveals that the themes that were resonant in the time of Jesus’ life – religious extremism, military occupation, forced migration of the poor and the tensions of globalism – are all still shaping the land called ‘holy.’
The book is dated. I wrote it 25 years ago when I was based in Jerusalem for five years as The Boston Globe’s Middle East bureau chief. I can see more clearly now how the book is perhaps flawed in some of its approaches. And, quite frankly, I can see it is just too damn long! But I am referencing it – and want to highlight a subsequent body of work I’ve done more recently through GroundTruth special reports – now because the reporting and the historical themes I’ve explored are powerfully resonant today. I believe looking at the Holy Land through the lens of a dwindling Christian presence can offer a way for us to think about how we might try to understand the modern Middle East, particularly the conflict in Israel-Palestine and the unique challenges that Lebanon faces with the largest Christian population in the Arab world.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that Pope Leo chose Lebanon as a destination for the first international trip of his papacy, and one that in many ways may define the role he seeks the Roman Catholic Church, and its 1.4 billion followers worldwide, to play as an advocate for peace in the years ahead. The pope presides over a church that is surging in growth in Africa, Latin America and Asia while still dwindling dramatically in the Middle East.
The numbers documenting that decline, as best we can find them, are staggering. In Lebanon, the population was long viewed as about 50 percent Christian and the rest a mix of Muslim, both Shia and Sunni, and Druze. Today, scholars when I wrote my book placed that number closer to 25 percent, and some of those same scholars contend that it is continually shrinking so perhaps now approaching 20 percent. In Jerusalem, across the West Bank, and Gaza the Christian population has dwindled to a number that is statistically so small it is hard to register.
During the British Mandate in Palestine following World War II, Christians were believed to represent about 10 percent of the total Palestinian population. Today, they represent less than 2 percent of the West Bank and Jerusalem and a fraction of 1 percent in Gaza. And this dwindling presence is occurring across the region both measured as a percentage of population and as the number of people. For example, the U.S. State Department estimates, the number of Christians in Iraq has reportedly fallen from 1.2 million in 2011 to 120,000 in 2024, and the number in Syria from 1.5 million to 300,000. These diminishing numbers, the State Department says, are broadly driven by persecution by terrorist groups and repression by authoritarian regimes.
With this context in mind, there is no place like the vibrant and tragic culture of Lebanon as a setting to take on all this history and its meaning. And it is fitting that the Pope seeks to highlight the unique role Lebanon’s Christians – a mix of Maronite Catholics, followers of the Anglican Church and Eastern Orthodox rites – play in a country that only in January of this year was able to form a somewhat stable government after years of instability and a political deadlock between its multiple factions, and that still feels the heavy influence of the Islamist organization Hezbollah in addition to the steady Israeli bombings and counter attacks by Hezbollah, despite a cease-fire that isn’t enforced on any side.
Pope Leo addressed this challenge in Lebanon and Lebanon’s role as a country that has worked hard to ends its own civil conflict, and offered words of encouragement for their perseverance, saying, “Even when it requires sacrifice, peacemakers dare to persevere. There are times when it is easier to flee, or simply more convenient to move elsewhere. It takes real courage and foresight to stay or return to one’s own country, and to consider even somewhat difficult situations worthy of love and dedication. We know that here, as in other parts of the world, uncertainty, violence, poverty and many other threats are leading to an exodus of young people and families seeking a future elsewhere, even though it is very painful to leave one’s homeland. It is certainly necessary to recognize that much good can come to all of you from having Lebanese people spread throughout the world.”
So as we all continue the march toward Christmas, and the next time you hear that “Little Drummer Boy” song you might stop to think for a moment about who that boy represents. To be clear, the song is not about anything real, as far as we know, it is more likely just a legend or parable that evolved as a way to think about how a poor local kid might honor an infant that three wise men from the East told him was a newborn king. The little boy had no gift for the infant. So, as the song proclaims, he brought his drum to play for a poor woman and her newborn seeking shelter in a cave where shepherds kept their flock just outside of Bethlehem.
Today, that local kid would be Palestinian and he would have sympathized with the plight of the Holy Family, Mary and Joseph, who traveled from Nazareth where they lived to Bethlehem because they were ordered back to their family’s traditional hometown, to register for a census. The occupying Romans did not really care that Mary was with child when they issued the edict. They were a Jewish family under the subjugation of an occupying power. Today we might even call the Holy Family internally displaced people.
For me, I see the faces of Joseph and Mary and her newborn and maybe even this poor boy from Bethlehem tagging along with a beat-up drum among the vast crowds of destitute Palestinian refugees trying to get back to their homes ravaged by Israel’s war on Gaza. I see their faces among the people caught up in forces driven by the powerful, and I see the innocence and hope that we all can see in the face of an infant in the loving arms of their mother. And that, for me, is the real meaning of Christmas, “pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.”
Charles M. Sennott is the founder of The GroundTruth Project and the author of “The Body and The Blood: The Middle East’s Christians and the Possibility for Peace.” (PublicAffairs, 2001.)
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This article originally appeared on charlessennott.substack.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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