How America Abandoned Secularism—and Betrayed Christians in the Middle East

The greatest betrayal of the modern West was not military but philosophical. When Washington and London chose to fight Marxism, they did not rally reason to their side—they rallied religion. In the Cold War crusade against the Soviet Union, they armed clerics to kill socialists. That single decision shattered the secular foundations of the Middle East, empowered Islamic fundamentalism, and doomed the region’s oldest Christians. Every American intervention that followed carried the same unspoken theology: better a mullah than a Marxist, better a mosque than a manifesto.

Iran and Pakistan were the first experiments. To block Soviet influence, Washington strengthened the Shah and courted conservative clerics who despised modernism. When the Shah fell, those same clerics built a theocracy that crushed secular life. In Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization program—funded and praised by the United States—replaced civic education with madrassas and civil law with sharia. America called him a partner against communism while he dismantled every secular institution left by Jinnah. Pakistan became an ideological factory of jihad, exporting zealots to Afghanistan and Kashmir with Western applause.

Afghanistan followed, the epicenter of America’s holy war. Under Operation Cyclone, the CIA and Saudi intelligence poured billions into the Mujahideen. Ronald Reagan called them “the moral equivalents of our Founding Fathers.” But the Founders were Deists and rationalists; the Mujahideen were medieval theocrats who banned music and murdered teachers. By confusing fanaticism with freedom, Washington baptized extremism as liberty. The war that was supposed to defend democracy ended by enthroning theology. Out of those mountains came al-Qaeda and the Taliban—monsters fed by American dollars and Saudi sermons.

Iraq and Syria were next. Both had Baathist regimes—secular, authoritarian, yet modernizing. They educated women, built industries, and kept religion under control. But Washington saw them not as secular governments but as Soviet clients. Sanctions, wars, and invasions followed. When Saddam Hussein fell, the last secular bulwark of Mesopotamia collapsed. Christians who had lived there since apostolic times were massacred or driven into exile. In Syria, the same script repeated. The United States and its allies armed Islamist insurgents to overthrow a secular dictator, birthing the Islamic State. Once again, the West destroyed a secular order and replaced it with a theocracy.

The pattern was global. Nasser’s Egypt was crushed after 1967, and the Muslim Brotherhood filled the vacuum. Gaddafi’s Libya was bombed into anarchy. Yugoslavia was dismantled, and NATO intervened for Bosnian Islamists against Orthodox Serbs. Greece—birthplace of Western reason—was left alone to face an expansionist Islamic Turkey protected by NATO’s indulgence. Everywhere the same equation: when forced to choose between secularism and faith, Washington chose faith. The West that once gave the world the Enlightenment now feared its own creation.

This was no accident; it was ideology. The United States defined itself as the defender of “faith” against “atheistic communism.” Marxism denied God; therefore, any movement that invoked God—no matter how reactionary—became a potential ally. The Pentagon called it geopolitics; the churches called it providence. The victims called it suicide. By collapsing the distinction between religion and liberty, the West destroyed both. The very secularism that had made its civilization strong was sacrificed on the altar of anti-Marxism.

The Christians of the Middle East paid the heaviest price. They possessed no oil, no armies, no theocratic slogans. They represented the rational middle—the bridge between Islamic and Western worlds. America had no use for them. They could not fight Marxism with verses; they could not shout jihad for dollars. They were the descendants of the same Enlightenment that Washington now rejected. From Lebanon to Iraq to Egypt, they were left defenseless, their churches burned, their people scattered. The cradle of Christianity became its graveyard—not through Islam alone, but through Western policy that weaponized Islam against modernity.

The end of the Cold War only magnified the contradiction. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Washington mistook theology’s victory for freedom’s. It believed that history itself had converted to capitalism. In truth, it had unleashed every reactionary force it had spent decades feeding. Bosnia became a NATO crusade for Muslim nationalism; Kosovo repeated the pattern. The moral vocabulary of democracy lingered, but the moral center was gone. The West no longer defended secularism—it defended whoever could serve its short-term interests.

September 11 was the reckoning. The jihadists created by Operation Cyclone turned their American rifles against their former patrons. The towers fell, and the empire that had armed zealots to destroy socialism suddenly discovered that zealots do not retire. Yet Washington did not repent; it doubled down. It invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, destroying the last secular remnants of those societies while proclaiming democracy. In Baghdad, Christians who once lived beside Muslims for two millennia were exterminated or expelled. In Kabul, twenty years of occupation ended with the Taliban’s return to power. The theologians of Washington and the clerics of Kandahar had finally become indistinguishable.

Libya, Syria, and Yemen followed. Gaddafi’s regime—secular and brutal—was bombed into chaos; Syria’s was attacked by “moderate” rebels who quickly joined al-Qaeda. ISIS rose from the ruins, waving the same black banners that once flew over America’s Afghan allies. Each intervention destroyed another secular order and produced another jihadist army. The West called it humanitarianism; the world saw it as apostasy from reason.

America’s alliances became a map of moral inversion. Saudi Arabia, whose clergy still preach hatred of non-Muslims, remains Washington’s favorite client. Pakistan, cradle of the Taliban, receives aid. Turkey jails secularists and threatens Greece but stays shielded by NATO. Meanwhile, the Copts of Egypt, the Maronites of Lebanon, and the Assyrians of Iraq are left to perish. In every case, the same perverse rule applies: every theocracy is an ally, every secular republic an enemy.

By now this pattern is not merely strategy—it is identity. The United States no longer sees itself as a secular republic defending reason, but as a “faith-based” empire chosen to export divine freedom. Presidents quote scripture more than science. Diplomats preach “religious tolerance” while arming intolerance. The Enlightenment vocabulary of rights and reason has been replaced by the evangelical language of destiny. A nation founded by Deists has become the sword of priests. In the name of fighting atheism, it has enthroned fanaticism.

The last secular movements—Marxist Kurds, left-wing Arabs, humanist intellectuals—are crushed by both empires: Western capitalism and Eastern theocracy. For the mullah they are infidels; for Washington they are radicals. The rationalist is the new heretic. The Middle East that once gave the world mathematics, medicine, and Christianity now exports superstition. That is not history’s accident; it is the West’s design.

Europe, too, has followed America into moral decay. It speaks of human rights while financing clerical tyrants. It abandoned Greece to appease Turkey, armed Saudi Arabia, and watched refugees from its own wars drown in the Mediterranean. The continent that produced Voltaire and Hume now funds medievalism. The Enlightenment that began in Athens ends in Brussels—bureaucratic, timid, and apologetic. Europe’s conscience has been colonized by Washington’s theology.

The circle closes here. The West, born in revolt against priestcraft, has become the patron of priests. It destroyed the Soviet Union only to enthrone the mullah. It toppled the secular Arab republics only to empower the caliph. It abandoned the Christians of the East because they embodied the world that once balanced faith and reason. Their extinction is not collateral—it is revelation. When America betrayed secularism to fight Marxism, it condemned both the Middle East and itself.

If redemption exists, it lies in remembering what the Founding Fathers actually believed. They were not missionaries but rationalists. They built a republic of reason, not revelation. Their enemy was tyranny—whether crowned or consecrated. They knew freedom dies when church and state embrace. America has forgotten that truth. It preaches liberty while arming faith. It wages holy wars in the name of democracy and calls the ruins enlightenment. The last Christians of the Middle East, dying in silence, are its mirror—a civilization that crucified its own reason.

Citations

1. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Meeting With Afghan Resistance Leaders,” The American Presidency Project, Feb 2 1983.
2. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin Press, 2004).
3. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Carnegie, 2005).
4. Nina Shea, “Endangered: The Iraqi Christians,” Hudson Institute Report, 2015.
5. Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad (Verso, 2016).
6. Michele Dunne, “Egypt’s Unfinished Transition,” Carnegie Papers, 2013.
7. Congressional Research Service, U.S.–Saudi Arabia Relations, 2023.
8. Soner Çağaptay, Erdogan’s Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2020).
9. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (Penguin, 1996).
10. Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne, 2008).
11. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (Metropolitan Books, 2003).
12. Andrew Mango, Atatürk (Overlook Press, 2000).
13. Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2012).
14. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005).
15. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802); James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785).