They Say We Are Infidels

Collin Hansen interviews Mindy Belz on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

“Everywhere militants were blowing up Christians, their churches, their shops. They threatened them with kidnapping. They promised to take their children. The message to these ‘infidels’: You have no place in Iraq. Pay a penalty to stay, leave, or be killed.”

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This description is from a book called They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East. The scene depicted is Iraq in 2006, eight years before ISIS starting targeting Iraqi Christians for persecution. The current onslaught from ISIS is only the latest in a string of threats to Christianity in Iraq and Syria. For this podcast, I talked about Christians in the Middle East with Mindy Belz, senior editor of WORLD magazine, and the author of They Say We Are Infidels. Thanks to Betsy Childs Howard for her help in preparing the interview.

Find more information on how to help Iraqi Christians through WORLD’s list of Iraqi AID groups. Also, see “In extremity, opportunity: Yes, there are ways to help defeat ISIS” from the June 13, 2015, issue of WORLD Magazine.

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Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.