Bethlehem's "marginalised minority"?

Rowan Williams recently described the Christians of Bethlehem as a "marginalised minority". This is not only incorrect, but possibly a damaging comment to those it aims to help.

Of course, the Archbish should be commended for using his good offices to highlight the difficulties Christians face in a number of places in the region, about which he clearly knows a great deal. But to characterise Bethlehem as "very definitely a place where Christians are a marginalised minority"seems to be gratuitous hyperbole.

Certainly, some Christians here do contribute anecdotes to a narrative of persecution for which there will be a ready and well-resourced audience in the West. This position may be the outworking of frightening or alienating experiences, of which there are undoubtedly some, though very often even these concrete examples are drawn from Jerusalem's charged melting pot, not Bethlehem. What's more, in other Palestinian towns such as Nablus, which used to have a healthy Christian minority, Christian communities may indeed face extinction, and Christians here are aware of that.

But it seems to me that the Palestinian Authority and other stakeholders in Palestinian public life bend over backwards to demonstrate the distinctively Christian character of Bethlehem and its satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Regardless of more altruistic motivations, it would be politically masochistic for them to do otherwise as the Palestinian national cause benefits a great deal internationally from being recognised as more than a Muslim struggle.

This political will might be demonstrated by three very different examples: the official and ecumenical endorsement of Bethlehem Bible College's 'Christ at the Checkpoint' Conference last year at which Salam Fayyad himself spoke; the reservation of the Mayoralty of the town to a Christian; and the appearance of Hamas officials at the Syriac Orthodox church in Bethlehem immediately after the massacres in Iraq and Egypt over the Christmas season explicitly to reject sectarian violence. Whether or not this is the outworking of genuine fraternal feeling is to some extent beside the point.

I might tentatively add another impression from the field. Where I have heard Christians express a sense of insecurity in Bethlehem specifically, it often seems somewhat reminiscent of the kind of defensiveness of established local populations in the face of immigration. The reason for the loss of a Christian majority here is of course related to the respective fertility of different communities and to emigration, but one mustn't forget that the population of Bethlehem was swollen by mostly Muslim refugees in 1948. The 'old families' of Bethlehem do not always look with affection upon them, and even some in-comer Christians drawn from families who arrived in the 20th Century have reported ill-feeling toward them from the established Christian families of Bethlehem. Tellingly, the attitude of Nablus Christians, among whom I lived for a couple of months in 2004, was never as defensive as that which sometimes I encounter here.

Promoting this narrative is risky. I recall recently listening to priest Jamal Khader (also Dean of Bethlehem University) assert the need to think of Palestinian Christians here not as a minority at all. I understood him to be saying that Western and local Christian anxiety about the plight of Palestinian Christians in particular, as opposed to Palestinians in general, may contribute to their 'othering' in the eyes of Muslims, and thus potentially undermine their persistence in the land which is presumably the Archbishop's goal. Some Christians may have a short-term interest in being thus othered, but Father Jamal would suggest, I think, that most do not.

Christian Palestinian sociologist Bernard Sabella has found that Christians leave the town for one overwhelming reason: economic hardship as a result of the occupation. This is wholly borne out by my interviews and informal conversations with Christians here, even those who are defensive and most aggressively sectarian. The Archbishop wishes to help Christians here, clearly, and in order to do this he must continue to challenge the Occupation and the theologies which support it, without giving succour to the defensiveness and Islamophobia which can prove dangerously divisive.