What happens when American Christians pray for persecuted believers on Sunday, then support foreign policies that place those same believers in danger on Monday?
Many of us hear words like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine and picture one large Muslim world. We forget that these lands are also home to some of the oldest Christian communities on earth. Christians were worshiping there long before the United States existed. Some still pray in Syriac, a form of the language Jesus spoke.
Yet their churches are bombed, their families are displaced, and their stories rarely enter our Sunday morning conversations.
In this episode, Craig talks with Mennonite pastor, writer, screenwriter, and activist Nathan Perrin. Nathan has spent nearly a decade working alongside Assyrians, Kurds, Palestinians, and other communities in the Middle East and Chicago.
This is not a simple conversation about choosing a political side. It is about seeing people whom our maps, headlines, and churches often hide. It is also about asking whether Western Christianity has become so tied to American power that people in other lands fear the empire when they hear the name of Christ.
A Cross Full of Bullet Holes
Nathan’s path began with discomfort.
As a teenager, he spent time in Messianic Jewish circles. He heard Christians speak about Arabs and Muslims as if they were less than human. One pastor even spoke about turning the Middle East “into glass” if people there refused to support Israel.
That language did not sound like Jesus.
Nathan was also dating a Palestinian Christian. The people he knew did not match the enemy pictures he was being given. The story began to crack. Later, while studying at Bible college, his growing belief in Christian peace moved from an idea into a calling.
After graduation, he traveled to northern Iraq with Community Peacemaker Teams. He visited an Assyrian church that Saddam Hussein’s regime had reportedly tried to destroy several times. Each time, the people rebuilt it.
In the courtyard stood a cross full of bullet holes. It was not a monument to revenge. It was a sign that the community was still there, that they would rebuild.
Even more striking was what happened when Turkish bombardments threatened the village. Christian and Muslim neighbors exchanged keys to their homes. Each family knew the other might need shelter.
No speeches. No campaign slogans. Just neighbor helping neighbor.
During the church service, Nathan could understand almost nothing. The liturgy was loud and spoken in Syriac. But one translated line reached him:
“Jesus wants us to be the church to the world.” — 05:30
That sentence changed the direction of his ministry.
Maybe we do not need to bring Jesus to these ancient communities. Maybe they have something to teach us about Jesus.
When “Evangelical” Sounds Like Empire
In many American churches, evangelical sounds like a normal Christian label. In parts of the Middle East, it carries a much heavier history.
Nathan explains that Assyrian Christians were cautious when he first approached them. Their first concern was whether he planned to “evangelize” them.
Think about how strange that is. These are Christians whose traditions reach back toward the earliest centuries of the church. Yet Western missionaries have sometimes treated them as if they knew nothing about Christ.
Nathan describes missionaries offering more aid to people who converted (even when those people were already Christians). Help became a sales tool. Food, money, or safety came with a religious condition attached.
That is not the way of Jesus.
Jesus healed people who never joined His movement. He fed crowds without making them sign a statement of faith. He loved before anyone could repay Him.
Nathan says many Muslims he has met do not reject Christian belief itself. They are often willing to work beside Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and others who honor their full humanity. What they distrust is a Christianity mixed with coercion, colonial power, and nationalism.
The question for us is uncomfortable: when people meet Western Christians, do they sense the love of Christ, or do they wonder what we are trying to take from them?
Praying for Persecuted Christians While Funding the Danger
The Middle East cannot be treated as one nation with one story. Iran is not Iraq. Iraq is not Lebanon. Palestine is not Kurdistan.
Nathan describes Iran as a harsh theocracy. Traditional Orthodox and Catholic communities have sometimes been allowed to worship, while public evangelism and conversion from Islam may bring serious danger. He tells Craig about a Farsi-speaking church near Chicago with only a few people in the room but many more joining online from Iran.
The Iranian government deserves honest criticism. But condemning a government does not make bombing its people righteous.
War rarely harms only rulers. It tears through apartment buildings, water systems, schools, churches, mosques, and family homes. It also creates what intelligence agencies call blowback: harmful results that return after military intervention.
Nathan argues that when the United States attacks Muslim-majority countries while presenting itself as a Christian nation, local Christians can become targets. Extremist groups begin to treat them as agents of the West, even when they have lived peacefully beside Muslim neighbors for generations.
He offers a hard challenge to American churches:
“Whenever I’m in an evangelical service and I hear prayers for persecuted Christians, I wonder if that pastor will also preach sermons about not supporting policies that put Christians at risk.” — 17:05
Praying is good. But what does the prayer mean if we keep blessing the machine creating the danger?
And the concern cannot stop with Christians. Muslims, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Jews, Kurds, Palestinians, and every other person caught beneath the bombs bear God’s image too.
Jesus did not tell us to protect only the neighbors who share our theology.
The End-Times Story Behind the War Story
Why do so many American churches support the State of Israel without question?
Nathan traces much of that loyalty to dispensationalism, an end-times system that became popular in the Western church during the last two centuries. In this system, the modern State of Israel becomes part of a prophetic checklist. Its existence is treated as a step toward the return of Jesus.
But this can turn real Jewish people into pieces on someone else’s religious game board.
That is not friendship.
Nathan explains that it is possible to love Jewish neighbors, oppose antisemitism, and still criticize the actions of the Israeli government. A government is not an ethnic group. A state is not a religion. Criticizing bombs, blockades, forced displacement, or collective punishment is not the same as hating Jewish people.
In fact, Jewish people themselves hold many different views about Zionism and the modern State of Israel.
Christian Zionism can also feed anti-Muslim racism. Muslims become the permanent villain. When something goes wrong, churches blame Islam instead of examining Western weapons, coups, sanctions, occupations, and proxy wars.
After September 11, 2001 fear made this easier. Muslims were presented as a single violent mass. The church often repeated that story instead of questioning it.
When our end-times chart requires us to ignore suffering, perhaps the chart, not compassion, is the thing that needs to go.
The Plate of Food That Broke the Spell
Craig shares a small story that carries much of the episode’s message.
After September 11, he had accepted the idea that Americans had to kill Muslims before Muslims killed them. He did not think of himself as hateful. He was afraid.
Then he met a Muslim neighbor during Ramadan.
The man was cooking outside and offered to bring Craig some food. Craig had to leave for work, so the neighbor saved him a plate and brought it to his apartment the next day.
That simple act broke through years of fear.
The man was not a distant symbol on television. He was a neighbor with a name, a meal, and enough care to ensure that Craig didn’t miss dinner.
Empire needs strangers. Jesus keeps turning strangers into neighbors.
This is why face-to-face life matters. A television host can tell us to fear millions of people at once. It is harder to hold that fear when one of those people is standing at our door with a plate of food.
“Christians Are Our Neighbors”
When Craig asks how Muslims in the region view Christians, Nathan gives a simple answer:
“Christians are our neighbors.” — 33:10
The tension Nathan witnessed was often not between ordinary Muslims and Christians. It was between communities and state power.
Many people were warm toward Christianity but cautious around white Western Christians. That caution came from history: missionaries tied to colonial power, governments speaking the name of God while dropping bombs, and churches treating ancient believers as mission projects.
Nathan also introduces listeners to communities that rarely appear in Western Christian discussions.
Assyrians are an ancient people whose ethnic identity is closely tied to Christianity. Yazidis suffered mass killing and enslavement under ISIS. Mandaeans, a small religious group connected to ancient Gnostic traditions and John the Baptist, have also faced violence and displacement.
Their stories differ, but a pattern appears again and again: when religion joins the government’s hunger for control, neighbors begin to fear one another.
Faith becomes a flag. Identity becomes a target. Human beings become categories.
The Kingdom of God moves in the opposite direction. Jesus gives people back their names.
Human Rights Without the Bombs
Nathan is not arguing that governments should never be criticized. He supports standing for human rights. But he asks whether a country can honestly lecture another nation about justice while funding bombs, suppressing local self-rule, or placing its own interests above the people living there.
He remembers being in northern Iraq during a Kurdish independence referendum. The vote passed by a wide margin, but the United States and Iraqi governments opposed the outcome. Nathan uses the story to point toward the many smaller proxy conflicts that never become major American headlines.
We usually hear about a region only after a missile is fired. We miss the years of outside pressure, secret agreements, sanctions, weapons shipments, and political interference that came first.
This does not excuse terrorism or cruelty. It helps us understand how violence grows.
Understanding is not the same as approval. It is simply refusing to pretend history began on the day our preferred news channel started covering it.
Thinking Theologically, Not Tribally
Nathan has been called a heretic and a dangerous socialist because he opposes war and questions American foreign policy.
His answer is almost funny in its simplicity: he believes in the resurrection, reads the Bible, and tries to follow Jesus.
“I don’t really think politically. I think theologically.” — 29:50
That does not mean theology has nothing to say about politics. It means party loyalty and nationalism do not get the final word.
If Jesus tells us to love enemies, a pastor cannot erase that command with a sermon about national security. If Jesus blesses peacemakers, a politician cannot turn warmaking into a Christian virtue. If Jesus identifies Himself with hungry and wounded people, we cannot ignore their suffering because they live beyond our border.
Craig puts it another way: when someone becomes angry because we quote Jesus, their argument may not truly be with us.
It may be with Jesus.
Christian Nationalism After the Politician Is Gone
Craig and Nathan also discuss the rise of Christian nationalism during the Trump era.
Churches did not invent flag ceremonies, political loyalty, or fear-based preaching in 2016. But those habits became louder. Political leaders were treated as protectors of the faith. Some believers reached a point where no action by their chosen leader could make them withdraw support.
Craig remembers asking one man where his line was. What could Trump do that would finally be too much?
The answer was, “There is no line.”
That is no longer ordinary political support. It is surrendered judgment.
Nathan believes Christian nationalists may someday distance themselves from a particular politician. But the deeper ideology will remain. It survives in closed information silos where every outside voice is treated as an enemy.
People can see suffering with their own eyes and still reject it because their trusted group tells them it is not real.
How do we respond? Not with our own cult of anger.
Nathan calls Christians to patient, honest engagement. We tell the truth, keep listening, and leave room for the Holy Spirit to do work that no argument can force.
Patience does not mean silence. It means we refuse to become cruel while confronting cruelty.
We Cannot Whitewash War
Near the end, Craig asks where listeners can begin learning.
Nathan recommends Palestinian Christian teachers, books, sermons, documentaries, and films that show war from inside the lives of those who endure it. Some focus on Palestinians. Others come from Israeli Jewish filmmakers wrestling with their nation’s use of violence.
The goal is not to replace one propaganda feed with another. It is to recover the people hidden behind slogans.
Nathan sums up the lesson clearly:
“You can’t whitewash war. You can’t whitewash genocide.” — 53:35
Following Jesus requires us to look.
We look at the wounded child, the frightened family, the ancient congregation, the Muslim neighbor, the traumatized soldier, and the person our political tribe has taught us not to see.
Then we ask the question empire avoids:
What does love require of us now?
🤝Connect with Nathan Perrin🤝
Website: https://nathanperrinwriter.com
Writing and film: Essays, screenwriting, a forthcoming novella, and a children’s project developed with an Assyrian media company
Mennonite Action Chicago: Christian organizing under Palestinian community leadership; search “Mennonite Action Chicago” on Instagram
Community Peacemaker Teams: Peace and human-rights work in Iraq, Kurdistan, Palestine, and other regions
Resources Mentioned by Nathan
Munther Isaac: Christ in the Rubble and his sermons from Bethlehem
Mitri Raheb: Books and teaching on Palestinian Christianity
Naim Ateek: Justice and Only Justice and A Palestinian Theology of Liberation
Documentaries: Israelism and 1948: Creation & Catastrophe
Films: Munich, Waltz with Bashir, and Lebanon
Highlights & Takeaways
Christianity was born in the Middle East, not the United States, and ancient Christian communities still live throughout the region.
Western military intervention can create blowback that places both Muslims and local Christians in greater danger.
Aid tied to conversion is coercion, not Christlike service.
Loving Jewish people does not require unquestioning support for the Israeli government.
End-times theology becomes dangerous when real people are treated as pieces in a prophecy puzzle.
Personal contact can break political fear; a shared meal often teaches more than a thousand angry broadcasts.
Ordinary Muslims and Christians frequently view one another as neighbors until governments, militias, and foreign powers turn identity into a weapon.
Christian nationalism will not disappear with one politician; churches must confront the theology and fear that allow it to grow.
Listen
Listen for the moments when Nathan describes Christians and Muslims protecting one another. Notice how different those stories sound from the fear-based picture often presented in Western media and churches.
Reflect
When you hear about Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine, whom do you picture? Are there people, churches, or whole histories missing from that picture?
Read
Read Matthew 5:43–48, Luke 10:25–37, and Romans 12:14–21. Ask whether our ideas about war, national loyalty, and enemies could survive a plain reading of Jesus.
Practice
Share a meal or conversation with someone from a religious or cultural background you were taught to fear. Listen to their story without treating them as a debate or mission project.
Episode Timestamps:
(00:00) The Christians missing from our maps
Western blind spots about Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine
Nathan’s Mennonite ministry, writing, and solidarity work
Local activism in Chicago and experience in northern Iraq
(04:20) A bullet-marked cross and shared house keys
Tishkawa church rebuilt after repeated destruction
Assyrian and Muslim families protecting one another
Syriac worship and “the church to the world”
(08:15) Why “evangelical” carries painful baggage
Colonial missions and conditional aid
Ancient Christians treated as conversion targets
Trust built through service without coercion
(12:40) Middle Eastern Christians and the cost of intervention
Different conditions in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza
Traditional churches, converts, and Farsi online worship
Blowback against Christians and Muslims
(19:45) Dispensationalism, Zionism, and prophecy politics
Modern Israel as an end-times checklist
Jewish people separated from state policy
Christian nationalism and anti-Muslim racism
(24:45) A Ramadan meal breaks through fear
Craig’s post-9/11 assumptions
A Muslim neighbor’s plate of food
Foreign policy, proxy power, and hidden conflicts
(32:06) “Christians are our neighbors”
Warmth toward Christianity, fear of Western power
Assyrian distrust shaped by missionary history
Empire mistaken for the Gospel
(36:36) Assyrians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans
Ancient ethno-religious communities
Genocide, displacement, and state corruption
Peaceful neighbors divided by political religion
(41:30) A political issue and a theological issue
Church teaching behind fear and foreign policy
Christian nationalism’s rapid growth
Dispensationalism and government power
(46:23) What remains after Trump
Political personality cults and missing moral lines
Closed information silos
Patient truth-telling and the work of the Holy Spirit
(50:55) Learning to see the people behind the war
Palestinian Christian authors and sermons
Documentaries and Israeli anti-war films
Refusing to whitewash war or genocide
(54:18) Nathan’s writing and peace work
Novella, children’s project, and screenwriting
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