In “Fleeing Christians,” Mark, you make a couple of assertions that strike me as dubious. “The percentage of Christians in the population of the Middle East,” you write, “has been declining since the Islamic conquest.” Not exactly. For the first several centuries of Muslim, most converts were Arabs, who had previously been pantheists, not Christians. These Muslims did indeed conquer much of the Middle East and North Africa, domains previously Christian, but they left the Christian populations largely intact, merely installing new, Muslim governments. The Seljuk Turks, who during what Europeans call the Dark Ages replaced the Arabs as the dominant force in the Muslim world, proved less hospitable to Christians. But for the most part they, too, left Christian (and, for that matter, Jewish) communities intact. There were few mass conversions of Christians to Islam and relatively little emigration.

As the dominant force in the region, Islam certainly exerted a certain pull—a range of professions, notably in government, were open only to Muslims—and individual Christians did indeed adopt Islam. And there are indeed examples of brutal treatment of Christians in this or that specific instance. But large and thriving Christian communities continued to exist throughout the Muslim world, a condition that remained true for many centuries.

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, this changed, with (among other atrocities) the Turkish massacres of Armenians (a subject on which anyone named Kirkorian is likely to know a lot). Christian communities came under increasing pressure during the second half of the century, as Islam became radicalized. Christians began to leave Lebanon, Syria, and other countries, often for the United States. For a very good account of all this—and some beautiful prose—take a look at William Dalrymple’s marvelous book, From the Holy Mountain. Note, though, that Muslim hostility toward the Christians who inhabit the Muslim world represents a modern phenomenon. Even as they reconquered the Christian principalities at the end of the Crusades, Muslim armies often left Christian populations unmolested. Only during the twentieth century did that attitude undergo a systematic shift.

“The spread of democracy,” you write, “is guaranteed to reduce the number of Christians still further.” Are you sure? Isn’t the whole point that democracy will tend to de-radicalize Islam? To make it more tolerant? Why should it prove impossible for nascent Muslim democracies to write protections for minorities, including Christian minorities, into their constitutions? If Egypt became a democracy tomorrow, wouldn’t its new leaders, like all democratically-elected leaders, find themselves accountable for establishing a tolerable administration of justice and promoting economic growth? And wouldn’t that make life better, not worse, for the ten percent of Egyptians who are Coptic Christians?

Sure, we can imagine scenarios in which Christians would find themselves subjected to persecution in Muslim democracies. But would the spread of democracy guarantee such persecution? To the contrary, I think. The spread of democracy would make such persecution less, not more, likely.