Cross in the Crosshairs: How U.S. Foreign Policy is Killing Christians Around the World

And how Vladimir Putin is presenting himself as its defender, and winning.

There’s a peculiar sort of blasphemy that doesn’t require heresy—just a Pentagon budget and a State Department press release. While American evangelicals slap yellow ribbons on their bumpers and thank soldiers for “protecting our freedom,” an ugly truth writhes beneath the surface like a demon in a three-piece suit: in the last quarter-century, no regime—not ISIS, not North Korea, not China, not Iran—has inflicted more death, displacement, or devastation upon global Christianity than the United States of America.

For all its flag-waving sermons and military chaplains, the modern American empire has trampled over ancient Christian communities like a blind giant on a blood-soaked pilgrimage. Its messianic quest to install “democracy” and “human rights” has repeatedly ended in jihadi regimes, bombed-out churches, and the ashes of two-thousand-year-old faith traditions.

The U.S. has armed terrorists, toppled secular protectors of Christians, and unleashed chaos so vast it makes Nero look like a piker. The cross wasn’t nailed to a tree this time. It was vaporized by a drone. Burned by a rebel militia trained by Langley. Buried beneath rubble at the end of a smart bomb. And all of it funded by Bible-belt taxpayers with Toby Keith on the radio.

PUTIN, THE CROSS-BEARER (BY COMPARISON)

For most of the modern era, the Western world laid claim to the moral high ground of Christianity. The memory of Christendom, though bruised and fractured, was still culturally anchored in the capitals of Europe and undergirded the policies and posture of the United States. But that era has ended. In its place has emerged a new and strange alignment, one that would have been unthinkable only a generation ago. Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent and Russian strongman, has recast himself—not just before his own people but before much of the world—as the last true defender of Christianity. However jarring it may seem, his bid for that mantle is not only deliberate but increasingly effective.

Putin has not approached this identity as a side note to his nationalism or a thin layer of religious rhetoric over Soviet imperialism. He has woven the defense of Christianity into the very center of Russia’s geopolitical narrative. His speeches no longer read like party briefings; they sound like sermons. He denounces Western relativism not only as a political threat to Russian sovereignty but as a spiritual threat to the entire world. He invokes moral law, natural order, divine justice, and the necessity of standing firm against the corrosive, decadent ideologies that, in his telling, have overtaken the West. In doing so, he has turned the concept of the "Third Rome" into something more than historical nostalgia—it is a strategic rebranding of Russia as the last citadel of Christendom.

This image has caught fire in the global South and in the blood-soaked corners of the world where Christianity still costs something. In places where believers face death, desecration, or daily humiliation, there is little patience for lectures on democracy or gender ideology. There is, however, a growing respect for the man who stands before the world and says, without apology, that faith matters, that family matters, that moral order is not up for revision. In Putin, many Christians across Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even parts of Latin America see something the West has long since abandoned: someone who takes their God seriously.

That seriousness is not just in his rhetoric. Putin has backed it with gestures that resonate deeply in the Christian imagination. Russia under his rule has restored thousands of churches, not as museum pieces but as functioning places of worship. Public celebrations of Christian feast days are common. Icons are displayed in state offices. The Orthodox Church is not treated like an embarrassing remnant of the past but embraced as a living guardian of Russian identity. These moves are not merely pious flourishes. They are acts of civilizational defiance, a way of telling the world that Russia is not ashamed of its soul.

What makes all of this more than empty posturing is the context in which it arises. The modern West, once the heart of Christendom, now offers little more than disdain for traditional faith. When Western diplomats arrive in foreign lands, it is not the cross they carry, but the flag of progressivism. When Western media speak of Christianity, it is most often in tones of mockery or suspicion. The institutions that once sent missionaries now send NGO operatives whose gospel is global bureaucracy and moral liberation from anything resembling biblical authority. Into this vacuum, Putin has stepped—not because he is the most righteous man in the world, but because he is the only one with power and intent who is willing to say aloud what millions believe: that Christianity is under siege, and someone must stand for it.

This is not to say that Putin’s Russia is a theocracy or that the man himself is a paragon of Christian virtue. He is neither. His rule is pragmatic, often ruthless, and deeply enmeshed in the apparatus of state control. But that is precisely what makes his appeal so potent. He does not present himself as a preacher or prophet. He presents himself as a protector. He does not offer theological purity; he offers safety. In a world where churches are being burned, clergy are being murdered, and Christian speech is increasingly criminalized, that kind of promise—however flawed—carries weight.

Across the globe, Christian populations are making comparisons. They are watching Western leaders walk away from their faith, not with regret but with smug satisfaction. They see church buildings turned into condominiums, pastors prosecuted for preaching biblical texts, and politicians who apologize for Christian history while celebrating every deviation from it. And then they look east, and they see a man who calls Jesus Christ by name, who enters cathedrals to pray, who venerates the saints of his nation’s past, and who offers Christian countries not lectures but alliances. It does not matter that some of it is calculated. What matters is that it exists at all.

Even in the lands of the once-mighty West, this contrast has begun to stir. Among the disaffected, the disenfranchised, and the devout, a strange kind of reevaluation is taking place. The narrative of Russia as a soulless tyranny has not disappeared, but it now competes with a second narrative—one in which Russia, for all its faults, has remembered something sacred that the West has forgotten. There is growing discomfort in conservative circles with the idea that the spiritual rot of Western civilization is irreversible and unchallenged. For some, Putin’s Russia is now the proof that it need not be.

Putin himself has leaned into this perception with increasing confidence. He does not merely criticize the West for strategic failures; he denounces it as morally bankrupt. He calls its rulers godless. He describes its cultural exports as demonic. He warns that what is at stake in the geopolitical realignments of our age is not just territory or trade but the very future of mankind’s soul. These may seem like overblown words, until one realizes that in many parts of the world, people believe him. Not because they trust him, but because the description fits what they’ve experienced.

The real scandal is not that Vladimir Putin is casting himself as the defender of Christianity. The real scandal is that, at this moment in history, he is doing so more credibly than anyone in the West. In an age when the U.S. State Department celebrates Pride Month with more zeal than it recognizes Easter, and when Western parliaments pass laws criminalizing traditional Christian teaching, the bar for being a “defender of the faith” is not high. All it takes is standing firm when others bow. All it takes is refusing to lie. All it takes is saying, out loud, that the old truths are still true. And right now, Putin is saying those things.

That doesn’t make him righteous. It makes him dangerous—to the narrative. It makes him difficult to dismiss. It forces a question no one in Washington wants to answer: If the world is choosing between a cross and a rainbow, and America no longer offers the former, who will be blamed when the faithful start to look elsewhere?

In that sense, Putin’s rise as a symbol of Christian resistance is less about his personal devotion than about the moral collapse of those who once claimed to lead Christendom. He didn’t steal the crown. The West left it in the dirt, and he picked it up.

THE NEW ROME AND ITS CRUSADES

America didn’t set out to kill Christians. It just set out to remake the world in its own image, and if Christians got in the way—especially the wrong kind of Christians, the ancient, liturgical, Semitic kind—well, too bad. God bless the troops. Like old Rome, Washington discovered that projecting power means breaking bodies. And unlike old Rome, it did so with the sanctimony of a missionary and the airpower of a demigod.

Iraq was the beginning. Once home to 1.5 million Christians—Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox, and more—Mesopotamia had nurtured Christianity since the apostles. But when the U.S. invaded in 2003, it blew the gates of hell wide open. First came the vacuum. Then the militias. Then the bombings. Then ISIS. Churches were torched. Priests were kidnapped and tortured. Christian neighborhoods in Baghdad and Mosul emptied overnight. By 2021, fewer than 250,000 Christians remained. That’s not collateral damage. That’s spiritual genocide. And it wasn’t a one-off. It was a pattern.

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DEMOCRACY DELIVERED BY FIRE

Syria came next. The CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore, blessed by Obama and run through Jordan and Turkey, poured billions into “moderate rebels” who turned out to be indistinguishable from al-Qaeda. One by one, Christian towns like Maaloula—where Aramaic still echoed in the alleys—fell to Islamist factions waving American rifles. Monasteries were desecrated. Nuns raped. Priests beheaded. Bishops vanished. Ancient churches that had stood since Rome fell to rebels backed by Washington.

In Libya, we armed the jihadis outright. The NATO campaign to oust Gaddafi—spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and rubber-stamped by evangelical hawks—turned the richest country in Africa into a failed state. It became a human trafficking hub, a terror haven, and in 2015, the stage for one of the most grotesque spectacles of Christian martyrdom in the 21st century: 21 Coptic Christians in orange jumpsuits beheaded on a beach by ISIS. The camera panned wide. The sea turned red. And the silence from Washington was deafening.

When the Arab Spring swept Egypt, the U.S. helped shove out Hosni Mubarak—a secular tyrant who, for all his sins, protected Egypt’s Christians. Into the void stepped Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, darlings of the Obama State Department. Within months, churches were torched, Christians lynched, and mobs chanted death to Copts in Cairo’s streets. Only after a military coup reinstalled the generals did the persecution subside. The U.S. cut aid in protest. They had preferred the Islamists. This is the pattern: we trade the devil we know—often a nationalist who guards minorities—for a chaos demon or a zealot who hates the cross.

America loves to tout religious liberty, until it gets in the way of oil pipelines and NATO. Nowhere is this clearer than Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2020 and again in 2023, Azerbaijan—with Turkish backing and jihadist mercenaries—attacked the Christian Armenian population of the region. Thousands died. Monasteries dating back over a thousand years were desecrated or captured. Entire communities were ethnically cleansed. The U.S.? Silent. Because Azerbaijan sells gas. Because Turkey is in NATO. Because Christians—real Christians, ancient Christians—aren’t the sort of people that win elections back home. We didn’t just betray Armenia. We watched it bleed and called it neutrality.

Ukraine presents a subtler version of the same problem. When the U.S. backed the 2014 Maidan coup and helped engineer the rise of the post-Yanukovych regime, it also backed the creation of a new Orthodox church body split from the Moscow Patriarchate. This was about power, not piety. It fractured Eastern Orthodoxy, triggered seizures of church property, and sparked violence between Christians loyal to different patriarchates. Yes, Russia is no saint. But in our zeal to undermine Moscow, we weaponized church schism. We funded a religious divorce. The result? Christian churches closed. Monks and priests driven out. Services disrupted by nationalist thugs. So much for religious liberty.

When South Sudan gained independence in 2011, evangelicals rejoiced. Here was a Christian-majority country born from the ashes of Islamic persecution. America supported it, cheered it, helped midwife it into existence. And then abandoned it. Without real support or accountability, South Sudan spiraled into civil war. Christians killed Christians. Churches were bombed. Aid workers died. The dream died. Another cross in another mass grave, courtesy of American half-measures.

Afghanistan is often remembered for dead soldiers and wasted money. But beneath the headlines were underground Christian converts—former Muslims who had embraced Christ, often at risk to their lives. Many cooperated with U.S. agencies. Many hoped America would protect them. When Biden’s botched withdrawal handed the country to the Taliban overnight, those Christians were left to die. The State Department refused to prioritize their evacuation. NGOs were blocked. Planes sat on tarmacs. Converts were hunted, tortured, executed. The American Church barely noticed.

Even before 9/11, America’s Balkan misadventures foreshadowed this pattern. In Kosovo, the U.S. backed ethnic Albanian separatists—many of them radical Muslims—against Orthodox Christian Serbs. After the war, dozens of Serbian churches were burned to the ground. Monasteries were desecrated. Priests fled. Christians were driven from towns they’d lived in for centuries. NATO troops watched. Sometimes they even protected the attackers. All in the name of freedom.

THE TOLL: NEITHER COUNTED NOR CARED FOR

No one knows exactly how many Christians died as a result of U.S. foreign policy since 2000. The numbers are buried in broader statistics—lumped in with “civilian casualties,” “collateral damage,” or “displaced persons.” But we can estimate: In Iraq, at least 45,000 Christians likely died in the war and its aftermath. In Syria, tens of thousands. In Libya, hundreds. In Egypt, perhaps thousands during the Brotherhood’s reign. In Armenia, thousands again. In Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Nigeria—more, always more. In total? Likely well over 100,000 Christians dead, and millions displaced. Not by design. Just by policy. The road to hell is paved with American intentions.

The cruelest irony is that American Christians paid for it. They cheered for it. They voted for it. They waved flags and sang hymns while their tax dollars trained the very men who burned churches and cut down priests. They were taught to hate “Islamic extremism” but never told that their own government was funneling weapons to it in Syria. They were taught to love Israel but never told what that meant for Palestinian Christians. They were taught to revere the military, never knowing that U.S. bombs fell on the very towns where Paul once preached. This isn’t just a policy failure. It’s a spiritual catastrophe.

Jesus told His followers they would suffer. What He didn’t say was that the richest, most powerful Christian nation in history would be the one holding the match. The United States didn’t kill Christianity. But it bulldozed it, one war at a time. And for those with eyes to see, the blood is still fresh. Maybe it’s time American Christians stopped sending missionaries abroad until they stopped promoting a foreign policy that for the last 70 years has caused Christians around the world to suffer.