I think there is a storng moral argument to help persecuted Christians and this argument was just published on Crux.
Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Usually, we apply this verse to serving the poor or sick; but if we think about it, a person who faces daily death threats, whose family has been killed, and whose whole society is in real danger of extinction, definitely qualifies as “one of the least of these my brethren.”
In that spirit, the ongoing genocide of Christians in the Middle East, especially in ISIS-controlled areas, is a reality we cannot deny.
Crux editor John Allen Jr. documented the persecution of Christians a few years back inThe Global War on Christians but the situation in the Middle East has deteriorated significantly since then. Christ based his judgment in Matthew 25 on how we dealt with these least: this applies not just individually, but how we – as an at least nominally Christian nation – respond to genocide against these least of Christ’s brothers.
Recently, I was at a conference run by In Defense of Christians, a non-profit founded to help persecuted Christian minorities. Andrew Doran, a senior advisor to IDC, began the conference by laying out the arguments used to convince both the U.S. Congress and the State Department to declare the violence against Christians and Yazidis and other minorities in Syria and Iraq as genocide.
