Nothing more powerfully undermines the image of the Iraq war as a liberation than the rapid decline in the welfare and status of the country’s Christian minority. This decline was underscored again this week by bombing attacks on four churches in Baghdad and Mosul. It is not hard to see that “liberation” has been almost entirely negative for Iraqi Christians, which ought to leave some American Christian backers of the war wondering just what they have supported.

It is fashionable in some corners of the antiwar movement in America and among European critics of the Bush administration to associate President Bush’s dreadful policy choices and belligerent attitudes with his professed evangelical Christianity. This is part and parcel of the absurd “right-wing” image of Mr. Bush that liberal critics find so satisfying.

Whatever Mr. Bush’s real motivations or convictions, we can be fairly sure that they do not involve much concern for the fate of Near Eastern Christians, given the appalling results of Mr. Bush’s Near Eastern policies for Christians in the Holy Land and Iraq. His support for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and the abetting of the criminal and terrorist Albanian elements in Kosovo also tells us much about the priorities of the administration. No matter the confession, American Christians should meditate on the awful consequences of this war of “liberation” for their co-religionists in Iraq, and those Christians who supported President Bush in good faith must take a hard look at the fruits of the present Iraq policy for the region’s Christians.

American militant secularists’ empowering of virulently anti-Christian and anti-Western Islamist groups is nothing new and already has an ugly history in the Balkans. What Christians must ask themselves is this: is the spirit of these policies of God or is it one that hates Christ?