Young people in the Turkish Black Sea region are increasingly breaking away from Islam and seeking to join Christian communities, reports Evangelical Focus newsletter (November 22). “What is striking,” Johannes Reimer writes, “is that Christian missionaries are rarely responsible for this awakening. For one thing, they have hardly any access to the region, and for another, the region has hardly been on the radar of Western missionary organizations for decades.” More often, these conversions are related to young people rediscovering their Christian roots. Most of them are the grandchildren of Armenians and Greeks who were forcibly Islamized under the threat of death during the Armenian genocide (1915–16). Entire villages changed their religious affiliation at that time, with those resisting facing death. Today, these forced converts are referred to as “crypto-Armenians,” which include several million living in Turkey. Reimer cites Turkish journalist Erhan Basyurt, who describes crypto-Armenians as “‘families, and in some cases entire villages and neighborhoods, who converted to Islam to escape the deportations and death marches (of 1915), but continue their hidden lives as Armenians, intermarrying and in some cases secretly returning to Christianity.’”
Even after the genocide, the Turkish state suppressed any independent development of the former Christian population. It was not until the 1960s that more liberal attitudes towards people of other faiths emerged in Turkey, and this was also the period when the first examples of crypto-Armenians returning to the Christian faith appeared. Such reconversions have often led to emigration from Turkey or to these re-converts’ segregation from Turkish society. An example of latter’s influence was the reconstruction of the Surp Giragos Church, originally built in 1376 in Diyarbakir, Eastern Anatolia, once a city largely inhabited by Christian Armenians. The Surp Giragos Church became the largest Armenian place of worship in the Middle East and its reconstruction was a key event for both reconverted Christians and Islamized Armenians in Turkey. But the church was destroyed again in the course of the Kurdish-Turkish war.
Under President Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish state is once again massively advancing its Turkification policy, with ethnic minorities facing new restrictions. The government’s war against the Kurds and the increasing oppression of other ethnic minorities is fostering the new interest in Christianity among the younger generation of Turks. Young Turks are experiencing an identity crisis and rediscovering non-Turkish roots and their families’ Christian pasts. “This process is also greatly aided by the fact that the level of education of the Turkish population and thus also their knowledge of foreign languages has increased enormously, making it possible to access the Internet and the information available here on developments in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic over the last 100 years,” Reimer adds. In the book Anneannem (My Grandmother), Turkish lawyer Fethiye Çetin tells the life story of her grandmother who was taken from her family during the genocide and raised as a Muslim. Çetin’s book set off a “small avalanche in motion” when it became clear that her grandmother’s story was not an isolated case. Reimer concludes that this rediscovery of suppressed ethnic and religious roots among crypto-Armenians and their consequent openness to Christianity will likely be seen as an “outstanding opportunity for evangelization and church planting in Turkey.”
(Evangelical Focus, https://evangelicalfocus.com/european-perspectives/29113/the-grandchildren-of-forced-converts-are-rebelling)
