How American converts complicate Syrian Orthodox Christians’ future

In Christianity’s early centuries, Syria became one of the faith’s main intellectual centers, producing some of its most important leaders and thinkers. At the beginning of the country’s civil war in 2011, nearly 1,400 years after the conquest of Byzantine (Christian) Syria in 638 C.E. by the Rashidun Caliphate, its population included roughly 3 million Christians — about 10% of the Muslim-majority country.