The grandchildren of Turks forced to convert are rebelling

There is a spiritual awakening evident as small Christian communities are forming all over the Turkish Black Sea region. This was simply unthinkable until very recently. Young people in particular are breaking out of the rigid corset of Islam and seeking to join Christian communities.

The turning of young people to faith in Christ has much more to do with the discovery of their Christian roots.

What is striking 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. The turning of young people to faith in Christ has much more to do with the discovery of their Christian roots.

The vast majority of them are grandchildren of Armenians and Greeks who were forcibly Islamized. The grandparents of these young people were converted to Islam under threat of death during the Armenian genocide (1915-1916).

Entire villages changed their religious affiliation at that time. Those who remained steadfast were brutally murdered (for more, see The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History). Women and children were hit the hardest. Hundreds of thousands of them were taken into Islamic families, where they were forced to give up their Armenian identity, language and Christian faith. But many of them have not forgotten their roots. Today, these forced converts are referred to as crypto-Armenians. Several million of them live in Turkey.

Turkish journalist Erhan Basyurt 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, as the recent book by Munich-based historian Talin Suciyan shows. It was not until the 1960s that something like a more liberal attitude towards people of other faiths emerged in Turkey. Even then, there were the first examples of some crypto-Armenians returning to the Christian faith.

Of course, this re-conversion often led to emigration from Turkey or extensive segregation from Turkish society. A significant example is the reconstruction of the Surp Giragos Church, built in 1376 in Diyarbakir, Eastern Anatolia, once a city largely inhabited by Christian Armenians.

The Surp Giragos Church is by far the largest Armenian place of worship in the Middle East. And the reconstruction of the church in 2012, and with it the Armenian community, which included a number of Islamized Armenians, was a special event for Armenians in Turkey. Unfortunately, the church was destroyed again in the course of the Kurdish-Turkish war.

Furthermore, under President Tayyip Erdogan and his conservative Islamic AKP, the Turkish state is once again massively advancing its Turkification policy. Ethnic minorities are being restricted in their rights everywhere and, according to the declared will of Ankara (the poltical center of Turkey), are to be leveled under the one Turkish nation, which is understood to be an Islamic nation.

There is little room for a Christian minority. This is one of the issues in the stalled talks on Turkey's accession to the European Union.

In search of their own identity

More and more young Turks are asking themselves who they really are.

The Turkish government's brutal war against the Kurds in its own country and the increasing oppression of other ethnic minorities has led to an unexpected reaction among the younger generation of Turks. More and more young Turks are asking themselves who they really are. And quite a few are discovering their Christian and non-Turkish roots.

This process is also greatly aided by the fact that the level of education of the Turkish population and, therefore, also their knowledge of foreign languages has increased enormously, making it possible to access the internet and the information available on developments in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic over the last 100 years.

The book by Turkish lawyer Fethiye Çetin entitled Anneannem (My Grandmother) has contributed a great deal to this. In it, she tells the life story of her grandmother Seher, who—as Çetin found out at the end of the 1970s—was not actually Turkish but Armenian: her real name, hidden for decades, was Heranuş.

As a little ten-year-old girl, Heranuş had escaped death when a Turkish gendarme (paramilitary police officer) snatched her from her family on a deportation march. He raised her as his adopted daughter and gave her a new name and a Muslim identity.

Çetin's book set a small avalanche in motion, as Christian Meier reports. Because as it soon became clear, her grandmother's story was not an isolated case. The lawyer writes,

"All of a sudden, young Turks started writing to me, asking the question: 'My grandmother had no relatives either—why is that? In Van, in Muş, in Diyarbakir, everywhere people came forward who had found out that there were Armenians in their family—mostly in their parents' or grandparents' generation. They had been taken away from their families during the deportations or had wandered through forests and villages on the run until they finally found a new home with some family. In the majority of cases, it was girls and young women who survived in this way—brides robbed together during the genocide."

Now, decades later, the truth has come to light. It is the rediscovery of the suppressed ethnic and religious roots among the crypto-Armenians that is the reason for the new openness to the Christian faith in Turkey.

Opportunity for evangelism and church planting

The awakened interest among young Turks in their own, possibly Christian, roots represents, in my opinion, an outstanding opportunity for evangelization and church planting in Turkey. Millions of Turkish citizens are affected.

Their potential interest in the Christian faith of their ancestors can open up unimagined possibilities for conversations about faith and the Gospel. And the awakening on the Black Sea described above shows how it can work. Nowhere in the world can people be permanently robbed of their true identity, even if it can take generations in some cases.

We can support the small new churches in prayer and financially.

For us in the so-called Christian world, this raises the question of how we as the worldwide church of Jesus can positively support such a process.

Several thoughts are worth considering in terms of mission strategy:

1. We should invest time and energy in scientific research into the consequences of the genocide in Turkey and ensure that the results of this research are widely published on the internet. Also and above all in Turkish. This will further strengthen the interest of crypto-Christians in Turkey.
2. We should stand up for Christians in Turkey politically. Turkey is knocking on the door of the European Union. Respect for human rights and religious freedom are key EU demands of the country on the Bosporus. Accordingly, violations of these freedoms should be reported to the Human Rights Commission.
3. We can support the small new churches in prayer and financially. The Caucasian Mission (newly formed in 2024) maintains close relations with these circles and will ensure that the help reaches them.
4. We can strengthen the relationship between the new Christians and the congregations in the motherland Armenia, create connections and cultivate them. The Caucasian Mission is already active here too.

Originally published by Evangelical Focus. Republished with permission.

Johannes Reimer was born and raised in the Soviet Union. As a young convert to Christianity, he spent two years in a labour camp in the east of modern day Russia. Today, Dr Reimer teaches Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the University of South Africa (UNISA), from where he gained his DTh, and is Professor of Mission Studies and Intercultural Studies at Ewersbach University of Applied Arts in Germany. Until recently he led the Public Engagement department and the Peace and Reconciliation Network for the World Evangelical Alliance.