The Maronite Cause

The Maronite Cause is simple: to ensure that our nation lives free and dignified in our mountain homeland.

This seems simple enough until we realize the implications of such a small statement, the first of which is that the Maronite Cause is not coexistence. The Maronite Cause is not about defending a failing republic either. It is simply the cause of preserving the freedom of Christians in this Mountain and ensuring their self-determination; everything else is secondary.

This definition isn’t my own invention. This isn’t some partisan political discourse either. It is the history of our nation and its core dynamic since the days of Yuhanna Maroun more than 1300 years ago. Volume I of our book discusses that history in detail.

If we are serious about the future of our community, then every political idea or project that Maronites engage in must be measured and evaluated based on whether it contributes to our cause or compromises it. This is actually the main reason why we wrote that book: to help realign our political awareness with our cause.

The Existential Threat to the Christians of Lebanon

Since the inception of the Lebanese Republic in 1920, Christians shifted their politics to relying on the state to ensure their liberty and survival. The problem, however, is that the Lebanese Republic failed miserably in that mission, but their political awareness hasn’t caught up to this fact yet.

The true problems of the Lebanese Republic are not a deficit in currency or electricity; they’re the result of a terminally flawed state.

Politics gridlock. Courts delay and bend. Borders leak and bristle. Ministries speak in the language of deals while delivering little to citizens. In such a house, religious and personal freedoms aren’t merely threatened; they grow thin to the point of breaking. Language and identity become decoration. Faith becomes private consolation. Land becomes real estate instead of a covenant. Even the ordinary work of adulthood, schooling a child, planning a business, repairing a car, or getting an official paper, all turn heroic, then impossible.

This is not a mood; it is a structure. For Maronites and Christians, who have historically relied on institutions aligned with their freedom of worship, their life ethics, and their way of land governance, the structure’s failure is existential. A people can survive hardship; they cannot survive indefinite institutional failure.

The Lebanese Republic, once imagined as a homeland for Christians and a model of coexistence, has completely collapsed into corruption, foreign dependency, and sectarian imbalance. The central state no longer guarantees sovereignty, nor protects the freedoms of its citizens. For Christians in particular but also for Druze, it has brought demographic decline, political marginalization, and mass emigration. What was promised as a pluralistic refuge has turned into a structure that accelerates their disappearance.

The Bermuda Triangle of Lebanonism, Leftism and Arabism

Unfortunately, amid this dangerous decline, most of today’s Maronites are disconnected from their roots, ignorant of their history, detached from their culture, and unaware of their cause. They are drifting slowly into a future that wants to erase them.

The vast majority of Christians today, but especially their leaders and political institutions, are lost in the confusion of Lebanonism, Leftism, and Arabism. These three make up a kind of Bermuda Triangle where the political consciousness of Christians goes to die.

While our society is shackled by this ideological triangle, our leaders can freely continue to be timid, disconnected, and unfaithful to their community, selling the future of Christians for political clout and financial gains.

Meanwhile, each year of drift depletes more parishes and schools of our young and turns our villages and cities into a summer memory. Our community is being offered the option to die politely, by assimilation into the pleasant anonymity of elsewhere, or by integration into the identity and culture of others. That is one path, but one we refuse.

Coming Back to the Mountain

Today, many Christians who are aware of their existential challenges often fall to despair. Whenever we talk about reclaiming our home and achieving self-determination, people react with a set of understandable concerns that’s sometimes mixed with anger and indignation, followed by a litany of excuses and objections of why this wouldn’t work.

Those who are more hopeful usually get stuck on rehearsing ideas that already failed, like “reform from within”. Our political consciousness has been so obliterated to the extent that we’ve become afraid of being truthful with ourselves. We’re even more afraid of the implications of admitting such truths. Because if we do, that means we have to let go of many comfortable lies, we have to let go of the Republic itself, and embark on a path that will be hard and scary for many.

Our inevitable path is renewal, grounded not in nostalgia or anger, but in building a political home scaled to our duties and able to keep promises in daylight and through darker nights.

Self-determination does not need a miracle, but also cannot happen through shortcuts. It cannot be achieved through an announcement or with talks and hopes. Self-determination can only be achieved through a sequence of adult politics that require consciousness and organization, and solid parallel institutions that gather public consent at home, and international lobbying that gathers legitimacy abroad.

First, we need a confident political culture that knows what it is for and what it refuses; then a disciplined grassroots body that can meet, serve, and hold a tone; then a set of useful institutions that quietly perform the state’s essential tasks. Then come layers of domestic and international legitimacy built on performance, and only then do acts of public consent make sovereignty lasting and peaceful.

Self-determination is a sequence of work and not an impossibility.

Time is short, and our community deserves clarity and a way forward. It’s time to let go of hope and rediscover the strength of our will. It’s time to come back to our cause. It’s time to come home.