After the Scottish referendum for independence and the unofficial survey in Catalonia, there should be no shame if Christians in Lebanon hold a plebiscite over possible separation from Lebanon and the creation of a “small Lebanon” that many Christians have long craved.
On paper Christians are the majority in 11 districts, nine of them geographically contiguous and connected to Beirut’s predominantly Christian north and northeast. The creation of a contiguous Christian state might force Christians to retrench to the “small Lebanon” and agree to land and population swaps with non-Christian districts, just as Greece and Turkey did a century ago.
Lebanese Christian sentiment about independence is not clear. Their emotions have been swinging between nostalgia for the enclave that they carved for themselves during the civil war, and the 10,452 square km that many of them talk about proudly, even if naively.
A secular Lebanon where all citizens are equal before the law is both optimal and impossible, and in a region where the various communities are asserting their ethnoreligious identities and openly celebrating them, shaming Christians for demanding to do the same is unfair.