Yes, Lebanon can be very confusing for outsiders. But keep it simple: the country is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians.
In recent decades, the Muslims have regressed into barbarian ultra-religious practices and have been trying to dominate the country and reduce the Christians to a second-class "Dhimmi" citizens. That was the genesis of the 1975 war that has yet to end. Generally the Muslims look to the Arab and Muslim worlds for their inspiration.
The Christians have been mostly on the defensive, trying to rescue a system of shared coexistence and division of power they and the Muslims had agreed to. Generally, the Christians look to the West for their inspiration.
But, just as there are outlying liberal, open-minded Muslims who oppose religious radicalism and fanaticism, there are Christians who are as illiberal and extremist as their Muslim counterparts.
Only yesterday, a group of Christian thugs calling themselves the "Soldiers of God" descended on a bar in the Christian neighborhood of Mar Mikhail in Beirut, known for its nightime parties and festive environment, and attacked an LGBTQ+ party. These thugs, just like their Muslim cognates of Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other regressive religious movements, claim to speak on behalf of God and declared the bar venue "Satan's place".
Despite its affiliation with the Vatican, the Maronite Catholic Church of Lebanon remains hesitant to follow Pope Francis's exhortation to welcome the LGBTQ community in its churches and be tolerant. The reason is that the Christian community of Lebanon is usually very conservative on social issues and lags several decades behind in its cultural adjustment to Western social and political trends, as are other Christians throughout the Third World. The Catholics of East Timor or the African Anglicans are perfect examples.
Unlike the West where the Church has been severely reduced to playing a uniquely religious role and no longer has the political power it once had, Christian churches in the global east and south continue to play primary political roles. But since their survival depends on their alliances with western religious institutions, the growing chasm between an evolving western world and its liberal churches on one hand, and an eastern-southern world stagnating in barbaric Bronze Age beliefs on the other, is likely to have dangerous repercussions on the survival of these minority Christian communities.
France used to play a significant role as a protector of the Christians of Lebanon, a relationship dating back to the early centuries of the Church when the Lebanese Maronite Catholic Church sided with western christian dogmas against eastern churches, then during the times of the Crusades, and up to the 19th and 20th centuries when France endorsed the creation of a majority-Christian independent Lebanon in 1920. With France still Catholic back then, that relationship had obvious religious, but also political, underpinnings. But France has, during the past two centuries since the French revolution, gradually evolved from its status as the Church's "eldest daughter" to a secular and essentially atheist nation that could no longer associate well with the still somewhat "primitive" nature of Lebanon's Christians who desperately try to superimpose a facade of modernity over their backward religious inclinations.
With the protestant United States indulging in a chronic dislike of Lebanon's catholics, and a France increasingly becoming a political poodle of the US, Lebanon's Christians seem to be abandoned to their fate in their increasingly assertive Islamic environment. Perhaps the Christian "Soldiers of God" thugs, in attacking the easy target of the LGBTQ community, are in a way appeasing their Islamic counterparts of Hezbollah, Daesh and others by being more radical than the radicals themselves. Somewhat like France's Vichy government rounding up Jews to send to the concentration camps to appease their German Nazi occupiers.
[See more on: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/08/hardline-christian-group-attacks-queer-friendly-bar-lebanon]
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