JOHN STEINREICH: CONFRONTING THE TEACHINGS OF ISLAM
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11411,css.print/pub_detail.asp
Islam is a religio-political doctrine, thus the policies of the State are only half of the intellectual arsenal needed to address its cold war with the West. For our civil society to survive the advance of Islam, we must confront it head on to block its efforts to subjugate all forms of government to Shariah law and to destroy all other forms of faith. We must use both political and religious strategies to successfully defeat Islamic supremacism.
In the domain of politics, there exists an unfortunate failure of imagination by our government elite to confront Islam ideologically. There are a few brave Western politicians who have acknowledged the fundamental threat posed by political Islam, but the large body of our elected officials has, to its discredit, refused to accept the fact that Islam’s codified doctrines promote an incessant march toward world hegemony.
In a similar manner, it is tragic that the Christian Church has neither fully recognized nor embraced its role as the spiritual defender of Western Civilization. In many ways the Church has actually aided and abetted our enemies through its unwillingness to stand up for its own values in the name of the dubiously noble ideals of diversity, tolerance, and inter-faith dialogue. Now is the time for the Christian Church to stop its dance with the devil, and she must don her spiritual armor to prepare for a confrontation of ideas with Islam.
If not thwarted, Islam will do to the West what many other tyrannical ideologies have attempted and at times succeeded in doing: Crush all other systems of belief and dominate the culture at large. By its own admission, Islam wishes to conquer the world, at least in part, through the destruction of all other belief systems:
Qur’an 8:39 “And fight with them (ie–the unbelievers) until there is no more persecution and religion should be only for Allah.”
This passage should serve as a warning to all of us. The Qur’an, which Islam regards as the perfect, immutable words of Allah, literally teaches Muslims to fight unbelievers indefinitely until their religion reigns supreme. If the Church has any true conviction that its heritage is worth protecting, it must pick up its intellectual and spiritual arms and stand in the gap like the Mighty Men of David. The Church must embrace the fact that Western Civilization was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic, and that Islam is dedicated to destroying that ethic. If the Church truly believes that God did indeed endow all people with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, she will defend Western Civilization against Islam’s anti-freedom manifesto.
Our Founding Fathers recognized precisely that the government of the United States of America would only be suitable, as John Adams put it, to rule over a “moral and religious people” and it was Biblical morals in large measure that gave men like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison the ideological firepower to fight for our divine and inalienable rights. The Church, then, must with great conviction counteract the advance of Islam by asserting the goodness of its own values and decrying the Islamic values that are incompatible with our society. The Church simply cannot sit by silently ignoring that Islamic doctrine treats violence, oppression, and hatred by Muslims toward the rest of the world as holy behaviors.
Let us take a moment to look at the example of history. In the first three centuries after the time of Christ, the two most significant threats to the Christian community were 1) physical persecution by the pagan state of Rome and 2) the ideological poison of heretical doctrine propagated by false teachers. The ultimate objective of these persecutors was the destruction of the Church and the culture it was promoting. The pagan persecution meant suffering and death by the sword, with the intent to drive the Church into submission to the state. The purveyors of religious heresy concurrently sought to destroy the Church by drawing believers into unorthodox belief systems. It was up to the pastors of the Early Church to protect their congregations from these persecutions and to promote the values of Judeo-Christianity in the culture at large.
The Early Church Fathers, to their credit and unlike today’s politically correct elites in both religious and secular circles, did not shrink back from taking strong positions to defend their faith and the culture that it was creating. These martyrs were unashamed and were emboldened to advance their faith even when facing violent opposition. They actively chose to contradict false doctrines thrown at the Church, because they believed wholeheartedly in their own. The modern Church would do well to follow the example of her religious forbears in this regard.
In the confrontation with modern paganism, embodied by various forms of collectivism, the contemporary Church is indeed fighting back against the destructive by-products of those ideologies. When it comes to religious threats, however, the modern Church has lost its spine. The strength that the early Christians had in fighting toxic religious doctrine has largely disappeared. It is rare to find a Christian who can articulate why his religious values are so effective and why those of Islam are not. As such, the Church must reach into its history and learn a lesson or two, in order to battle Islam as the heresy it is.
The Church must stand up for its values because it is within societies based on Biblical traditions that freedom in all its forms has flourished. The Church needs to boldly tell the world that it stands for liberty for all people, because freedom is a divinely ordained right of mankind. The Church must repudiate Islam, which defines Allah with the worst qualities of man’s image, complete with a nature of deception, violence, hatred, and so forth, as a heretical doctrine that undermines the tenets of liberty.
The Christian community must acknowledge the threat of Islam—with its holy calls to kill unbelievers wherever they are found (Qur’an 9:5), its oppression of women (Qur’an 4:32-34), and its dehumanization of unbelievers (Qur’an 98:6). The Church must go head-to-head with Islam on the religious front, call out its false doctrines, and diminish its power of persuasion in the marketplace of ideas. As an active and unapologetic Christian, I am calling my spiritual brethren to action. It is time for the Christian devout to engage Islam much like the primitive Church did in confronting the dangerous heresies that threatened its existence and seek to win a victory for its ideals – those that form the basis of Western Civilization.
[1] John Adams’ letter Message from John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,October 11, 1798.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor John Steinreich is an author and public speaker who serves as a chapter leader with ACT! for America. His book, “The Words of God” (http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jdsbookstore) is a rigorous textual analysis of the Bible and the Qur’an, documenting which holy book teaches peace and which does not.
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