THE problem with Islam is that Muslims tend to believe its teachings and seem relatively untouched by the secularism of the West. They continue to believe in the Koran and try to live out its teachings in their daily lives and increasingly demand that the non-Muslim majority adhere to their beliefs, as evidenced by the attempt to criminalise criticism of Islam. Those who inwardly or even outwardly reject the faith give it lip service at the least; they consider religious community cohesion to be of greater value than greater community cohesion. And if they are graduates of our prison system they are liable to have had a crash course in fundamentalist Islam. They have a strong faith.
Contrast this with the relatively few Christians in the post-Christian West. The mainstream church has lost its devotion to a transcendent God and replaced Him with a therapeutic deity who is sure to forgive and who shares in the zeitgeist of our age: that generosity and acceptance is all and that truth and distinctiveness are to be avoided in case they disturb the neighbours.
We have seen the feminisation of the church, the elevation of those attributes traditionally described as feminine and the downplaying of those traditionally understood as masculine. Thus we have the instruction to ‘do the loving thing’ without the injunction that the loving thing might be to tell the other person that they are wrong and imperilling their own immortal soul, as they are if they believe and follow the false religion of Islam.
Many within the mainstream church, particularly the hierarchy, are conflict-averse. They are quite willing to indulge in ersatz conflicts: the fight for climate justice, racial harmony, sexual equality and inter-faith reconciliation, all ‘fights’ supported by the bien pensant right-thinking orthodoxy of our day. Such is not conflict no matter how righteous the cause may be: it is merely a camouflage, a means of reassuring oneself that they are fighting the good fight while hiding from the real conflicts the church should be facing.
According to an apocryphal Martin Luther quote: ‘If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him.’
It does no good complaining about cultural Marxism, George Soros, Davos Man or any other bogeyman when we allow the real culprit to escape. Our favourite scoundrels are just doing what scoundrels do: they are being true to themselves and following their own agenda. The responsibility for the parlous situation facing the church and Christianity in our land lies with those who are entrusted with the defence and spread of the faith.
At a time when the UK is on a knife-edge of fiscal crisis, with consequent economic hardships and ever-increasing tax burdens married to political incompetence, the mainstream church concerns itself with debates about sexuality and providing helter-skelters and pitch and put in cathedrals, when it is not desecrating sacred space with graffiti. Is it any wonder that we face cultural decay and societal disintegration when the defenders of the cultural roots have abandoned any hope of meaningful intervention in the precarious state of the nation?
To quote Luther, ‘You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say,’ and our church leaders are silent. They are silent on the slaughter of babies in the womb and the consequent demeaning of life. They are silent when Christian preachers are harassed by police for the crime of reading and preaching the Word of God in public. They are silent when a Christian is arrested for the crime of praying silently in certain streets. They are silent as our Christian heritage is demeaned, debased and deleted from our island story. They are silent.
The Christian faith is a faith of peace; we follow the Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6), who taught His followers ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ (Matt 5:9). But Jesus, the crowning example of peace, knew the division that he would bring. He caused division by offering the world His peace; the world did not want it then and it doesn’t today. ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword . . .’ (Matt 10:34ff).
The Christian faith with its gospel of peace is not intended for the risk-averse, for comfortable onlookers. It’s for those willing to stand up for what they believe and stand against those who oppose it. The battle avoidance attitude prevalent in much of the church must be repented of if Christianity is to survive in the West.
This means living out the dangerous undertaking of faith. The fight of faith is more than an internal battle with our own sin, it also means the external battle with the sin which is prevalent in the world around us. We are called to take the faith to every aspect of life. As Abraham Kuyper reminds us, ‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!’
The day is coming when we will be unable to raise our voice in the public square. We should prepare for it, but although fast approaching that day is not yet. While we still have the opportunity, we have an obligation to oppose what we can and point to a better way. This does not mean that we should be involved in every battle, but we should be involved in the battles to which our generation are called. There we must do as Isaiah says: ‘Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet.’ (Isa 58:1).
