There’s an interesting discussion on YouTube between two Christian apologists to Muslims, the American David Wood, and the English “Bob from Speakers Corner.” They agree on the need for the churches to “muscle up,” and they have good experience to back this view up, being far more aware than most Christians about the real threat to peace (and potentially to Christianity itself) from Islam. Their message may well find more general agreement than it would have a year or so ago, as ordinary people begin to sense the antisemitic and anti-christian militancy of many from a religion that now comprises 6% of the population, and that is increasing by hundreds of thousands annually through uncontrolled immigration.
Essentially they draw attention to the frank hostility of both Islam (in its purest form) and progressive globalism towards Christians (as well as Jews) despite the glaring incompatibility between their own two ideologies. They say that the churches have become too beset by “middle-class niceness” to mount an effective resistance to these enemies. They call on them first to recognise these ideologies as enemies, to educate themselves about their true nature, and to engage in cultural warfare in the form of avoiding and even boycotting products and organisations promoting them so as to starve them of money and influence. They don’t advocate taking up arms!
Making judgements on one’s own times and one’s own religion that are, in effect, historical, is fraught with difficulties. But I can’t disagree with the general thrust of the discussion. My recent trawl through my own church’s history, amongst other things, has enabled me to see that for all its admirable doctrinal consistency, its sociological role has necessarily changed according to the challenges of the time.
The most dramatic contrast with the present lies in its very origins, the church’s founders being actively engaged, using real swords, in a Civil War that was largely about religious freedom. There was a very real risk under the Stuarts of the forceful re-imposition of Catholicism on the nation – a risk actually realised during the reign of James II. One may argue about the justice of that bloody war, but the fact is that my Baptist forbears judged the problem as an existential threat to biblical faith, and therefore to eternal salvation, and they were closer to the matter than any of us.
Although it lies before my own church’s time, and outside the immediate concerns of England after the Crusades, Europe had also felt the need to take up arms against Muslim invaders who had already occupied 70% of Christian lands, and had begun the destruction of the Christians that has been more or less completed in those regions as recently as our own times. That occupation had begun back in in the 7th century, yet still threatened in the 17th. Indeed, as late as 1895 members of my church signed a petition asking the Great Powers to intervene in the Armenian Genocide by the Turks that reached its climax two decades later: many millions of Christians died across Asia Minor and Greece because that intervention was withheld.
Just like the churches in dhimmitude in conquered Christendom, the role of my own church under the persecutions of the Restoration years had to change to one of mere survival. Meeting, like underground churches under Communism, effective political action consisted in keeping their heads down until better times.
Perhaps it’s fair to say that with the emancipation of the free churches, despite the lack of access to universities and other disadvantages, the teachings of a church like mine became a relatively civilised competition in the marketplace of ideas, a situation to which biblical Christians became used, and which still persists probably long after it became inappropriate. Evangelical faith may have been largely unfashionable amidst the beliefs of the great and good, be they deism, rationalism or whatever. But a Wesley, or a Moody, or a Spurgeon, or a Billy Graham could freely present the claims of Christ even to the higher echelons of society, and persuade many that what was fashionable was not necessarily true.
Christians (I’m thinking of examples from my own church) could petition their MPs against excessively liberal licencing laws, and win their case, or stand for their local council and not be sidelined, or win political battles against the ideological indoctrination of their children (unlike today, they could withdraw their children from the propaganda lessons, and even insist that parents should approve what was taught!).
I guess what was fairly unique in the decline of Christianity during the last century, as far as I can judge as one involved, was the degree to which Evangelicals bought into the ruling ideology of intellectual and financial materialism. Perhaps that was because the secularists seemed to have captured the intellectual high ground with liberal theology, secular science and so on, or perhaps it included new factors like the indoctrination by state-mandated education and the mass media.
The intellectual fight-back did exist, for sure, amongst people like C. S. Lewis making the commonsense case for mere Christianity, Francis Schaeffer arguing for Christian involvement in the whole of culture, or John Stott restoring the intellectual footing of Evangelical faith in Britain. Such people, at least, kept my own willingness to resist the cultural decline alive. But by the time, only recently, that a wider hunger for God has been restored among the ordinary people, too many churches had replaced Scriptural truth with perceived relevance, and hence believers had taken on the priorities of the elite newsmongers – racism, environmentalism, feminism and so on – rather than asserting those of the apostolic message. And I’m not only thinking of the Anglican bishops, but the Baptists, the Charismatics, and so on.
“Niceness,” then, as well as being a leftover from an unusually civil couple of centuries, has also been weaponised against us by the progressives as what has been called “suicidal empathy.” And so churches have been pressured to accept all kinds of immorality by the fear of seeming less kind than the outsiders, having lost sight of the fact that the gospel is intended to transform the immoral by the challenge of the cross, not welcome them unreformed.
Here’s one example of the unreality to which this leads. Although 6% of the country is now Muslim (and far greater than that in the cities), few Christians have bothered to study it beyond the propaganda that it is an “Abrahamic” religion of peace. They therefore think of it as they would think of aberrant Christian sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you’ve the time and the inclination, organising a Bible Study with a JW, on your own terms rather than the Watchtower’s, may well win them to the truth. And if not, your ways will part politely, and they’ll even cross you off the door-knocking list.
But to see mass Muslim immigration primarily as a great opportunity to share the gospel with newcomers ignores the whole of Muslim teaching on jihad, the caliphate, the penalties of apostasy (potentially lethal even in Britain), and the fact that Christianity (like Judaism) being of Satan, and therefore worthy of death at the faithful Muslim’s hands, is part of the religion itself. Now don’t get me wrong – there is of course a place for evangelising Muslims, whether that be the lovely medical couple next door, or the dawah merchants at Speakers Corner. But though converting an individual Nazi concentration camp guard might win a soul, yet it does not prevent the invasion machine of the Third Reich laying waste the Church, and so does not justify disarmament. Likewise the threats of Islam and of globalist socialism require Christians to view things sociologically as well as individually.
And I guess that means more public, ie political involvement. In the days of the Festival of Light, Graham Kendrick’s Make Way, and so on, Christian mass gatherings seemed to be designed to alert the nation, and the government, to wrongs it hadn’t noticed. “Come on chaps, let’s return to Christ, shall we?” It appears to me that since the nation overall is now very well aware of the problems, and often more in touch with their causes than the public face of the churches, and since Governments are the deliberate engineer of the problems because they are ideologically committed to globalism and apparently in bed with Islam, then a more robust and muscular response is needed. And that’s what Dave Wood and Bob (and indeed Tommy Robinson, prophetically prayed over at Shiloh in Israel last week by a bunch of American Christians who hadn’t even hear do him or his recent profession of Christ) insist.
Exactly what form that should take I’m not sure, but it might start where Clifford Hill left off – by calling the nation out for its apostasy from Christ, and identifying its problems as judgements for sins to be repented of from top to bottom, rather than mere political misfortunes. But for anyone who doubts the necessity, I suggest you take a look at the history of Christian Lebanon in the last half century.
The Byrds took the message of Ecclesiastes and got a hit, perhaps for the sake of a cause that has become one of the problems. Maybe the monochrome format of this clip signifies that.
