Copyright 2003 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is impossible to be a believer living in the United States and not wrestle with the question of how best to respond to what has occurred between ‘9-11’ and the end of ‘Gulf War II’. As both Christians and Americans it has become necessary to face the question of what our rules of engagement are with the Muslim world. It is an emotional topic, especially for those of us living in the New York area.

The author recently did a web-search under the words ‘Evangelicals for peace’. It was a bit surprising to find that nothing came up, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. The vast majority of believers in the U.S. feel that our nation just finished fighting a just war in Iraq. Like many Americans watching Saddam’s statue get knocked over in Baghdad most Evangelical Christians here could not help but feel a certain satisfaction. The fact of the matter is that we felt like the destruction of the World Trade Center had been at least partially avenged and if ‘vengeance is the Lord’s’ a lot of us felt that perhaps He was using George Bush as His chosen instrument.

But whether for or against the war it still falls on believers here to ask what Jesus would have us do in regards to Islam. Perhaps the best answer lies in separating the religion from the people who espouse it so that we might ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’. We cannot be politically correct about what Muhammad, and the powers and principalities behind him, brought into existence 1400 years ago but we need not, indeed must not, despise the hundreds of millions who follow him today. Christ died for every one of them and Christians in America will have to overcome the temptation to write off Muslims as people who are somehow more evil than the rest of us. The fruit of Islam is evil, to deny this is to blind ourselves to spiritual reality, but the average follower of ‘Allah’ might be one of the ones Jesus was thinking of when He said ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’.

It is hard to renounce a religion when it is inextricably bound up in the culture in which you live. It is also difficult when the civil authority over you is either a Muslim theocracy or a nominally secular government intimidated by Muslim clerics (It might be wise to remember that even Christianity was perverted when it was invested with too much political power. Separation of church and state, as historically practiced in the U.S., is not so much for the protection of the state as the for the protection of the church). Personal freedoms which would allow the legal proclamation the Gospel simply do not exist in the vast majority of states in the Islamic world. American believers need to take this into account when tempted to give in to painting all Muslims with the broadly negative, and often racially motivated, brush that too many of our countrymen are using today. Those who cannot hear about Jesus Christ will not be as harshly judged as those who can. Moreover, Congenitally culturally-compromised Christians in America cannot afford to throw stones. The truth is we have heard the Gospel and yet oftentimes live as though we haven’t. Muslims have too much zeal for a false religion. We have too little zeal for the right one.

It is time for the Church in America to be proactive in fighting the spiritual battle that must proceed the destruction of the huge stronghold that is Islam. We need to pray to God to revive our own hearts and minds even as we pray for Him to open the doors to the evangelization of the Muslim world. The sword of the Spirit is, in the long run, far more likely to pursuade than American military might. God may indeed be using the temporal strength of ‘the last superpower’ to accomplish some of His will regarding Islam but His humbled Church will be the far greater force in the battle to win Muslims to Christ