NEW DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCE FROM IRD’S RELIGIOUS LIBERTY PROGRAM:

UNDERSTANDING AND RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE OF RADICAL ISLAM IN THE UNITED STATES
Faith McDonnell
Director, Religious Liberty Programs
and Church Alliance for a New Sudan

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How should churches and individual Christians respond to the political, theological, cultural, and missional challenges of the insurgence of radical Islam in America?
 
First of all, this is a far different question than asking how Christians should respond to the missional challenge of the Gospel concerning sharing their faith with Muslims.  And it must be answered in quite a different manner.  Muslims are people that Christians are called to love.  Islam is a belief system that encompasses every part of life – both the life of the believer within Islam as well as the believer’s perspective on the world outside of Islam. 

Both the churches and society in general have great difficulty in comprehending that this is a belief system that sees all that is outside of itself as territory to be conquered.  Culturally relative post-modern America considers all religions equal (with the exception of orthodox, biblical Christianity which it views as embarrassingly naïve and outré).  And whereas biblical Christianity does not view all religions as equal, it does view all people as equal – all those for whom Christ died.  But radical Islam does not view all religions as equal, nor all people as equal.  It is therefore an enormous pitfall for individual Christians (or political leaders, or church leaders) to think their own experience of pluralism and tolerance provides the parameters for an encounter with radical Islam.  We have discussed such mistaken perceptions and the accompanying gestures in past articles such as “Common Ground or Giving Ground?” , “Western Apologies,” and “Yale’s Dhimmi Applicants.”

Neither religious pluralism nor secular humanism can provide an answer or even understand the challenge of radical Islam’s agenda in the United States.  Unlike Islamic insurgency in other parts of the world, which tends to violence, in the United States radical Islam is pursuing its goals through more indirect means and by means of our own system of democracy and religious freedom.  Such strategies include hiding its true aims and objectives, stopping critical thinking, and creating fear (either fear of shame and embarrassment “being labeled an Islamophobe,” or fear of actual physical intimidation and harm).  Rather than confronting radical Islam’s agenda in the United States, both political and church leaders have often resorted to appeasement.  This appeasement is either due to wishful thinking or fear (“If we just have sufficient dialogue, if we just apologize enough for all of our sins against the Muslim people, if we just give in to all of their demands for the permeation of Islam in American culture and society, they’ll understand that we are all people of good faith who want to live in peace and harmony together.”).  Either way, it is extremely dangerous because Islam as a belief system is not content to be a minority.  The theology of Islam is a theology of majority. 

In order to help Christians more fully understand these issues of radical Islam’s agenda of global jihad, and of Islamic insurgency in North America and Europe, we have compiled a diverse, but not exhaustive, list of resources that we have found helpful.  All of these resources have insight and critical information about radical Islam.  Much of what they offer is hard to take in – and not very comforting.  That is why, even as we equip ourselves with understanding and consider how to be “wise as serpents,” as well as “innocent as doves,” when confronting radical Islam, we must return to the word of God for encouragement and strength.   No matter how daunting the task in front of the Body of Christ, we have the Lord’s promise in Revelation 12: 11:

They overcame him
      by the blood of the Lamb
      and by the word of their testimony;
   they did not love their lives so much
      as to shrink from death.

 

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