The World Trade Center
September 11, 2001 was an interesting day for all of us. I remember where I was when I heard about the towers coming down. That was also the moment when everyone had to become an expert on Islam.
I was a teenager at the time so things didn’t seem too intense. I hadn’t even studied apologetics and I had never read the Bible at that time. Apart from going to Church, I hadn’t had much exposure to my faith. Now, having studied Scripture, Church History, and apologetics, I have a very different worldview.
Between that awful day and now, I have observed the Counter-Jihad movement. One thing that bothers me about this movement is how secular it is. Even though he’s a Catholic, Robert Spencer’s critique of Islam is almost entirely secular. Pamela Gellar is the other big gun of this movement and her critiques of Islam are completely secular as well.
What Christians need to do is show Muslims that while we oppose their religion, we don’t stand with the secularists. The Christian critique of Islam is worlds apart from the secular one.
Sadly, some who claim to be Christian are mounting secular attacks against Islam, saying things like Islam is incompatible with democracy. Before September 11, 2001, opposition to Islam in the West was almost entirely an arm of Christian apologetics. Now the Counter-Jihad movement is defending the Masonic doctrines of the enlightenment.
Christian apologists like to point out to Muslims that they’re inconsistent and use double standards when they accept conclusions of liberal Biblical scholars based on naturalistic presuppositions and speculations. We’re quite right to do that but sadly many Christians dabble in these same double standards. We defend democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion as if they’re Christian ideas. They’re not.
As an apologist I have to study the best that the other side has to offer. Recently, I listened to a lecture by Shabir Ally where he was giving a clinic on how to respond to Christian arguments. Naturally, Ally would bring up the most probably objections to Islam. Sadly, many of the objections that he’d give responses to were completely secular objections. It made me sick. This was a clinic on how to respond to Christians, not secularists or Freemasons. The fact that he brought those arguments up indicates that these were common objections.
One of the classic secular objections used by both Christian and secular Westerners is that the Quran says a man can marry up to take four wives. If this is not responded to with Matthew 19, then it’s done incorrectly. If we answer in a secular way, it would be our downfall because in the West, a man is allowed to “marry” a man. Hey, if you defend the West, that is part of our pitiful ensemble of laws.
I think that if we act like this, we will make a distinction between the three groups. As Christians, we aren’t Muslim or secularist. We proclaim Christ as king, not Muhammad or some secular ruler with Masonic values. This will send a message to Western secularists as well. The message that their secularism will never win against Islam. The Christian faith is the ultimate Counter-Jihad movement. Anything else will ultimately fail.
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