Christians who do care about the persecution of their brothers and sisters around the world need to be fearless about speaking the truth, and willing to be called Islamophobes. The media, the governments of nations, and the churches are increasingly self-censoring for fear of this bogus epithet — exactly as the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates had hoped.

Graduate school at the University of Maryland (recently named the 10th best party school in the United States) was quite a shock after the protected, Christian environment of my college. So in the hedonistic sea of fellow teaching assistants and much of the English Department faculty, I was overjoyed to meet another Christian who, like me, was teaching freshmen composition while working on a Master’s degree.

Brian and his wife, Grace, were kind, generous, and added stability to my new life in College Park, far from everyone I knew. When they decided to host a Bible study/worship/fellowship in their little apartment, the “Thursday Night Group” became the place where I was not only spiritually fed, but made life-long friends.

In the years that followed, my friend Brian McLaren pastored a church, wrote lots of books, and became known as the “Emergent Church Guru.” [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.] My colleagues at the IRD have written extensively his “generous orthodoxy.”  And although I have grieved over what my old grad school friend says in books and in talks that seem so far from the Brian McLaren I knew, I have not responded personally until now.

After reading McLaren’s recent blog post, “Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Peace,” I am compelled finally to respond. Because for much of the time that Brian has been doing his many things, I have been doing things, as well – mostly connected to advocacy for persecuted members of the global Body of Christ and others suffering under grievous human rights violations.

McLaren, along with The Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers and faith and culture writer, Jonathan Merritt, pose the questions: Why is this kind of anti-Christian persecution happening? and Why is the world, and especially the Christian world, so silent? I asked these questions two decades ago and my daily experience these past twenty years has taught me that flesh and blood testimonies provide far more accurate and truthful answers to those questions than do theoretical statements by those far removed from the reality of persecution.

McLaren suggests six reasons why Christians are silent, adding that he is speaking as “as a Christian who cares but has not spoken up often enough or effectively enough about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.” Presumably McLaren also cares (but has not spoken up often enough) about the persecution of Christians throughout Africa, and in North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, as well, so I will occasionally mention them. He says Western Christians are silent because:

1. They don’t want to add their voices to the growing numbers of Islamophobic voices in the Christian community.
2. They already know that much anti-Christian violence is retaliation against hawkish American foreign policy.
3. They know that a careless bias against Palestinians – many of whom, by the way, are committed Christians – has become a pre-requisite in some circles for being considered “pro-Israel.”
4. They are part of a global oil-based economy, and as such . . . depend on repressive Muslim governments . . . .
5. They have accepted superficial clichés (“They are evil” or “Their religion is evil”) and avoided the hard, often unsettling work of understanding how religious identity can be turned to violent ends – in any religion: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even atheist.
6. They don’t know what can be done practically.

Nothing new here. McLaren echoes the Religious Left’s longstanding discomfiture on the issue of the persecuted Church and its tendency to criticize persecuted Christians’ defenders. Former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Joan Brown Campbell, famously opposed the particular advocacy for Christians as coming from the “overly muscular Christianity” of both the persecuted and their advocates. These believers, who are willing to die for their faith rather than compromise with the world systems or convert to other religions, are alien to the “new kind of Christianity” espoused by McLaren.

Based on my experience as a persecuted church advocate, I believe that five of the reasons that McLaren gives to explain Christian persecution are incorrect, in that:

1. Speaking the truth about Christian persecution is not Islamophobia.

You can’t have it both ways. McLaren is concerned that too many Christians are silent about what Powers described as ”Christians in the Middle East and Africa. . .”being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity” and yet he implies that those Christians who do speak up are “Islamophobes.”

Islamophobia is an Orwellian invention of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, designed as a weaponto advance global Islamic supremacism by stigmatizing critics and silencing them. In a defiant manifesto  released by authors Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and others in the wake of the “Mohammed Cartoons” of Denmark, Islamophobia is described as “a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it.”

Read More.

To read Part 2 go here.

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]