Our nation's latest homegrown act of terror, the San Bernardino shooting spree by a Muslim couple, has produced an interesting little "meme" with a decidedly anti-Christian flavor. This conversation already has a catchy name. Known as "prayer shaming", it goes something like this: "Those stupid Christians are once again calling for us to 'remember the victims in our thoughts and prayers'. Well guess what, people God is not fixing this and those Bible clingers should be joining us secular liberals in our fight to enact gun control laws that WILL fix this problem once and for all".
Of course, this bigoted line of anti-Christian rhetoric is absurd on its face both from theological and socio-political standpoints.
From a theological perspective, we can say that this is nothing new for God. The Old Testament carries within it a dominant theme of His people the Jews* repeatedly falling away from faith in God and His promised coming of the Messiah and being harshly and violently punished for their lack of faith. How? By God's unleashing of brutal wars and hardship upon them as a people and upon their nations of Judah and Israel, largely by non-Jews. There is a fairly sound argument that this is happening now. Unlike during the aftermath of 9/11/2001, our victim nation does NOT appear turning to God in response to the latest waves of Muslim terror.
In fact, our faith as a nation has sharply waned since 9/11, according a recent Pew Research report only 56% of millennials identify as Christian, as opposed to 78% of baby boomers.
The trend is obvious and harrowingly portentous. Progressively fewer Americans are being raised in a Christian setting with each passing generation. All this while Islamist terrorism is clearly ascendent against the traditionally Judeo-Christian west. It is mandated in their theology. (For more on this topic, see Erwin W. Lutzer's insightful book, The Cross and the Crescent.)
Terrorism is designed to divide its target nations. But the greater reality and, yes the biblical one is that the goal of Islam is specifically and actively to destroy Christianity. They are succeeding by violent and manipulative means that exploit the good but ill-informed intentions of secular and christian liberals, alike.
So, then what about the socio-political or secular realities of this growing menace? The stark reality is that we are in the midst of a shooting war with Islamic terrorists. They are gaining strength at present and we are not meeting that strength. One can argue that the we gained the upper hand in that war with The Surge in Iraq but that battlefront, having been neglected along with a similar neglect on domestic security, namely at our borders and in other areas, has spawned a global caliphate and a wave of attacks in various western countries that is now beginning to gain steam in earnest. In the U.S. and Europe, where gun control laws abound, most of which are largely unenforcible, terrorists are gathering strength in numbers as well as weaponry and we will see more and more of these attacks on soft targets. An organized web of secrecy and deception can easily circumvent laws that realistically only stop law abiding citizens from obtaining weapons with which to defend themselves. For instance, online "chatter" is no longer a reliable source of intelligence, as ISIS and Al Qaeda are now in possession of advance encryption technology.
Gun control laws will not minimize or expose terrorist cells who are rapidly gaining expertise while we attack each other over gun control and other indulgent, contrived and illusory social issues such as gay marriage, ethnic "micro-aggression" and transgenderism. Sharia law will have a short conversation with transexuals and same-sex couples and it will be terminal. This is not about hunting or target shooting. This is about survival in the face of unpredictable, cunning and implacable immoral evil.
Thus we all as a nation, enjoying the fruits of Judeo-Christian liberty whether faithful or not, have a profound vestiture in attacking both the underlying ethic, theology and violence of Islamism by any means necessary or we will be faced with an increasing grim and lurid scenario akin to hell on earth. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, indeed. Or at least don't keep it from the hands of the good guys.
Amen.
*In this context the Jews means the pre-Christian Jews of the Old Testament. The Jewish religion of the Old Testament no longer exists. But that is a topic for another entry. Fundamental Muslim theology hates contemporary Jews and Christians equally. It overtly hates the Judeo-Christian ethic. Islam's God, Allah, is not the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac. That is why it is called the Judeo-Christian ethic and not the Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethic.
