Islam and Century 21 American Liberalism
1 February, 2008
Editor
Wilmington News Journal
Barry Jude is the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. He is the only pastor to speak out at a zoning hearing on January 10 against the recently proposed construction of a mosque. His outrageous remarks, in the eyes of good liberals, were these: “We promote and propagate Christianity first and foremost.” Subsequently, these words have been indited repeatedly in news reports including a Dayton Daily News editorial (“Our view: Sugarcreek bigots can’t call the shots,” January 16) which decried the pastor’s freely expressed opinion as an “ugly public sentiment.”
Why must the Dayton Daily News, a literary tool which could be a herald and conservator of a Christian Midwest, fall prey to the foolish desires of a New York Times wannabe? The doctrine of Liberalism is freedom for the individual to believe anything – or so it generally and thoughtlessly presented. (No freedom for a community to believe what it wants and pass laws upholding what it believes to be good and right?) Is the there no freedom to associated as a community and uphold standards which exclude what the community holds to be evil deeds?
Mindlessly, Liberalism imagines that the law of non-contradiction somehow can be suspended so that two opposing propositions can both be true or good and exist peacefully in a community. But the citizens of the Aztec society could not live peacefully with their neighboring communities because their god required that they capture members of the neighboring communities and cut their hearts out. The point is that those communities whose propositional truth claims are directly in conflict cannot live together. Sorry. That is simply the truth.
The earnest Muslim who believes his Koran to be true cannot live in the same neighborhood with an apostate – anyone who ever was a Muslim who renounces Islam. But let us not derail ourselves with the hot topics of mandatory Islamic doctrine of jihad juxtaposed to varying Christian doctrines of defensive wars, crusades, or pacifism. Let us take up a topic more ear to the Liberal heart than any other: “equal rights” and “privacy” as related to sexual egalitarianism, abortion, sodomy, and adultery.
Do our News editors find bigotry in Muslims who call for the death penalty for the crimes of abortion, sodomy, and adultery? Are Muslims bigots when they declare that “there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet”? Are they narrow-minded, offensive, and exclusivist when they say that Jesus is not God, not divine, not the Savior, not the Lord, not the Judge, not “seated at the right hand of the Father”?
We Christians (those of us who take the Scriptures seriously) might well find ourselves in agreement on the Law of God and together call for the death penalty for what we agree to be capital crimes. The outsider comparing the ethical standards of Christianity and Islam might well find them similar. But there is a reason why the editors (and any Liberal) find more tolerance for Muslims than they do for Christians. And that reason is more profound than one might imagine because, in fact, this single reason unites Muslims and Liberals in opposition to Christianity. Islam and Liberalism share in common a fundamental rejection of the claim that Jesus is God in the flesh. This point of doctrine is central to defining Christianity in contrast to all other religions and philosophies. The first epistle of the Apostle John is devoted to establishing this proposition: Jesus, the Christ, is God in the flesh. He is “the true God” (5:20). Those who deny this Truth – whether Liberal or Muslim or Jehovah’s Witness are anti-Christ (2:22: 4:2,3). Such a person denies both he Father and the Son (2:23).
Let us illustrate these sentiments in the Liberal. He appears to be committed to his cardinal doctrine of equality among the sexes and is profoundly offended by any subordination of women in any way. With this doctrine he campaigns for women working for equal pay, the right to fight in wars along with men, the right of a woman to be a lesbian. And yet he would rather find peace with Islam with its clearly defined inequities than to brook any the claims of Christianity to having the Truth in Jesus as THE one-and-only divine Messiah. Consider the gross offense to the sensibilities of the doctrinal Liberal, even the very profound heresy which Islam advances when it permits by statute beatings for a woman by her husband. Sura 4:34 unequivocally instructs concerning the man’s charge of his wife:
“The righteous women will accept this arrangement obediently, and will honor their husbands in their absence, in accordance with God’s commands. As for the women who show rebellion, you shall first enlighten them, then desert them in bed, and you may beat them as a last resort.”
This Islamic doctrine flies directly in the face of a cardinal doctrine of modern Liberalism and yet the Liberal is less offended by it than by the “bigotry” of Christianity’s truth claims.
And it is not the exclusivity in se of the Christian claims concerning the deity that offends the Liberal. Islam makes the exact claims in this regard concerning Allah that Christianity makes concerning Jesus. How can the Liberal overlook the extraordinary offenses Islam presents Liberalism’s cardinal doctrines and take up as “ugly public sentiment” the Christian exclusivity claim as represented in Rev. Barry Jude: “We promote and propagate Christianity first and foremost”?
Again, the Apostle John tells us, “He who denies that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is anti-Christ.” In this spirit the Dayton Daily News editor, his fellow Liberal ideologues, and Islamists are brothers. And the hostility toward the so-called “ugly public sentiment” of First Baptist of Kettering is understood.
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