Why the American Church Sucks

By Walid Shoebat

When I became Christian they told me I needed to go to a Bible believing church.

I wandered to find such a church, but as I wandered for two decades in America looking for one, I found no Christian leader who emulated Moses when he took a million Jews to march through the Red Sea. There was no Mega Church pastor like Elijah, who challenged the prophets of Baal. Nor did I find a Church emulating ancient Israel who entered the Promised Land to fight the giants.

Why do Christian churches turn their backs on their own history?

Why do Christian churches turn their backs on their own history?

When I asked them about all these stories, they told me that I needed to emulate the apostles in the Book of Acts, that these stories in the Old Testament are only applied in a personal way.

So I studied the book of Acts. Yet the gist of the whole book, as I found out, was about disciples defying the powers of darkness while continually going to prison for it, and standing up to proclaim God over pagan tyranny until they were all martyred.

As I carried out what the book said, and when I feared persecution, my American Christian brethren would tell me, “Don’t worry, God will put a hedge of protection all around you” (Job 1:10).

But as I tested them to join me, they all fled. It was like walking a tightrope between two high-rises and everyone clapped, “you can do it,” but the moment I asked for any volunteers to ride on my back to cross to the other side, they all stopped clapping and continued to say, “God will provide a hedge of protection all around you”.

I then asked, if militancy was obsolete, and all we need is to pray for a hedge of protection, how is it that Israel in 1948 and during the Six Day War in 1967 – while they had a “hedge of protection” given by God’s providence – still had to fight? Israel would never have become a nation without using militancy.

Militancy, they told me, was sort of forbidden for the Christian but allowed for the Jew.

Well, not exactly. It wasn’t completely forbidden for Christians to war. It was rather strange, the evangelical would sanction the Israelis fighting during the Six Day War as fulfillment of prophecy (and rightfully so); Americans fighting in World War I and World War II was – in their view (as well as mine) – Biblically sanctioned. Of course, these wars had to do with their own survival but when Christians defend themselves militarily against Muslims, in let’s say, Serbia, Mindanao, Syria or Africa, preachers cry foul, pass judgments, demand quick peaceful resolutions, or turn away while bemoaning the significant displacement of Muslims since these Christians ought to “love their enemies”.[1]

So then I told myself that since militancy was a sin, that I needed to at least rescue these unfortunate souls from death.

But when I started looking for an organization to help, I found many organizations that say they “rescue Christians” to only find out they “pray,” “lend moral support,” “send them bibles,” and “inform others of their plight”.

Not one of them lifted a finger to remove persecuted Christians out of harm’s way. I am still searching, so please send me proof of actual cases.

So then I started my own organization and roamed the nation speaking at hundreds of evangelical churches, yet I could not find a single pastor who would give a cent.

Then I went to Catholic churches asking for help and the bishops and priests too were nothing but a bunch of hypocrites.

They all had a form of godliness; pastors, priests, bishops…

For years to come, I concluded that most pastors were church managers who favored to read the Acts of the Apostles over all the other books of the Bible, since it is the place where we go to analyze the biblical model for local church management.

I always thought, why must we modernize a book, which took us from pagan antiquity into the best civilization in history?

For two decades I watched how American Christians witnessed to Muslims and they were riddled with hypocrisy. When the Muslim instantly brought up the Crusaders to claim the Bible taught violence, the evangelical instantly provided a liberal response; they would start apologizing, saying that “the Crusaders were the evil works of the Vatican” and then summed up all these wars, adding a spin loaded with conservative piety, “This does not represent biblical Christianity or the spirit of Christ,” they would say to the Muslim.

So then I refined my abilities, since all these years I wasted my time talking to so many hypocrites, to simply develop a keen eye on how to spot the hypocrites.

Here is how. A hypocrite can be easily spotted from his religious piety; he is usually pro-Israel but not pro-war. He condemns violence by all means. He loves everyone and judges no one. He always advocates to, “Turn the other cheek” and always says that we “must render unto Cesar what is Cesar’s” while he forgets to “render unto God what is God’s”.

He is always cloaked with half-truths.

Let me explain it better. A Christian hypocrite would sanction (and rightfully so) the Israelis fighting during the Six Day War as fulfillment of prophecy, Americans fighting in World War I and World War II. But when Christians defend themselves militarily against Muslims, in lets say, Serbia, Mindanao, Syria or Africa, they would cry out foul, pass judgments that these promote violence, demand quick peaceful resolutions, and then focus on the significant displacement of Muslims since these Christians ought to “love their enemies” and “pray for them”.

When it came issues such as fighting the biblically-sanctioned wars as World War I, World War II, or the six day War, they would easily find biblical verses to go in line with the American conservative thought sanctioning their own wars, and then find verses to rebuke other Christians overseas from fighting theirs.

What was ironic in all that I witnessed is that such verses to support American wars were the same verses that old Catholics found during the days they had to fight Islam, heresy and paganism.

The hypocrites in America are both in the Evangelical and Catholic circles.

To evangelical hypocrites, the Muslims killing Catholics was absent from their discussions because to them, ‘Catholicism’ was a warmongering religion and the Vatican, of course, was the greater enemy; Muslims and Islam represented little but a field for the Christian to sow seeds. Such a “field” now includes Catholic nations in which evangelical missionaries predominately enjoy visiting in order to undo the centuries of what old Jesuits and Franciscan monks have done while giving their lives for Christ in South America, Mexico and Africa, especially that since these regions, while at times were converted through militancy, are now humble Catholics and would not bite back as the Muslim or the heart-plucking Aztecs would do.

I remember when they all talked about the “unreached by the Gospel 10-40 Window,” which the majority refrain from entering since it is virtually hostile territory, a territory that was all Christianized once-upon-a-time by Catholics of all creatures.

I would tell them that Islam had conquered the once Christianized 10-40 Window and even wanted more, Europe itself, the center of their heritage which these hypocrites proclaimed as the future devil and Antichrist. They knew nothing about the Battle of Lepanto, Battle of Tours, The Battle of Vienna, and The Battle of Malta—wars to defend Europe from Islam—since all these were Catholic-Islamic wars.

The absence of Muslim-Catholic wars from their awkward interpretations was simple to explain; such struggle was described as the suffering of a “whore” who drinks the blood of saints, while the Muslim killing them was simply “doing God a service”.

They did not even realize that Arabia’s Islam was the vampire who hadn’t had its fill of sanguine Christian blood. It took me two decades to convince a few. I was always astonished; how can killing Catholics serve Allah, the false God of Islam, and also serve the true God of the Bible?

To these, Islam was not even on their radar. It mattered little prophetically when I explained how the Bible in Revelation 13:2 was speaking of the greatest threat to Christianity. It was Islam that became this threat (beastly nation) as predicted in Scripture that occupied the region that was prophesied by John; Lion (Iraq/Arabia), Bear (Persia) and Leopard (Greece/Asia Minor).

But then they told me that Americans will not likely read beyond a thousand word articles and for me to explain it all is a waste of time.

They were all hung up on the Crusaders.

I could not move the needle so the rest of the song can play.

They had no clue how it all began when through deceit using the Hudaybiyyah Treaty, Muhammad took Arabia to later, under Omar bin Al-Khattab, advance into Christian Byzantine territory. They were, as naïve as my mother Marilyn was upon her moving to the Holy Land to only become a captive of Islam.

They were clueless how every Muslim is educated on the importance of the decisive Battle of Yarmouk in August 636 when the Christian Emperor Heraclius was defeated by Islamic hordes.

Even the land of their beloved weekly topic, the Holy Bible, I was amazed they had never learned on how it was first invaded by Islam and taken away from them. Unlike Christians in the East who had a heart for such history, the American Christian never heard of Sophronius, the Christian Arab from Bethlehem who was at the time Patriarch of Jerusalem, how in his sermon on the Day of the Epiphany 636 A.D. he bewailed the destruction of the churches and monasteries, how the sacked towns, the fields laid waste, the villages burned down by the Muslim nomads who were overrunning the country then to later invade Jerusalem itself and occupy it under Umar bin Al-Khattab.

Even today, when Saudi Arabia and Qatar send incursions into Syria of replicas of the same ancient savages, beheading Christians, raping, burning and destroying everything in sight; the American Christian initially was unaware, despite our warnings, that he would take the side of such savages in full support of the so-called Free Syrian Army; which is nothing more Muslims from different nations whom converged in Syria to carry out the Harlot’s interest of Saudi Arabia.

The American has not learned the lessons from history about what Arabia has done to the Christian world beginning with the conquest of Christian Syria in 637, the conquest of Christian Armenia, 639, to later massacre 1.2 Million Armenian Christians in 1915, then the conquest of Christian Egypt in 639 A.D., in which the population of the Christian Copts gradually decreased from nine million to 700,000 in the early 1900’s.

The case of how Egypt fell to Islam needs pause; Egypt is an important case-in-point regarding the tolerance to Islam. It is a fact of history that the Egyptians allowed the Muslims into their country. When the Egyptian populace heard that the Muslims were arriving, they accepted them with open arms, not seeing them as deceiving heretics, but as people who merely believed in one God. Their open mindedness would have received the applause of the moderns, but the end result was the consequence of all ultra equality and tolerance: violence.

Did Egypt follow the Book of Acts in confronting the Muslim heresy?

The Muslims broke right into the country, plundering, burning, and massacring wherever they went. They took the city of Nikius with much bloodshed, putting to the sword everyone they met, “in the streets and in the churches, men, women, and children alike, sparing none.” It did not take long for the Egyptians to recognize that their acceptance of Muslims was a grave mistake.[2]

Then Islam marched – with the same ravishes as in Egypt – for the conquest of Christian North Africa, 652, then the conquest of Christian Cyprus, 654. And then under the Umayyads, more conquests into Christian North Africa, 665, then the first Arab siege of Christian Constantinople, 674–678, then the second Arab siege of Christian Constantinople, 717–718.

To western ‘prophets’, all these territories represented the eastern leg of the Vatican, which according to them were simply following the harlot religion mentioned in the Book of Revelation, which was not even included in their European centric Roman beast.

Even the Islamic conquests of beacons of the Christian west was of no concern as the Muslims proceeded into Europe itself; the conquest of Christian Hispania (Spain), 711–718, then the conquest of Georgia, 736 in eastern Europe, then Christian Crete, 820, then the conquest of Christian southern Italy, 827 and 831–902.

To them, these were simply the western leg of Antichrist and the bosom of the Harlot of Babylon, the very center of where this beastly ten-horned kingdom will arise out of the European Union.

All they knew of Africa’s Christians were proselytes of recent missionaries they sent. They knew very little about the Muslim conquests into Christian Nubia: 700–1606.

Even the Seven Churches which were the Seven Lampstands in Asia Minor mentioned in Revelations by John, the very churches the apostles established, the beacon of Christendom, they knew little on how the descendants of these churches ended, beginning with the conquest of Anatolia: 1060–1360 and the bloody history against Christianity, which continued into the Byzantine-Ottoman Wars: 1299–1453, further conquests: 1200–1800, after the Mongol Empire removed the Abbasid Caliphate, rampaged through most of the Muslim world following the Battle of Baghdad (1258), they soon converted to Islam, beginning an era of Turkic and Mongol Muslim expansions into Christian Eastern Europe, Central Asia and India in which they slaughtered an enormous sum of eighty million and literally erected towers of skulls.[3] They knew little about how Islam jolted itself into becoming the superpower after Islam in 1068 with Alp Arslan and allied Turkmen tribes recaptured many Muslim Abbasid lands and invaded Christian Byzantine regions, pushing further into eastern and central Anatolia after a major victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which laid the foundation to create the Ottoman Empire which came as result of the disintegration of the Seljuk dynasty, which was The Sultanate of Rum or Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (Anadolu Selçuklu Devleti or Rum Sultanlığı).

None of this fit in their eschatological paradigm, regardless of the fact that the term “Rûm” comes from the Arabic word for the Roman Empire. The Seljuqs called the lands of their sultanate Rum because it had been established on territory long considered “Roman”, i.e. Byzantine, by Muslim armies.[4] This became the first unified Muslim Turkic dynasty.

Then on April 15, 1452, the fateful day when Muhammad II ordered preparations to be made for the siege of Constantinople, captured it and had himself titled “Kaiser-i-Rum”, or “Roman Caesar”, and modeled the state after the old Byzantine Empire, thinking of himself as the successor to the Roman throne. Later, when he invaded Otranto, his goal was to capture Rome and reunite the Roman Empire for the first time since 751. Justinian’s cathedral of Hagia Sophia was converted into an imperial mosque, as eventually were numerous other churches and monasteries.[5] The evangelical had no clue that their revival of the Roman Empire had to include this portion of history in which Muhammad II claimed his domain as the Roman Empire.

Finally, the greatest threat to Judeo-Christianity, this beast, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, collapsed in 1918 and the Islamic empire received a head wound in the aftermath of World War I. This significant historic event, which ended centuries of the bloodiest wars in Christian history until on March 3, 1924, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the institution of the Caliphate as part of his reforms in creating Turkey as a secular republic and a Turkish nation state from the remnants of the collapsed Islamic multi-ethnic Ottoman realm.

I had warned about Ottoman revival two decades ago when so few political analysts were speaking of it. Today it has become a debated argument when reviewing the shifting powers in the Middle East.

Despite all this prophetic progress, to these folks, the villain was still by far the Vatican.

The Catholic was the enemy, while ignoring that all the evils of Islam stemmed from that Babel, Saudi Arabia, which established the first Caliphate (Vicar of Allah on earth). This is significant. It is the key to unlock everything; the persecution of the saints, the Harlot, the image of whom they demand worship, the purpose of the wars being anti-God-in-the flesh, the anti-Cross, the anti-Trinity, the first head wound, the ending of the Seven Churches and Seven Lampstands, the spiritual driving of the Seven Mountains … everything of this evil stemmed from Arabia and landed in Turkey, the seventh kingdom to be revived as the eighth (Revelation 17:11)

Today in America, both institutions – Catholic and Evangelicals – suck. What is left are you, the followers, wandering souls, migrants, church hoppers … we are not conquering but salvaging what is left. We stand together until death do us part.

So I ask you to stand with us, support Rescue Christians.

[1] New American, World Turns Away as Rebel Massacres of Syrian Christians Intensify, Friday, 20 December 2013

[2] Butcher, The Story of the Church of Egypt, vol. i, part i, ch. xxxi, p. 352; ch. xxxii, p. 358, 363-365, 370

[3] Prof. K.S. Lal, suggests a calculation in his book Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India which estimates that between the years 1000 AD and 1500 AD the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million.

[4] Alexander Kazhdan, “Rūm” The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 3, p. 1816.

[5] Wikipedia*
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