My Christian brothers who are not persecuted desperately want to feel as if they are.
That’s why there’s such murderous hysteria over Muslims. (And hysteria, though less murderous, over the state/culture’s treatment of Christmas.)
A lot of people consider Islam (or at least a particular branch of it) to be an existential threat to Christianity: they want to wipe us out, etc.
But think about it: at the very beginning, Christianity faced two cities that conceivably could have broken Christianity:
Jerusalem & Rome
In Jerusalem, our countrymen had a bit of a messianic disagreement with us and started killing us off by the oxload.
Later on, Rome saw us as a threat and started killing us far more expeditiously than the Sanhedrin ever did. And Rome, mind you, was the United States of the time. And we were very, very few.
But how did we respond? What did Jesus himself and his apostles tell us to do?
Kill their leaders and convert them? Assassinate influential members of the senate? Get together popular support to pass favorable legislation?
Nope.
We were supposed to (and by and large did, for a long, long time) turn the other cheek, give ourselves as sheep to the slaughter, bless those who cursed us, and sheathe our swords.
You know what? It worked.
But you think: that’s crazy! They would have been exterminated!
That’s the wisdom of the world, my friends.
And yet now, when some TBN commentator or your local pastor or a guest speaker talks to you about Muslims, what does he do? Does he follow the scriptures?
No. Times are different now, he says. They’re trying to kill us, and we’ve got to defend ourselves. We’ve got to get our brave men and women in uniform to fight them over there so they don’t fight us over here.
That’s the language of AD 70, of the Zealots, of those who died in Masada. It’s not the language of Jesus, and it’s not the language of the New Covenant.
Mecca is no different than Jerusalem or Rome. If anything, it poses far weaker a threat to Christianity.
If Christians today hate the violence of some of our Muslim neighbors, we should first remove the planks from our own eyes.