Saving Christianity? by Michael Youssef

Author:Michael Youssef [Youssef, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Living / Social Issues, RELIGION / Christian Theology / Apologetics
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

More Lessons from History

The rest of Brian McLaren’s analysis of Christian history is equally flawed. He cites the Crusades as part of “the dark side of the Christian religion’s track record.”[9] I don’t defend the atrocities committed by many of the Crusaders. In fact, in 2019 I detailed those very atrocities in my book The Third Jihad. But what is almost always left out of the discussion is the fact that the Crusades were a delayed response to more than four centuries of Islamic invasion, slaughter, conquest, and forced conversions. The original intent of the Crusaders was to protect defenseless Christians from being massacred or forced to convert at the point of a sword.

As historian Robert Louis Wilken writes, “By the middle of the eighth century more than fifty percent of the Christian world had fallen under Muslim rule. . . . The successors of Muhammad planted a permanent political and religious rival to Christianity and made Christians a minority in lands that had been Christian for centuries.”[10] Critics of Christianity seem to forget that all the great cities that cradled the early church—Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Carthage, Hippo, and Alexandria—were at one time conquered by mass slaughter and turned into strongholds of militant Islam.

Whenever the Crusades are spoken of, the full story should be told, including the story of the Islamic invasion of lands that had been peacefully converted by evangelists spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. If you leave the Islamic conquest out of the discussion, you are not telling the truth about history.

And what about witch burnings, slavery, apartheid, and the rest of Christianity’s so-called track record? Let’s be honest. People have committed horrible acts in the name of the Christian religion. But the closer we adhere to God’s Word and obey its teachings, the more ethical, compassionate, tolerant, and generous we will be.

Is witch burning encouraged in the Bible? Absolutely not! Is racism ever justified in Scripture? No, never. Some racists in the American South superimposed their prejudices onto the Old Testament and invented a rationalization for racism. But those rationalizations came purely from the hateful minds of those racists. They are nowhere to be found in Scripture.

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