Pope Leo XIV is getting lynched on social media. The Chicagoan pontiff renewed his broadside against the death penalty after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who shot dead 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009. “I, an American jihadi, killed for Islam,” Hasan declared at his court-martial.

Leo rushed to rescue the jihadi from the firing squad. “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he pontificated on X. Leo stated his logic for countermanding capital punishment. We have created “effective systems of detention” that keep us safe while not depriving the guilty of “the possibility of redemption,” he argued.

Leo’s tweet garnered over 10 million views. Plebs and highbrows united in an unprecedented barrage of insults against the putative successor of St. Peter. “Sit this out. Let the Christians handle it,” one X-user quipped. Several posted images of the robe and axe used by Giovanni Bugatti, the Papal States’ longest-serving executioner, who carried out 514 executions over 68 years. Scores of Twitterati, including Gad Saad, author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, asked Leo to read his Bible. Others asked why Leo was tight-lipped on the thousands of executions in the Muslim world. A 2002 report highlights a 600 percent rise in capital punishment in Bahrain.

“We’ve reached the stage of Catholicism where the Pope has accused God of being a sinner,” one X user quipped, referring to God legislating capital punishment in the book of Genesis. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image,” God commands Noah. In fact, capital punishment for premeditated murder is the only law repeated in all five books of the Torah.

I’m not going to argue that abrogating the death penalty is a contradiction of Scripture and pre-Vatican II magisterial teaching. Catholic philosopher Edward Feser argues this persuasively in his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, writing: “If capital punishment is wrong in principle, then the Church has for two millennia consistently taught grave moral error and badly misinterpreted Scripture.”

“The reversal of a doctrine as well established as the legitimacy of capital punishment would raise serious problems regarding the credibility of the magisterium,” Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in 2001. “If the tradition on capital punishment had been reversed, serious questions would be raised regarding other doctrines.”

Pope Francis confirmed the magisterial status of the new teaching on the death penalty by promulgating it in his declaration Dignitas Infinita and his encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Leo’s tweet is simply reiterating what has now become official Roman Catholic doctrine.

Did Jails Exist When the Bible Ordered Capital Punishment?

Leo’s main argument against the death penalty in his latest tweet is the development of “effective systems of detention.” He is citing Francis’ exact words in his revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. Two popes claim that there weren’t prisons fit for purpose when the death penalty was practiced in biblical times.

Leo’s main argument against the death penalty in his latest tweet is the development of “effective systems of detention.” In doing so, he is quoting Francis’ exact wording from the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. Both popes contend that prisons fit for purpose did not exist in biblical times, when the death penalty was practiced.

Have the popes even read the Bible? Five chapters in Jeremiah deal with his imprisonment (20:1-3, 32:1-5, 37:11-15, 16-21, 38: 1-13, 39:11-14). From overnight detention in stocks by the priest Pashur, to his imprisonment in the “court of the guardhouse” on the orders of King Zedekiah, to his arrest by a royal officer who “imprisoned him in the house of Jonathan the Scribe, which they had converted into a prison,” we are made aware of “effective systems of detention” that imprison the prophet. Jeremiah is also put into a vaulted pit beneath the house, where “he remained for a long time.” At one point, the soldiers detain him in a cistern. They return him to the “court of the guardhouse,” acting on a friend’s petition.

Pharaoh throws Joseph into prison (Genesis 39:20) for 12 years (Seder Olam Rabbah §2 and Shemos Rabbah 7:1). Samson is jailed (Judges 16:21). Assyria’s king Shalmaneser imprisons Israel’s king Hoshea (2Kings 17:4). Jehoiachin, king of Judah, spends time in a Babylonian prison (2Kings 25:27). The psalms speak of God’s concern for prisoners (68:6, 69:33, 79:11, 102:20, 107:10). Herod puts John the Baptist in prison (Matthew 14:3). Jesus tells his disciples to visit prisoners, because by doing so they are visiting him (Matthew 25:44).

Before encountering the Messiah, Saul is on a mission to imprison Jesus’ followers (Acts 8:3). The high priest has the apostles put in the “public prison” (Acts 5:17), and Luke records multiple accounts of their imprisonment. Paul writes four letters from prison. The biblical accounts establish that the detention facilities cited are “effective.” Peter escapes from jail only by angelic intervention (Acts 12:7), and an earthquake enables the jailbreak of Paul and Silas (Acts 16:25-34).

Notably, the magisterial texts do not talk about “humane” detention systems. If they did, one might point to Paul’s two-year house arrest—during which the Romans permit him to receive visitors and preach the gospel (Acts 28:16–31)—as an example. If Leo reads The Oxford History of the Prison, he will discover that effective detention systems weren’t developed after Vatican II. They existed in the ancient world.

Michel Foucault’s Ideological Capture of the Catholic Church

For two millennia, the Catholic Church so firmly upheld biblical teaching on the death penalty that Martin Luther’s nemesis, Pope Leo X, in his bull Exsurge Domine, even declared that it was the will of the Holy Spirit to burn heretics. What accounts for the shift from Leo X to Leo XIV? A strong clue to the revolution lies in how Pope Francis advanced the debate from capital punishment to life imprisonment.

Addressing the International Association of Penal Law in October 2014, Francis condemned all forms of life imprisonment as an affront to human dignity. “Recently the life sentence was taken out of the Vatican’s Criminal Code. A life sentence is just a death penalty in disguise,” Francis stated. Leo similarly rejected chemical castration for a pedophile who savagely raped a 3-year-old girl when he was bishop in Peru, even though Peru faces an epidemic of child rape and several countries, including seven states in the US, prescribe chemical castration for pedophilia.

Francis’ condemnation of life imprisonment as a “hidden death penalty” is straight out of the playbook of Michel Foucault—the “emblematic figure” of French postmodernism. Foucault treated capital punishment as a problem of power—specifically the “right of the sword,” the prerogative of the ruler to take life (articulated by St Paul in Romans 13:4).

Like Leo, Foucault claimed he was taking a “pro-life” position. “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order?” he asked in The History of Sexuality (Volume 1). In May 2025, Leo said: “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life.”

Foucault condemned the death penalty as a retributive response to crime that pathologized the criminal as a “monster”—someone deemed incorrigible or a threat to the safety of the population (emphasis mine). Francis and Leo’s reasoning closely parallels Foucault’s: the guilty can be redeemed, and modern prisons pose no threat to communal safety. Foucault’s theories have had a huge impact on criminal justice practice in the West. It’s no surprise that the Vatican has capitulated to the zeitgeist.

What is tragic is that Rome has bought into the ideology of a philosopher who simultaneously upheld the dismantling of Christian sexual ethics in his life and works. Foucault sexually abused boys in Tunisia. James Miller’s authoritative biography of the philosopher, The Passion of Michel Foucault, records his interest in sadomasochism. “Besides, to die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?” Foucault’s biography records him saying. Foucault was one of the first openly homosexual public figures in the 20th century, dying of AIDS at the age of 57. Known as the “prophet of pederasty,” he signed a petition to the French Parliament calling for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of 15.

Popes Silent on Capital Punishment in the Muslim World

On September 17, 2026, Saudi Arabia pronounced the death sentence on Anojan Sivarasa, a 24-year-old Sri Lankan migrant worker, as a hadd punishment under Sharia for posting a Facebook comment deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. Sivarasa later deleted it and issued an apology. Leo said nothing.

In Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, all four major schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) classify apostasy (abandoning Islam) as a capital offense. Muslims who convert to Christianity face the death penalty. Leo says nothing.

Iran and Saudi Arabia account for the majority of recent death penalty cases in the Muslim world (as of mid-October 2026), with Iran especially active on protest-related cases. Leo remains silent.

The Trump administration announces the execution of an Islamic terrorist. Leo roars like a lion.

If he could travel back in a time machine, Leo would plead for Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss to be spared the death penalty. Francis would go one step further. Had Hitler survived the war, Francis would ask for him to be spared life imprisonment.

Subscribe now

On October 7th, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., the first rocket barrage began as Hamas-led attackers breached the border and entered Israel. Times of Israel reported a channel 12 estimate, based on data from the IDF’s Gaza Division, that approximately 6,000 Hamas and their Palestinian supporters entered Israel that day, including 3,800 trained and armed Hamas terrorists from the Nukhba force who brutally murdered Israeli civilians in their homes and at the Nova music festival, and abducted hostages to Gaza. According to the same report, some 1,000 terrorists inside Gaza were responsible for firing rockets at Israel on that day, bringing the total number of Palestinians involved in the attack to 7,000. The scale of the barrage was staggering, “[some] 5,000 rockets were fired at Israel that day, 3,000 of them in the first four hours of the onslaught.”

The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported that approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians were killed and more than 251 were taken hostage. Yet, even these staggering numbers and the barbarity shown that day cannot convey the horror of October 7th. The loss and the brutality are beyond what statistics or words can ever capture or convey. We once again were “in the presence of a crime without a name.”

In the wake of that devastation, a question rose within me. Where was God?

I carried that question with me on one unforgettable afternoon in July 2024 as I walked through the silent grounds of Kibbutz Nir Oz. I could hear bombs exploding in the distance in Gaza. My guide had to tend to an urgent matter, and I was finally alone and I preferred it that way. I wanted to be alone with the birds chirping still over the broken bricks and charred walls; alone to whisper a prayer, shed a tear, and honor those who were no longer there.

Outside some homes, the sukkot still stood. I approached one, its structure was partly damaged and torn cloth fluttered in the air. A mild breeze went through the torn fabric and caressed my face. I was shaken; I felt the anguish of those whose lives had been shattered pass through me.

On a blackened wall hung pictures of a family; a mother, a father, and their three children. They may have been celebrating Simchat Torah the night before they were mercilessly murdered. With every footstep, the ground seemed to tremble beneath me, as if the earth itself still held within it the pain of that frightful day. Later, I learned their names and their stories. “Tamar Kedem Siman Tov, 35, her husband Yonatan ‘Johnny’ Siman Tov, 36, their 5.5-year-old twin daughters, Shahar and Arbel, and son Omer, 2, were all murdered by Hamas terrorists in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7.” The Siman family was remembered as delightful and loving; their lives was cut short far too soon.

A month later, Tamar’s mother wrote: “‘Tamar, John, Arbeli, Shahar and Omriko, our beloved. The world has seen only your names written on my skin, but I want the world to know what a shining and huge light you were for us. In this world and the world to come. I love you my angels and fairies. Forever and ever you will light our world.’”

As I approached the other homes, I paused out of respect. I imagined the ordinary lives interrupted within them, their traces still visible to the world; tea flasks, broken breakfast cups, burnt cooking devices, and shoes charred to a crisp. Outside the Bibas family’s house; the children’s toys were scattered on their front lawn.

I do not need to explain what happened there. I can only bear witness to what I felt as I walked through the silence.

I could not walk away from Nir Oz before asking God: “Where were You in these homes? Did You see parents trying to protect the children who were set ablaze before their very eyes? Did You hear a mother’s shriek? Did You feel a father’s horror? Were You there or were they alone?

As I left Nir Oz, the question I carried with me has led me to the Book of Job. His story is important here not because it explains or justifies suffering, rather it helps us better understand that grief cannot be easily explained. Job brought his anguish directly to God. This act and his example illustrate that amidst despair, we must approach our Father and question Him. Job’s story of loss leaves us with lament, moral questioning, and the courage to speak honestly before God. But this does not settle the question I carried from Nir Oz, Was God present in their suffering? That question leads me to the Jewish concept of the Shekhinah.

In the Bible, God has promised to be with the one who suffers, and in turn, the believer naturally longs to experience God’s presence and nearness in times of pain and sorrow. This promise is stated in Isaiah 57:15, “For thus said the One who high aloft forever dwells, whose name is holy: I dwell on high, in holiness; yet with the contrite and the lowly in spirit, reviving the spirit of the lowly, reviving the hearts of the contrite.” The Jewish tradition offers us insight into God’s presence among His suffering children through the Shekhinah, a term derived from the Hebrew root meaning “to dwell.” Although the name Shekhinah does not appear in the Torah, it is frequently mentioned as the indwelling presence of God, the Ruach (spirit) within every human being. There are numerous verses in the Bible that attest to the presence of God among His people; Genesis 46:4 states: “I will go down with you into Egypt,” and Isaiah 43:14 says, “For your sake I was sent to Babylon.” Psalm 22 begins with the anguished words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” same words uttered by Jesus on the cross.

Scripture does not erase that cry of distress, and these texts do not give reason to the suffering, but they give the afflicted words with which to cry out and insist that their suffering is seen and heard by their Father.

In the confines of the tunnels beneath Gaza, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reportedly comforted his fellow hostages with repeating a line he had read in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, “‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’” Or Levy, who had been held alongside Hersh, later told the world that Hersh shared these words with fellow hostages.

I do not know whether Hersh ever wondered where God was or whether he believed God suffered along with him and his fellow hostages. I cannot know what truly sustained him. I only know what Or Levy later recounted, which explains how Hersh offered the other hostages a way to hold on to hope.

The theological tension remains. Some traditions insist that God, being beyond human limits, cannot suffer as humans do. Jewish tradition states that the Shekhinah followed Her people into exile, and Christian theology, in its distinct language, speaks of God’s participation in human suffering through Christ. These are very specific and distinctive ways of addressing God’s nearness to His creation. However, neither explains tragedies unfolding across the globe or the enduring human suffering.

The question I carried from Nir Oz remains; Was God with them, and what does that presence mean when no rescue ever came?

Three years after the tragedy of October 7th, an ethical responsibility continues to be placed upon us. In Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 1:18, we read “Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel used to say: ‘On three things does the world stand: on justice, on truth, and on peace, as it is said: ‘execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates.’ (Zechariah 8:16).” This teaching implicates us to remain committed to the truth, to seek the truth that seeks us.

We will never fully comprehend the savagery committed on October 7th or the suffering inflicted on the innocent. To acknowledge this is not to walk away and become indifferent, but to approach the victim stories with honor and humility. Job’s protest, the Indwelling presence of the Divine, the Christian witness to the Cross, Frankl’s words, and Hersh’s resolve and message of hope do not explain or justify human suffering. They leave us with a tremendous responsibility; to remember the victims, to stand with the survivors, and to tell the truth about October 7^th. Even from the depths of the silence shrouding Nir Oz, God cries out to us, as He cried out to the first human being, “Where are you?” My answer is, Hineni, Here I Am: To remember and to bear witness.

Subscribe now

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally became global meme fodder. Mullally conferred an interfaith award on Osama bin Laden apologist Maulana Hafiz Ashrafi. The photograph went viral. Mullally, an über-feminist who had pledged to wipe out misogyny in the Church, was caught on camera, grinning like a barracuda alongside Ashrafi and his wife, who was dressed like a sarcophagus. Ashrafi’s daughter, masked like a Ninja at a Halloween party, put the finishing touches on the comedy of the absurd.

A week later, desperate to compete with his partner in interfaith suicidal empathy, Pope Leo XIV approved a declaration titled “A Journey of Hope.” The document suffers from a diarrhea of words and a constipation of theology. It urges greater dialogue with Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions. It elevates Islam to a key fraternal partner. It castigates perpetrators of “Islamophobia.” It does not preach Jesus’ uniqueness. And it reads the riot act to Christians who engage in the unforgivable sin of “proselytism.”

In effect, the declaration is Pope Leo’s ultimatum to St. Paul. “Put your aggressive proselytizing on mute,” Leo is telling Paul. “Cool the sales pitch. Cut the converts. Quit cruising around the Mediterranean persuading Jews and Greeks to follow Jesus. It’s ruining the Vatican’s interreligious dialogue with devotees of Artemis, Zeus, and Hermes and killing our fraternity with disciples of Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras.

Leo’s document does not define “proselytism,” leaving room for weaponized ambiguity. Not once does the document use the term “evangelism,” my preferred term for proselytism. One has to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “proselytism” as “the making or seeking of converts.” The root word is proserkhesthai, ‘to approach.’ You’ve got to approach someone if you wish to convert them.

European Court Affirms What the Vatican Negates

It is striking that while the Vatican anathematizes proselytism, the European Court of Human Rights approves proselytism as a bona fide manifestation of religion. The ECHR recognized this in the landmark Kokkinakis v Greece case, wherein a Jehovah’s Witness challenged his conviction for attempting to convert a Greek Orthodox Christian on a home visit. Kokkinakis was arrested more than 60 times for proselytism. He was also imprisoned several times.

The court based its verdict on the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 9), which asserts that the right to freedom of religion includes the right to change one’s religion (as does Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

“Proselytism is linked to freedom of religion; a believer must be able to communicate his faith and his beliefs in the religious sphere as in the philosophical sphere,” Judge Pettiti stated. “Believers and agnostic philosophers have a right to expound their beliefs, to try to get other people to share them and even to try to convert those whom they are addressing.”

According to the court, proselytism is valid since religious conversion, as permitted by Article 9, often involves being persuaded by others. “Indeed, without proselytism, the right to change religion ‘would be likely to remain a dead letter,’” Andrew Hambler, an expert in employment law, writes in his peer-reviewed article in the Industrial Law Journal.

Hambler might as well have quoted the apostle Paul. Writing to the Romans, Paul strings together a series of rhetorical questions: “How then will they call on him [Jesus] in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14). In this sense, proselytism has the strongest claim to legitimacy, Hambler emphasizes.

Leo’s Strategy: “Don’t Preach, Simply Wait!”

Sadly, “proselytism” bashing is now a staple of papal pontificating. During his visit to the Rimini Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples, Leo “recalled that his predecessors have repeated on several occasions, ‘the Church does not engage in proselytism,’” Vatican News reported. In a letter to the cardinals, Leo slammed “the temptation of proselytism.” Pope Francis frequently attacked proselytism. “Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense,” he famously said.

For Rome, “the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make[s] sense in a world that increasingly resembles an interconnected and constantly evolving global village.” So how does one preach Christ? Sure, Rome isn’t calling for “renouncing the truth” but “proclaiming it in a manner befitting the Gospel: with esteem, listening, and charity.”

But the exaggerated emphasis on interreligious dialogue can lead to “grave confusion,” as Bishop Joseph Strickland warns. He contends that Leo’s document risks placing dialogue above evangelization, suggesting that non-Christian religions are authentic paths to God and raising doubts about the Church’s missionary mandate. The New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon observes that Leo’s document “at the very least depresses or discourages evangelism (what it calls ‘proselytism’), if not outright rejecting it.” Gagnon calls the document “utter nonsense,” adding: “It is heretical to discourage conversion to Christianity from other faiths. This Pope and his Vatican cohorts have made many missteps in a relatively short time, but this is the worst.”

I would applaud if Leo warned against using coercion, cajolery, or crookery in proselytism.

But Leo redefines evangelistic outreach as the supine expectation of a lover whose words “do not disturb others,” do not “make demands or oblige,” but “only lead others to marvel at such love.” Christians must not proactively seek to convert others but, like a lover, “simply wait[s] for them to inquire about the love that has filled his or her life.”

This is pious humbug. No great love story would be penned, or no great romantic movie would find an audience if all the lover did was to “simply wait.” Even a peacock proactively opens his feathers and dances to attract a peahen. Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to “simply wait” but to go to the very ends of the earth to proclaim the gospel.

St. Paul Didn’t “Simply Wait”

Paul did the very opposite of “simply waiting.” He went around the Mediterranean on three missionary journeys. He preached to Jews and Gentiles. Jewish and Christian scholars agree that Paul wasn’t trying to “convert” Jews to “Christianity” or to “Roman Catholicism.” Saul the Jew never became Paul the Christian. He remained a Jew to his death. In the highly fraught sectarian context of Second Temple Judaism, where the Jesus Movement emerged as one of the many Jewish sects, Paul was preaching to the Jews that their Scriptures had been fulfilled and their Jewish Messiah had come in the person of Jesus. Paul is emphatic that the gospel is “to the Jew first.” Much of his preaching takes place in synagogues. The embryonic “churches” are actually synagogue sub-groups comprised of Jewish Jesus followers who keep Torah, Paul Treblico argues in his monograph Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament.

Paul didn’t “simply wait” for Jews or Gentiles to enquire about Jesus. For example, in the synagogue at Thessalonica, “for three weeks he argued with them from the [Hebrew] scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Messiah.’” Luke, the author of Acts, notes that “some of them were persuaded” (Acts 17:3-4). The five verbs: arguing, explaining, proving, proclaiming, and persuading, suggest that Paul was proactively proselytizing the Jews.

In Athens, Paul “argued” in “the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there” (17:17). Rather than “esteem” other religions, “his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols” (17:16). The Greek word for “provoked” is paroxyno, from which we get our English word “paroxysm.” In Corinth, he “argued in the synagogue every sabbath and persuaded Jews and Greeks” (18:4). In Ephesus, he “entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” and “argued daily in the hall of Tyrannus” for two years (19:8-10).

Non-Jewish proselytes did indeed attend synagogues. In his magnum opus Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, Jewish historian Louis Feldman argues that Judaism possessed a robust spirit of proselytism and attracted large numbers of converts and proselytes throughout the Greco-Roman world before the rise of early Christianity.

What’s Wrong With Conversion or Proselytism?

Ironically, while Pope Leo is shying away from proselytism, Islam is making massive inroads with dawa. In July, Muslim organizations launched aggressive proselytization campaigns using the FIFA World Cup series to recruit new converts in 16 cities of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) kicked off its dawa at SoFi Stadium in California with banners inviting football fans to “discover Islam” as a “faith of peace, purpose, and submission to the Creator.”

MUNA missionaries offered free copies of the Qur’an in English, Spanish, Bengali, and other languages, promoting the Islamic text as a book that “has inspired billions of people for over 1,400 years” and Islam as a religion “regardless of race, language, nationality, or background.”

But scholars and ex-Muslims are warning the West that dawa is not simply the sharing of Islamic faith in the Christian sense of “evangelism.” “Dawa as practiced by radical Islamists employs a wide range of mechanisms to advance their goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and former Muslim, explains in her book The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It. “The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with the rule of sharialaw.”

Like Catholics, many evangelicals are not only failing to understand the sinister aspects of Islamic dawa but, unlike Paul, are unwilling to confront it with robust argumentation and challenge.

Am I Not Good Enough for Your Religion?

I find it difficult to comprehend why certain religious groups resent proselytizing others or having their members proselytized. If Jews tried to convert me, I’d feel honoured. In fact, I’d joyfully go with my Jewish proselytizers to the synagogue. Since I read Hebrew, I can join in the prayers. As a chaplain at a London university, I had excellent relations with hardline Muslim leaders. They’d tell me they respect me but loathe my liberal Anglican clergy colleagues. “We know you are trying to convert us and you know we are trying to convert you,” they’d say. In turn, I respected and loved them for their convictions and passion for dawa (Islamic proselytism).

My Hindu students were candid: “You’re wasting your time. Britain is a post-Christian country. We are here to convert Britons to Hinduism,” they’d say. On campus, even Buddhists, Stoics, and atheists proselytized unapologetically. It was a playground of ideas. I am richer for my interactions with the evangelists of these religions and philosophies. Likewise, my mission was to preach the gospel and pray that they would come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. With Paul, I would remind myself daily: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

While I was a student in Cambridge, Catholics and Orthodox unrelentingly tried to convert me to their “one, true church.” I felt flattered. A religion that doesn’t proselytize is essentially saying: “We are a closed club. We don’t want you. You are not good enough for us.” On my part, I’ve never missed an opportunity to evangelize. I did this for eight hours while I was flying back from India to England to defend my doctoral thesis, with a Briton who had left Christianity for Buddhism, even though I desperately needed the time to prepare for my viva voce. At the end of our conversation, the Buddhist promised to reconsider the claims of Christ.

Leo doesn’t believe in proselytism because he doesn’t understand the transformative power of the gospel. In India, millions of Dalits (untouchables) have been liberated from three millennia of the caste system because missionaries proselytized them. In the Islamic world, millions of Muslims have been unshackled from the slavery of Islam because someone shared Christ with them—as my ex-Muslim colleagues at the Ideological Defense Institute would testify.

Paul said: “I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t!” (1 Corinthians 9:16, The Message). He ends his life and ministry incarcerated in Rome, “expounding the gospel [to his fellow-Jews] from morning till evening, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the law of Moses and from the prophets” (Acts 28:23).

In the landmark Mbuyi v Newpark Childcare Ltd employment tribunal case, Sarah Mbuyi, a Christian nursery worker, framed her workplace proselytism in these terms: “I believe what I have got is a gift and a desire to share.” That’s why I love the Sri Lankan theologian D.T. Niles’ definition of evangelism as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”

Subscribe now

On Christmas Day 2017, more than 5,800 former Muslims who converted to Catholicism published an open letter to Pope Francis. They challenged him to reconsider his words in Evangelii Gaudium, an exhortation concerning evangelism in which Francis wrote, “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

“If Islam is a good religion in itself, as you seem to teach, why did we become Catholic?” they asked. “Do not your words question the soundness of the choice we made at the risk of our lives? Islam prescribes death for apostates (Quran 4.89, 8.7-11), do you know? In accordance with (Jesus’) teaching (Lk 14:26), we preferred Him, the Christ, to our own life. Are we not in a good position to talk to you about Islam?”

Their letter featured a stinging indictment.

“Many of us have tried to contact you on many occasions and for several years and we have never received the slightest acknowledgement of our letters or requests for meetings.”

Undaunted, Francis in 2019 signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together with Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of the most prestigious university in the Sunni Muslim world, Al-Azhar. The document provides a framework for Catholicism and Islam to work toward common goals that build peace, freedom, justice, and prosperity.

Francis’ attitude reflects the Vatican’s policy of indulging Islam to the point of appeasement and enabling it at the expense of the Catholic Church’s moral credibility.

William Kilpatrick, a professor emeritus at Boston College who has written numerous books and articles about the relationship between Christianity and Islam, makes a more devastating accusation.

“The Church’s attitude toward Islam goes beyond appeasement and enablement,” Kilpatrick said, adding:

“At this point, and I speak as a Catholic, it’s more accurate to speak about complicity.

“By speaking only good about Islam, and by remaining silent about the bad, the Church has covered-up much of the truth about Islam. In doing so it has put Catholics and other Christians in a much more vulnerable position vis-à-vis Islam—more vulnerable because (the church is) misinformed.”

The church’s attitude reflects the views of Louis Massignon, a French-Catholic scholar from the 20th century who believed the God of Abraham was the God of Muhammad. Massignon also described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” he wrote, and the Qur’an as reflecting a level of divine inspiration.

Because Muslims are Abraham’s descendants, Massignon concluded, “they have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham to participate in the double promise made to Abraham, that of the Messiah and that of the Holy Land,” he wrote.

Massignon’s work appeared while secularism’s influence increased in Europe, creating “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” French-Catholic scholar Alain Besancon wrote in 2004. As a result, “an entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas.”

“Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe, these writers cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besancon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”

The Catholic Church embraced Massignon’s ideas at the Second Vatican Council, which took place between 1962-65 to address the church’s role in the modern world. One document, Nostra Aetate, which focused mainly on Judaism, addressed Islam:

“The Church also regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”

Another document from the council, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

That passage made the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope John Paul II, who published that catechism, plotted the course for appeasement by making an unprecedented commitment to engage in dialogue with Islam.

“For Karol Wojtyla (John Paul’s given name), religious dialogue is necessary in order to foster the common good of humanity,” Renzo Guolo, an expert in Islam at the University of Trieste, wrote in 2003. “This dialogue is sustained by the awareness that there are common values across cultures, because these values are rooted in human nature. These include the defense of the family, opposition to abortion, and peace.”

In the late pope’s mind, no obstacle would be too powerful to overcome.

“He seems to believe,” Guolo added, “that only the prophetic gesture, the utopian perspective, the mystical leap powered by an intense spirituality, can achieve this objective.”

John Paul used such dialogue to try to forge a de facto alliance with Islam against Western secularism after the demise of European Communism.

“The Church is aware that it can offer a sort of new civil religion to the United States of Europe,” wrote Enzo Pace, sociology professor at the University of Padua. He added:

“Islam thus becomes the most important moral interlocutor because the Church sees it as a well-structured religion which is on the increase in contemporary Europe.

“To ensure this integration, the Catholic Church believes it is necessary to accept the idea of recognizing Islam as a universal religion, while, at the same time, inviting Islam to accept at least the basic moral and juridical principles of European Christian culture.”

Bishops implemented that directive by selling underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups, with churches becoming mosques. In 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy build a mosque in Genoa.

The union, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, advocates “an extremist version of the Qur’an, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” reportedMilan’s Corriere della Sera. The group’s president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Nevertheless, a Vatican cardinal suggested Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in Italian schools during the hour reserved for Catholic instruction.

“If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said in 2006. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

In 2008, the bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt lavatories for ritual washing before prayer. “The demands go way beyond legal requirements on catering for religious minorities,” reported the Daily Mail.

But the worst appeasement occurred in Belgium.

Bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants to force the government to grant amnesty. In 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served that purpose. About 300 migrants occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700.

At Brussels’ Our Lady of Succor Church, migrants lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor. The Rev. Herwig Arts described the scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel for Gazet van Antwerpen in 1998.

“(Migrants) removed the tabernacle, (and) installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass,” Arts said. “It has upset me very much. For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.”

Belgium’s bishops were not amused.

“Everybody is entitled to a good place in our society,” said Monsignor Luc van Looy, the bishop of Ghent, including what he called “illegal fugitives.”

Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop of Brussels and Belgium’s leading prelate, added that “solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation.”

Bishops thus silenced Arts and other priests who held similar opinions.

While Catholic bishops disregarded the needs of their own congregants, John Paul ignored the plight of Christians in the Muslim world. Bishops remembered how John Paul, “who ordinarily speaks about all topics,” Guolo wrote, “had spread a veil of silence over the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.”

In 2002, an Arab convert named Nura told Corriere della Sera: “We feel abandoned. After our conversion, we have no one to support us. We ask the Church and Italy: Protect us, defend us.”

Pope Francis accelerated the momentum by reinforcing the link between migration and Islam. In 2015, Francis askedparishes in Europe to take in at least one family escaping civil disorder in Syria. In 2016, the pope visited the Greek island of Lesbos, home to thousands of Syrian refugees, and brought 12 Muslim refugees from three families with him on the return trip to Rome.

During his visit to Lesbos, Francis lectured about the moral imperative to help migrants “who have faces, names and individual stories,” he said. As European governments imposed immigration restrictions, the pope criticized their “fanaticism of indifference” while visiting Marseilles in 2023.

Yet when confronted with Muslim violence, the Vatican and Western bishops display their own “fanaticism of indifference.”

Middle East Forum reported in 2019 that French authorities recorded 1,063 attacks on churches in 2018. In Germany, “crosses are broken, altars are smashed, Bibles are set on fire, baptismal fonts are overturned and the church doors are smeared with Islamic expressions such as ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

In the midst of hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants overwhelming Europe and engaging in criminal behavior, Catholic bishops either issue sentimental boilerplate or remain silent.

“Have you heard one English bishop express sympathy for the English people’s concerns about criminal aliens invading our country? I haven’t,” the Rev. Nick Donnelly, a British Catholic deacon, wrote last year during massive nationwide protests. “Have you heard one English bishop express outrage over the hundreds of thousands of English girls raped by men from foreign cultures? I haven’t.”

As IDI examined, Pope Leo propels Francis’ agenda. In an impromptu press conference while returning from Lebanon in December, he insisted upon dialogue as the solution to long-standing problems between Christians and Muslims.

“I think one of the great lessons that Lebanon can teach to the world is precisely showing a land where Islam and Christianity are both present and are respected and that there is a possibility to live together to be friends,” the pope said. “We should perhaps be a little less fearful and look for ways of promoting authentic dialogue and respect.”

Only breathtaking naïveté can explain such a response after visiting a nation ravaged by more than five decades of religious civil war.

“The Church has, in effect, become an enabler of Islam,” Kilpatrick said, “by lending legitimacy to Islam through dialogue, joint statements from the Pope and Islamic leaders, Islam-friendly school curriculums and so forth—but mostly by keeping silent about the worldwide persecution of Christians by Muslims.”

In the current clash of civilizations, Rome’s relationship to Mecca resembles Vichy’s to Berlin during World War II.

Joseph D'Hippolito is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institue

Subscribe now

Charles Finney was one of the most important revivalists in nineteenth-century America. Born in 1792 and trained as a lawyer rather than a theologian, he became one of the defining figures of the Second Great Awakening and exercised enormous influence over the revival culture that spread across the United States in the decades before the Civil War. His preaching was practical and deliberately aimed at producing an immediate response. He believed revivals could be brought about through the proper use of means.

That conviction marked a significant break with the theological culture represented a century earlier by Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards had also lived through revival. He was one of the principal theologians of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, and no one could accuse him of wanting a cold or lifeless Christianity. But he treated religious experience as something that had to be examined, disciplined, and interpreted through Scripture and theology. His Religious Affections was written precisely because emotional intensity could not be accepted as proof that God was at work. People could cry, tremble, shout, experience overwhelming feelings, and still be wrong about what was happening to them.

For Edwards, the experience had to answer to the truth. Finney gradually reversed that order. In Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published in 1835, he complained of “vast ignorance in the Churches on the subject of revivals.” By ignorance he meant that Christians did not understand how revival could be produced. He believed that when the correct methods were employed, revival followed in a predictable manner.

William McLoughlin summarized the difference between the two men like this: “One saw God as the center of the universe, the other saw man. One believed that revivals were prayed down and the other that they were worked up.”

The older Protestant minister was expected to be a theologian. He studied Greek and Hebrew because Christianity rested upon texts written in Greek and Hebrew. He studied church history. He studied systematic theology because a doctrine taken from one passage had to make sense alongside everything else Scripture taught.

The educational institutions surrounding the First Great Awakening reflected that expectation. The Log College associated with William Tennent and the founding of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, grew from a culture in which revival and scholarship were not enemies. Ministers were expected to know languages, theology, philosophy, the Reformers, and the older Christian tradition.

Finney’s world increasingly valued a different qualification: results.

His language about the Holy Spirit shows how far the shift went. He wrote that Christians could be guilty for not having the Spirit because “God has placed His Spirit at your disposal.” Revival therefore depended heavily upon whether Christians employed the proper means. If revival failed to occur, the explanation could be found in the minister, congregation, or method.

As a result, the minister who produces visible conversions begins to look more useful than the minister who can parse Greek verbs. The sermon becomes increasingly concerned with eliciting a response. Music, atmosphere, direct appeals, prolonged meetings, and psychological pressure acquire new importance because the human will becomes the object upon which the minister is working.

Finney’s famous “anxious bench,” where people under conviction were publicly separated and pressured toward decision, belonged to this world. So did the protracted revival meeting. The success of ministry became visible and countable. The minister was beginning to change from theologian into technician.

That shift created a religious culture in which formal theological formation was increasingly easier to bypass, and in which immediate experience and measurable results could carry authority that had once belonged to scholarship.

The Burned-Over Church

The region stretching across western and central New York became known as the Burned-Over District because revivalism swept across it so frequently during the first half of the nineteenth century that people joked there was no spiritual fuel left to burn. The region produced enormous religious energy. It also produced an extraordinary number of new religious movements.

William Miller, Joseph Smith, the early Adventist movement, and later Charles Taze Russell all emerged from or were deeply connected to the religious environment created in this period. Their doctrines differed enormously, but their founders were constructing massive theological systems without the kind of linguistic and historical formation that older Protestant churches had once considered essential.

William Miller was a farmer and Baptist lay preacher. By reading the King James Bible and calculating prophetic numbers in Daniel, he concluded that Christ would return around 1843 or 1844. Thousands eventually accepted the prediction. October 22, 1844, passed without the return of Christ and became remembered among his followers as the Great Disappointment.

Ellen G. White later helped transform the Millerite failure into a new theological system. When the expected event did not occur visibly on earth, 1844 was reinterpreted as a heavenly event associated with what became the Adventist doctrine of the Investigative Judgment.

Joseph Smith, with little formal education and no training in biblical languages, announced new revelation and produced new scripture in the language of the King James Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged from the same broader nineteenth-century American religious environment in which established theological authority had weakened and charismatic claims to revelation could flourish.

Charles Taze Russell, whose movement developed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, likewise constructed a sweeping theological system without any serious theological training. His rejection of Christ’s full deity revived arguments Christians had fought over during the Arian controversy more than fifteen centuries earlier.

The point is not that a degree guarantees orthodoxy. Church history contains highly educated heretics. The problem is what disappears when serious theological formation ceases to function as a restraint.

By the twentieth century, American Protestantism had become extraordinarily successful at producing religious movements on a mass scale. Revival campaigns filled stadiums. Radio and television turned preachers into national figures. Megachurches emerged. Christian publishing became an industry. The United States produced some of the largest Protestant ministries in history.

Finney’s emphasis upon decision developed into a revival culture built around bringing individuals to an identifiable moment of commitment. Billy Sunday carried the mass revival into the early twentieth century. Billy Graham later perfected the crusade model on a scale Finney could never have imagined.

Clinging to measurable results eventually entered the ordinary church. The Church Growth Movement encouraged pastors to think deliberately about what attracted people, what retained them, and what produced numerical growth. The seeker-sensitive movement pushed this further by designing services around people who were uncomfortable with traditional churches.

Once that happens, the pastor’s professional formation changes. He needs leadership skills, communication skills, organizational skills, fundraising ability, marketing instincts, and the personality necessary to lead a large staff. Greek and Hebrew become useful but optional. Church history becomes specialized knowledge. Systematic theology can be delegated to seminaries while the successful pastor concentrates on growing the ministry.

Christian preaching increasingly moved toward therapy. Questions about sin, judgment, covenant, redemption, holiness, and the nature of God were displaced by questions about personal fulfillment, relationships, success, mental well-being, leadership, and finding purpose. The prosperity gospel represents the most shameless version of this development. God becomes the mechanism through which the believer obtains health and wealth. God exists largely to improve my life. Scripture becomes a source of practical lessons. The sermon becomes encouragement. The pastor becomes motivational speaker, therapist, and chief executive simultaneously.

Salam Almasry is a fellow at the Ideologiocal Defense Institue

Subscribe now

“The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous,” Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, wrote in a 1941 essay titled “Churchill’s Lie Factory.”

On July 13, 2026, the Church of England endorsed two big lies that would turn Goebbels green with envy. Despite robust opposition from top Jewish leaders, including Chief Rabbi Efraim Mervis, its General Synod approved a libelous Palestinian Christian manifesto.

Published in November 2025 by the Palestinian Christian advocacy group Kairos Palestine, the Kairos II manifesto is titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.

The first lie of the Anglican-endorsed manifesto is to label Israel’s war on Hamas a “genocide.” “The genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people,” the manifesto asserts. It uses the terms “genocide” and “genocidal” 30 times.

The second lie is by omission. Kairos II mentions Hamas only once in the 14-page document, and that too in a paragraph justifying the October 7 massacre as “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948, and more than sixteen years of an immoral, suffocating blockade on Gaza.”

As if this weren’t enough, in a hand-washing gesture that would make Pontius Pilate blush, the Church of England’s parliament passed an amendment to “hear” rather than “receive” the defamatory document. A few clerics opposing the manifesto warned that Jew-hating jihadis would hardly pause to parse such verbal gymnastics. Synod’s antisemites ignored their pleas.

On that dark day, the Church of England wantonly voted to bear false witness against Israel and, dementedly, against Hamas. Why? Who benefits from Synod’s big lies? What if it is Hamas, and not Israel, who committed genocide? What if Synod engaged in Kairos II’s big lie of “genocide inversion” to cover the involvement of a section of militant Palestinian Christians who deny Israel’s right to exist, engage in anti-Israel terrorism, desire Israel’s destruction, and perhaps even took part in the October 7 massacre? What if such Christians are not merely dhimmis but collaborators with Hamas?

Synod’s vote absolves the Church of England’s hierarchy from addressing the hippopotamus in the vestry, what historian of antisemitism Robert Wistrich identifies as “eliminationist” or “genocidal antisemitism,” as a key theological element of Hamas and Islam. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally can now cover her face with the calligraphic edition of Kairos II and pretend Hamas didn’t perpetrate the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. She can also continue to claim that the Israel-Arab conflict is about land, not Islamic imperialism.

How Hamas Inverted Its Own Genocide Against Israel

In a peer-reviewed article, International Law scholar Avraham Shalev argues that Hamas’ October 7 attack, combined with its statements of intent to exterminate Jews, meets the legal threshold for genocide under the Genocide Convention. He establishes both Hamas’s actus reus (physical acts of genocide) and its mens rea (genocidal intent).

“Recently captured documents demonstrate that on October 7th, Hamas believed that Israel’s destruction was a goal they could achieve,” Shalev writes. Hamas’ motivation was its intent to destroy Jews “as a distinct ethnic, racial, and national group.” Its “original charter makes it clear that the war against Israel and the Jews is an existential battle.” For example, just days after the massacre, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said: “We must remove that country [Israel]… The Al-Aqsa Flood [October 7] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”

Shalev emphasizes genocide inversion as “a distinctive feature of the Hamas genocide of October 7.” Hamas’ genocide of Jews is “uniquely characterized by the immediate deployment of reverse accusations against its victims.” The weaponization of genocide inversion “deflects attention from Hamas’ own genocidal actions,” hijacks the moral freight of genocide accusations to delegitimize Israel’s war on Hamas, and “inverts Jewish historical trauma by comparing Israeli actions with the Nazi genocide,” he argues.

The big lie of genocide inversion isn’t original. Hitler deployed it in the 1920s, portraying the Jews as genocidal killers, writes Wistrich in his book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. The Führer justified the preemptive genocide of the Jews, alleging that they were the “world enemy” who were seeking Germany’s annihilation.

Muslims claim that “Israel and world Jewry are determined to extinguish Islam, so they, too, must wipe them out,” Wistrich explains. It is as if Nazism was “symbolically handing over the relay baton of genocidal antisemitism to the Arabs just as its own star began to wane.”

“The Hamas Charter and its proclamations about implementing Allah’s promise and annihilating the Jews are as genocidal in their implications,” Wistrich notes, stressing that virtually all Islamic movements share “this language of mass murder.”

Islam’s Co-option of Antisemitic Palestinian Christians

A unique feature of Kairos II is that it is composed by Christians, not Muslims. And yet, much of its language mirrors the bombast of Islamic Israel-hatred. It calls the Balfour Declaration a “historic injustice.” It vilifies Christian Zionism as a “theology of racism, colonialism, and ethnic supremacy” that “calls on a tribal, racist god of war and ethnic cleansing.” It blames Christian support for Israel for “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of indigenous people.” It trashes the Abraham Accords. It disingenuously warns “against giving our national struggle a religious character or turning it into a religious issue that pits religions against one another.”

Echoing the jargon of antisemitic elimination, it notes that “any genuine beginning must involve dismantling settler colonialism and the apartheid system built on Jewish supremacy as codified in Israel’s racist Nation-State Law.” If the Jewish state is so evil (genocide is, after all, the “crime of crimes”), a “Final Solution” is the only solution.

And that justifies violence against the Jews. Anglican biblical scholar Ian Paul, one of the very few synod members who spoke strongly against approving Kairos II, wrote: “Historically, Palestinian Christians as a group have been deeply involved in violent terrorism as their rejection of the State of Israel, and have been deeply involved in the PLO, whose founding charter rejected the right of Israel to exist, and claimed the whole region as an Arab homeland.” Outsiders find it “hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror,” Paul writes, explaining: “In this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than in the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus.”

Subscribe now

Just before the Synod vote, Archbishop Mullally went on a “pilgrimage” to Israel. She didn’t visit the martyrs’ memorial at the Nova Festival. Instead, she met Palestinian Christian activists linked to anti-Israel terrorist outfits and praised them for their “faithful resistance.”

In my news story for the Middle East Forum Observer, I reported on Mullally’s meeting with Layan Nasir at her home in Birzeit. The Archbishop described Nasir’s time in Israeli custody over the last five years as a “terrible ordeal.” She assured Nasir’s family of her prayers for the “unjustly imprisoned.”

Mullally omitted an inconvenient fact. Israeli authorities arrested Nasir for her leadership in the Democratic Progressive Student Pole at Birzeit University, the student wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), proscribed as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, Japan, Canada, and Israel.

The PFLP participated in and celebrated the October 7 genocide. It reportedly held hostage Shiri Bibas and her two infant sons. NGO Monitor confirms that the PFLP is Hamas’ abiding ally in Gaza. The European Council on Foreign Relations warned that the PFLP opposes a two-state solution, calls for Israel’s destruction and wants to create Palestine using “armed struggle.” It is responsible for numerous attacks on Israelis, including airline hijackings, suicide bombings, a synagogue attack, and the assassination of Israel’s Agriculture Minister Rehavam Ze’evi.

Mullally also met Natalie Abu Diyeh, a Lutheran soccer player, arrested on suspicion of “promoting terrorist activities,” and Zeina Barbar, the daughter of Majd Barbar. The archbishop’s website labeled her a “child detainee.” Barbar, a PFLP member, served 20 years in prison. Charges against him include attempted murder and membership in a terrorist group. Barbar and his accomplices transported a car bomb to Jerusalem and manufactured grenades. Police detained Zeina, another PLFP member, on suspicion of terrorism and released her in February 2025 as part of a prisoner exchange.

The PFLP was founded by George Habash. TIME magazine christened Habash “Terrorism’s Christian Godfather.” “If you assumed that Palestinian or Arab extremism somehow sprang entirely from Islam, from the puritanical Wahhabi intolerance and so forth, take a close look at Habash’s first name. He was a Greek Orthodox Christian who sang in his church choir as a boy back in the Palestinian town of Lydda,” TIME wrote. On his death anniversary, Yusef Daher, a Christian “peacemaker,” posted a statement asking George Habash to “pray for us.”

On her “pilgrimage,” Mullally is photographed praying in Layan Nasir’s living room with the portrait of Layan’s great-uncle Kamal Nasser behind her. Nasser played a key role in the Black September kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Another photograph shows Mullally meeting Greek Orthodox Archbishop Benedictus. On the wall is a portrait of Yasser Arafat. “Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement!” Ian Paul quipped on his blog.

General Synod Takes a Leaf Out of Hitler’s Autobiography

In Mein Kampf, Hitler explains how the masses “more easily fall victim to the big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous representation in others.” Hitler does not characterize his own poisonous propaganda as lies; he instead adopts the persona of a truth-teller and asserts that the Jews are the ones behind the great lie, effectively engaging in moral inversion.

The day before General Synod met in York, preached a sermon on the prophet Isaiah at York Minster. In a twist of supreme irony, she cited God’s word to the Jews in the Babylonian exile, assuring them that they would soon return to the Promised Land: “For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).

Remarkably, the archbishop failed to recognize that God has fulfilled his promise when Israel was reborn in 1948. Mullally trumpeted her sermon on X. Jewish columnist Nicole Lampert responded: “Isaiah was a Jewish prophet in Judea. Yet your Synod has approved a document denying Jewish indigenous presence in that land. You encouraged them to approve it.”

I couldn’t help chiming in. I tweeted: “Isaiah says: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ (5: 20). Mullally and her Synod have proved the prophet right by voting for the libelous Kairos II document.”

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

IDI frequently responds to the misinformation spread by Carlson and his guests, but for the moment it is worth focusing on just this one claim. The assertion that John Nelson Darby originated Christian Zionism is historically false.

Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are related, but they are not identical. Dispensationalism is a particular system of biblical interpretation. It offers answers to questions about prophecy, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and the sequence of events surrounding the end times. Christian Zionism is merely the belief that God intends to keep His promises to Israel. When God promised Abraham descendants, a nation, and a land, those promises were not transferred to someone else and stripped of their original meaning.

Darby certainly held that conviction, but he did not create it. To claim otherwise requires ignoring centuries of Christian history. Long before Darby was born, prominent Protestant thinkers were already arguing that the Jewish people had a future in God’s plan and that the promises concerning the land retained a literal dimension. The belief appeared in some of the most influential currents of Protestant thought.

Subscribe now

One of the clearest examples is the Geneva Bible of 1560, published nearly three centuries before Darby’s major writings. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of the English Reformation, the Bible carried by the Puritans, and the Bible that crossed the Atlantic with many of the settlers who helped shape early America. Its marginal notes frequently reflected an expectation that God’s dealings with Israel were not finished. The prophets were not simply speaking about the Church under another name. Israel remained a meaningful category within God’s redemptive plan.

The same pattern emerges among the Puritans. Increase Mather, one of the most influential figures in colonial New England and later president of Harvard College, published The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation in 1669. Mather argued that the Jewish people would one day experience national restoration and once again possess the land promised to Abraham. More importantly, he challenged the habit of turning every biblical promise made to Israel into a purely spiritual promise for the Church.

Mather was not a dispensationalist. He was not a nineteenth-century prophecy teacher. He was a Puritan Calvinist writing in seventeenth-century Massachusetts more than a century before Darby’s birth. Yet the central issue he was addressing is the same issue debated today: when Scripture speaks about Israel, should Christians assume that it really means the Church, or should they allow Israel to remain Israel?

Mather was hardly alone. Across the Protestant world, long before Darby’s birth, influential theologians were reaching similar conclusions. The German Pietist leader Philipp Jakob Spener encouraged prayer and expectation for the conversion and restoration of the Jewish people, a theme developed even more explicitly by his disciple August Hermann Francke and later Pietist writers. In England, the Puritan theologian Thomas Brightman argued in the early seventeenth century that the Jews would return to their land and experience national restoration before the end of history. His views influenced a generation of English Protestants, including figures such as Joseph Mede, whose prophetic writings anticipated a future conversion and restoration of Israel. In New England, Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, continued the same expectation, writing that the Jewish people would one day be gathered and restored according to the promises of Scripture.

What all of those men shared was the belief that God had not finished with the Jewish people and that the promises made to Israel in Scripture could not simply be dissolved into the Church. Long before Darby systematized his prophetic framework, Protestants across England, Germany, and colonial America were already reading the Bible and concluding that Israel still had a future in the purposes of God.

When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he was already confronting a temptation that would accompany Christianity throughout its history: the temptation of Gentile believers to conclude that Israel’s story was over. Romans 11 is Paul’s direct response. He warns Gentile Christians against arrogance toward the Jewish people. He reminds them that they have been grafted into a covenantal story that began long before them. Most importantly, he rejects the idea that God has cast away His people. Whatever debates Christians may have about the precise meaning of Paul’s statement that “all Israel shall be saved,” it is difficult to read the chapter honestly and conclude that Paul believed Israel had simply vanished from God’s purposes, or as Hall told Tucker Carlson, that the Jewish people had “just become like any other nation.”

Subscribe now

While forms of supersessionism eventually became dominant, particularly after Christianity became intertwined with imperial power, the idea that God retained future purposes for Israel never disappeared entirely. The rise of replacement theology was not the inevitable outcome of Christian reflection. It was a historical development shaped by particular theological and political circumstances.

Once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, many theologians increasingly interpreted the Church as the complete and final replacement for Israel. Promises once associated with the Jewish people were reinterpreted as promises fulfilled exclusively in the Church. Over time this became the dominant framework throughout much of Christendom. Yet even at its height, alternative readings persisted beneath the surface.

The Reformation brought many of those older questions back into view. By returning to Scripture as the highest authority, Protestant thinkers reopened debates that had long been considered settled. As they worked through the prophets, the covenants, and Paul’s writings, many discovered that the biblical text did not fit comfortably within the assumptions they had inherited.

At its heart, Christian Zionism is a theological claim about the character of God. It asks whether God’s promises remain trustworthy even when centuries pass between the promise and its fulfillment. It asks whether the covenants made with Abraham can simply be reassigned to another people. It asks whether the God who bound Himself to Israel in Scripture intends to keep the commitments He made.

@DanBurmawy is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

Nine countries currently possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. All the world’s nuclear weapons states are non-Muslim except for Pakistan, which acquired the so-called Islamic Bomb in 1998. Although Pakistan is an Islamic republic, it’s nuclear weapons are to deter a military attack by its arch-rival, India, a nuclear weapons state since 1974.

Why, then, is there such particular concern about the nuclear weapons program in Iran? Ultimately, the issue boils down to ideology, theology, and the apocalyptic worldview held by the jihadist leaders of Iran, and the eschatological imperatives that incentivize them to use such weapons against Israel and the rest of the Judeo-Christian world.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocratic state based on the Shiite branch of Islam. Shia Muslims comprise roughly 15% of the global Muslim population, with the other 85% being Sunni Muslim. The main difference between the two branches of Islam lies in a historical dispute over the rightful successor to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, after his death in AD 632. Shias believe Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was the true successor; Sunnis believe Abu Bakr, a close companion of Muhammad, was the rightful heir. In essence, the centuries-long quarrel between Shiites and Sunnis boils down to whether Muhammad’s legitimate successor must be a blood relative.

Twelver Shiism

Read more

I learned the word jihad before I understood what it meant. Growing up in Beirut, I watched militias and armed men move into civilian neighborhoods, and I saw neighbors kill neighbors over religion and sect. Years of it nearly destroyed the country. And all of it was carried out in the name of jihad, jihad for Allah, Allah is with the jihadis, slogans that flooded the radio, the newspapers, the conversations on my own street. Decades later, the word still runs across the news, in the Muslim world and the Western press alike, and it has not lost its meaning.

September 11, 2001, broke something in the American mind, the comfortable assumption that all is well because all religions are basically the same, and that no faith teaches the killing of the innocent. I was in Indianapolis that morning, meeting with the missions committee of an evangelical church, when we watched the second plane hit the tower and the buildings come down. A word millions of Americans had never spoken entered their vocabulary overnight.

In the days after, imams went on television to explain that Islam is a religion of peace and that the men who did this were not Muslims. It was a campaign built to reassure Americans and to move their attention somewhere safer. Others called the attacks a tragic accident, an aberration, something jihad is not.

Subscribe now

The years since have answered them. Jihad did not recede; it spread. Jihadi movements and terror attacks multiplied, not only in the lands they call kufar, the territory of the unbelievers, but across the Muslim world itself. The Islamic State slaughtered Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds, and then slaughtered fellow Muslims, Sunni and Shia, for being the wrong kind. In the West, an American woman converted to Islam, named herself Jihad Jane, and announced she had joined the global jihad. An Englishman converted and surfaced in execution videos as Jihadi John. The convert tells you what the convert was converted to.

If Islam is a religion of peace, why does the new convert so often arrive at the knife? The notion of a peaceful Islam is not a description of the thing. It is a tool, used to disarm the societies the thing intends to subdue. Thomas Jefferson met the same reality at the founding of this country. Rather than keep paying tribute to the Barbary states that preyed on American ships in the name of holy war, he sent the Navy, and the Marines, whose hymn still carries the line “to the shores of Tripoli” from that fight. He concluded that force, not negotiation, was the only language those raiders understood.

The Qur’an sets out jihad in Surah 9, verses 5, 29, and 111, and Surah 47 turns to the waging of war and the killing of enemies. I have read the Qur’an in Arabic more than forty-five times, so I can say plainly what the apologists obscure when they insist it can only be understood in Arabic: the meaning is clear. The Qur’an, like the Hadith, sorts humanity into Muslim and kafir, and it places Jewish and Christian believers among the kuffar, the blasphemers. The fashionable claim that the three faiths are simply “Abrahamic” cousins does not survive a reading of the book itself.

What Muhammad set in motion was a permanent fault line, between his religion and every other, and within his religion as well. The Sunni-Shia war is itself a jihad, a contest over who truly follows Allah and his messenger, and it does not end. Under Khomeini, the Iran-Iraq war consumed something close to a million lives on both sides in eight years, Muslim killing Muslim. Today American forces stand in the region largely as a buffer between a radical Shia regime and the Sunni Arab states it targets with rockets and drones. Jihad can be turned on anyone judged insufficiently faithful.

Once, speaking on jihad and the Middle East, a man in the audience told me jihad will end when the whole world becomes Muslim. I answered him with the history above. The Muslim world has not found peace within itself, and it will not, not until the ideology changes, until the way Muslims are taught to see other peoples and other nations changes. Islam has given neither inner peace nor social peace, and I do not foresee it.

I do not write this from a distance. My friend and classmate Waleed was killed by Palestinian jihadis. I had cousins die in the Golan Heights. For years I carried the hatred those losses earned, hatred for Palestinians, hatred for Jews. There are many peace-loving Muslims in spite of Islam, not because of it, and I am not speaking against them; I am speaking against an ideology that permits the killing of the kafir and the seizure of his land, and calls it obedience to God.

Subscribe now

What changed me was not politics and not time. It was the Gospel. I asked God to forgive the hatred in me, and I trusted that Christ had paid the penalty I owed and risen to give me power over sin. I became a different man, able to feel compassion for all people, ready to ask God’s blessing on every nation. That is why I have given my life to Christ, and why I founded Crescent Project. In the years since, I have spoken with hundreds of Muslims, many of them once drawn to jihad, and I have found the same thing in them again and again: a thirst. A thirst for a God who is near and who saves. You cannot satisfy that thirst with seawater, and Islam is seawater.

This is where the Church has work to do. Speaking the truth about Islam is not Islamophobia, it is love. Christ told us the truth would set people free, and I have watched it do so. Many Muslims are leaving Islam now, turning away from an ideology that divides the world into believer and unbeliever. Some have come to Christ; some have not yet. But the door is open, and the people on the other side of it are thirsty.

Fouad Masri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

On the morning of May 29, 1453, the Emperor Constantine XI took off his imperial regalia, so that he might die as a soldier rather than be recognized as a prince and went down into the fighting near the Blachernae wall. From that moment he disappeared from the record. By nightfall Constantinople had fallen. Mehmed II rode to Hagia Sophia and ordered the call to prayer raised inside the greatest church in Christendom. The last emperor of the East lay dead somewhere in the ruins, and no one has ever found the body.

For eleven centuries Constantinople had been the capital of Eastern Christianity. Its fall closed a chapter that had been written across the five great cities of the early Church, and it left a small mountain people in the Levant carrying a weight far heavier than their numbers should have had to bear. The Maronites.

The ancient Church was governed by five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ratified this arrangement, the pentarchy, as the constitutional order of Christendom. The five sees were the load-bearing pillars of the Christian world.

They fell one by one.

Antioch fell in 636, after the Byzantine army broke at the Yarmouk. Jerusalem was surrendered to the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab in 637, barely five years after the death of Muhammad. Alexandria was taken in the same decade. Three of the five sees were under Muslim rule within a single generation of Islam’s birth.

In the Antiochian lands, what survived of the faithful was driven up into the heights the Arabs called Jabal Lubnan, the mountain of Lebanon. They gathered around the memory of Maron, the fifth-century hermit of the Orontes valley, and they held there with no empire left to protect them.

When the Maronite Church formally renewed its union with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439, fourteen years before Constantinople fell, it brought with it the apostolic succession of Antioch, one of the original sees founded in the first generation of the Church. The Maronite Patriarch has borne the title Patriarch of Antioch and All the East without a single break ever since: through the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, through the Crusader kingdoms, through the Mamluk sultans and four centuries of Ottoman rule, through the massacres of 1860, when more than ten thousand Maronites were killed in one summer, and through the Great Famine of 1915 to 1918, when something close to a third of Mount Lebanon starved to death under Ottoman blockade.

Constantinople was the last pillar. When it fell in 1453, four of the five ancient sees lay under Islam. Only Rome remained free, and Rome was in the West. In the East, one mountain church still held what the others had lost: a patriarchate, a homeland, and a line unbroken since the apostles.

Subscribe now

The Maronites, and the other Eastern Christians the mountain took in, the Greek Orthodox of Koura and Batroun, the Greek Catholics of the Beqaa, the Armenians who came to Beirut with nothing after the genocide, did more than survive. They built.

Universities, hospitals, schools, newspapers, monasteries, political parties, towns that governed themselves. And a way of living together in which the largest sect did not simply rule the rest. Almost nowhere else in the Middle East was that ever built at all.

Lebanon itself came from this. In 1920, the Maronite Patriarch Elias Howayek went to Paris and stood before Clemenceau and Wilson and asked for a country, not a refuge, a Lebanon big enough to live. What he wanted was a place where the old law of the region did not apply, where a faith did not have to be the majority to be safe.

That country is broken now. Corruption ate it, weak men sold it, and Iran’s proxy took what was left. But it was real, and that it was real is the whole point, because the other paths were taken too, and you can see where they led.

The Copts of Egypt are ancient and they endure, but they live by the state’s permission. The Assyrians of Iraq were about 1.4 million in 2003. Now they are counted somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000, most of a people gone in twenty years, and the world hardly turned its head. Syria’s Christians were once a tenth of the country and have lost more than half their number since 2011.

There is a concept in Roman law, and Antioch was a Roman city, called nemo plus iuris transferre potest quam ipse habet. No one can transfer more rights than he himself possesses.

What passed to the Maronite Church, and by extension to Lebanese Christians more broadly, was not only a liturgical tradition and a set of beautiful vestments. It was the guardianship of the Levant, the land where the faith of Israel and then the Church were born, the ground of Abraham and Moses and the Incarnation itself.

An estimated fourteen million people of Lebanese Christian origin live outside Lebanon today, in São Paulo, Abidjan, Detroit, Sydney, Paris, Caracas, and dozens of other cities. Many families left after 1975. Many more are leaving now. But a Christianity kept only in the diaspora, in festivals and folk dances and parishes far from the mountain, is not the Church of Antioch and Chalcedon. It is the museum of it.

Since Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 637, the Eastern Church has lived under Islam, day after day, century after century, in violence, in fragile truce, in ordinary neighborliness, and always under pressure. That witness cannot be reproduced from the outside. It is what John Paul II meant when he said Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message, proof that in the East another arrangement is still possible, that the Christian need not choose only between exile and submission.

Lebanon’s Christians are still a third of the country. They still hold land, schools, churches, votes, and the memory of who they are. By every rule the region runs on, they should be a handful of old families by now, their churches kept as museums. They are not. That did not happen by luck. It happened because people decided, again and again, not to vanish.

The task of Lebanon’s Christians now is to keep that message in the present tense. Not to perform it for Western audiences. Not to sell it to diplomats while the pews empty out behind them. To live it, with enough numbers, enough institutions, and enough nerve that it does not slip into the past tense.

Mario Dayba is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

In Berlin, in May 1934, one hundred and thirty-nine delegates from the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of Germany gathered at the city of Barmen and signed a document. The document, drafted by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, ran to six articles. The articles did not mention Adolf Hitler by name. But every Christian in Germany who read the Barmen Declaration in May 1934 understood that the document was a public, ecclesial, theological repudiation of the regime that had taken power the previous year and of the church faction, the Deutsche Christen, the German Christians, that had supported the regime. Karl Barth mailed the document personally to Adolf Hitler

The signers paid for what they had done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, two weeks before American forces liberated the camp. Martin Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Catholic provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin who had aligned with the Confessing Church and prayed publicly for Jews each evening from the cathedral pulpit, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and died in transit to Dachau in November 1943.

The Confessing Church did not save Germany or prevented the camps, it was a minority within German Christianity, denounced by the majority of German pastors. What it did was speak. It did the thing the German majority church had refused to do and paid the cost the majority church refused to pay, and the majority church, in the long evening after 1945, had to live with the knowledge of what its silence had purchased.

Fence-sitting is not an absence of position, it is a position. It is the position the strong side wants the weak side to take, and the side that has captured the institutions of American cultural authority over the last sixty years has wanted, more than anything, the American church to take exactly that position. American Christianity now offers the culture almost nothing the culture has not already approved.

The German Christians of 1934 were ordinary pastors and ordinary churchgoers who had decided that the institutional survival of the German church mattered more than the prophetic content of the Christian message. They argued that opposing the regime would cost the church its remaining ability to do good in German society. They were not wrong about the cost. They were wrong about the math. The institutional church they were protecting did not survive. It was complicit in the crimes of the regime that was protecting it, and after the war it spent two generations doing penance for what it had failed to say when saying mattered. The American church is making the same calculation the German Christians made. It is going to discover, as the German Christians discovered, that the institutional survival it bought with its silence was a kind of death that had not yet announced itself.

Subscribe now

The prophet Isaiah was not writing to pagans when he warned, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. He was writing to the covenant people, who had decided it was easier to stop calling things what they were than to bear the cost of accurate speech. The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 22, recorded a divine indictment of the people of God: I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. The gap is left empty by the people who should have stood in it. Judgment fell on Jerusalem because righteous men were silent.

The Christ of the Gospels was not a fence-sitter, the Jesus the Gospels describe walked into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers in public, before crowds, with full understanding that the men he was insulting were watching for an opportunity to kill him. He called Herod, the political ruler of Galilee, that fox. When Pilate asserted authority over him, Jesus told the Roman governor to his face that he would have no power at all except that it had been given to him from above. These are not the words of a man committed to staying out of the public square. These are the words of a man who walked directly into it, knowing what it would cost him, and who paid the cost without flinching.

Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus that Christians are to expose the works of darkness, the Greek verb is elenchō, which means to refute, to convict, to bring into the open. It is the verb of a prosecutor in court. When Peter and John were brought before the Sanhedrin and ordered to stop preaching in the name of Jesus, they answered: We must obey God rather than human beings. They did not form a committee. They did not commission a study. They stood.

The Christian tradition’s great moments of public witness have, without exception, been moments of refusal to stay on the fence. William Wilberforce was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1785 at the age of twenty-six, while serving as a Member of the British Parliament. His conversion produced an eighteen-year campaign, conducted against the unanimous opposition of the British political and economic establishment, to abolish the slave trade. He introduced the first abolition bill in 1791. It failed. He introduced it again the next year. It failed. The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, three days before he died. Wilberforce was attacked in the press across his entire career, denounced as a betrayer of British economic interests, he did not care. He could not accept what his society was doing with the bodies of African human beings.

The civil rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. led was a movement of preachers. The mass meetings that sustained it were held in Black churches. The vocabulary of the speeches that defined the movement was the vocabulary of Amos and Isaiah and the Hebrew prophets, deployed by a Christian preacher who understood that the gospel had political implications and that those implications had to be preached in public. King paid the cost. He was jailed nineteen times. His home was bombed. He was stabbed in 1958 by a deranged assailant. He was finally murdered on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had spent fourteen years on the public stage and he had never, for a single day of those fourteen years, sat on the fence.

The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day were paid to tell the people what the people wanted to hear, which was that the situation was under control, that the cultural patterns the people had grown comfortable with would continue unchanged into the future. The situation was not under control. Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the people went into exile, and the false prophets who had assured them everything would be fine went with them, into an exile their cowardice had helped to produce.

Subscribe now

If the church stays on the fence while these lies are told, the church will watch the end of Western civilization from inside its own sanctuaries. Islam conquers the public square. That is what it has done in every civilization it has entered, from seventh-century Damascus to twenty-first-century London, and it is what it will do in America if the institutions that should be defending the foundations of the West continue to behave as though their job is to be polite. The polite church will not be allowed to remain polite under Islamic political authority. It will be made to convert, to pay the jizya, or to disappear.

The American church is busy with the couples’ night programs, the Wednesday small groups, the staff retreats, the building campaigns, and the budget meetings to keep the lights on in the converted shopping centers that many large American congregations now occupy. The pastor is busy preparing his sermon series on personal growth. The elder board is busy reviewing the audiovisual contract. The church is busy, while the central story of Western civilization is being rewritten by those who have been waiting fourteen centuries for the Christian West to fail.

Abd Alfadi is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

One word succinctly defines the outrage: anti-Zionism. Its adherents claim it represents legitimate political and theological positions. That excuse, however, masks centuries of hatred toward Jews. It not only contradicts the position of many churches. It not only encourages historical manipulation. It ultimately ignores the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.

Perhaps the most organized Christian exponents of anti-Zionism are traditionalist Catholics. The most visible include podcasters Candace Owens and Jason Jones—who equates Zionism with Satanism—and former government officials Carrie Prejean Boller and Joe Kent.

Subscribe now

Boller, fired from the White House Religious Liberty Commission, calls Israel “evil” and “a terrorist state.” She posted that “Catholics reject Zionism,” that Christianity has been “hijacked” by Zionism’s “heretical teachings” and that “We Catholics are taking Christianity back.”

When Israeli authorities prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from celebrating Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, Boller made this vitriolic X post:

“The Israeli government hates Christians. We’re seeing now how Christians are treated in occupied Palestine. You can no longer hide it. This is the fruit of your heretical teaching of Zionist supremacy.”

Joining Boller and her traditionalist comrades are such traditionalist outlets as LifeSite News, Crisis Magazine and The Remnant. Their collective stance reflects the position of Pope Pius X, who rejected a request in 1904 from Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, to support Jewish settlement in Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

“We cannot give approval to this movement,”Pius said. “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”

Archbishop Angelo Roncalli begged to differ. Roncalli, a papal diplomat based in Turkey during World War II, dedicated himself as early as 1940 to helping Jews reach Palestine, which the British secured after World War I. In 1944, he managed an operation using baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas—some forged—to get Jews out of Europe. Since Nazi officials recognized the documents as legitimate, the bearers had unimpeded travel access. Many went to Palestine.

In 1958, Roncalli became Pope John XXIII, who called a council to help the Catholic Church navigate the modern world. One of the many documents that emerged, Nostra aetate [In Our Time], renounced Catholicism’s historic antisemitism.

“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues….

“Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.

“Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

Nostra aetate has since become part of the Catholic catechism.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II opened diplomatic relations with Israel, making Pius’ objections moot.

R.R. Reno, ethicist and editor of the Catholic journal First Things, dismissed Boller’s assertions in a Washington Post op-ed.

“In fact, the Catholic Church advances no specific teaching on Zionism,” wrote Reno. “I am a Catholic and a Zionist. But my position is not ‘Catholic Zionism.’ Rather, it is plain-old Zionism: The Jewish people are justified in establishing a sovereign nation in the land of their ancestors.”

Joining traditionalist Catholics in their anti-Zionism is a group of Millennial Calvinist pastors whose views reflect those of R.J. Rushdoony, who created a legal system called Christian Reconstructionism that would supplant Constitutional law with the Mosaic Law in toto.

Rushdoony not only equated Zionism to Nazism. He dismissed the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust and even dismissed the Jewish genealogy of European Jews.

The most visible of these pastors is Joel Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas and founder of Right Response Ministries, which promotes Christian Reconstructionism. On X, Webbon revels in his contempt for Jews:

“Religiously speaking, I believe that Judaism is ‘anti-Christ.’ I believe it is a pernicious evil. I fully recognize that many Jews are secular, and do not practice Judaism. However, ... American [sic] was profoundly shaped by Christian thought and Christian values. Likewise, Israel has been deeply shaped by a religion that has as its foundation, a complete rejection of Christ.

“A people shaped by a rejection of the ‘Logos’ ... will have at least some degree of hostility towards God’s natural order. They will resist, and at times even seek to subvert, natural distinctions and hierarchy.”

Webbon also uses X to broadcast the quiet part at ear-splitting volume. In response to Tucker Carlson’s comments at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, in which Carlson accused the Jews of killing Jesus, Webbon disagreed yet agreed.

Subscribe now

“We all killed Jesus by our sin.” Webbon wrote. “Also...the Jews killed Jesus.”

On February 26, Webbon stated his views more emphatically:

“When your Christian theology puts you on the same side as those who killed Christ then you do not know God.”

Like Webbon, the late Dr. John MacArthur was a Calvinist. Unlike Webbon, the former president of The Master’s University and pastor of Grace Community Church, both in Metropolitan Los Angeles, admonished those who shared Webbon’s views.

“I think we are obliged to stand as protectors of the Jews,” MacArthur said, “and they’re constituted now, obviously, globally in their own nation, and so we should be protectors of that people and that nation.”

One of Webbon’s ideological comrades is the Rev. Calvin Robinson, a former Anglican priest who either left or was expelled from four denominations since the Church of England refused to ordain him in 2022. In a March 14 post on X he asserted:

“Christ died for us. The Jews had him killed. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Robinson made an interesting comment on X on February 28 when the United States and Israel killed many of Iran’s key political and military leaders—including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—in a surprise bombing attack:

“Israel has proven itself to be the greatest threat to the world. Zionism is the greatest threat to the West/Christendom. That much should be obvious by now....”

Robinson followed on March 21 by posting that “Israel has no right to exist” and declared the next day that “Israel is a terrorist state. Zionism should be proscribed.”

The former Anglican also holds the term “Judeo-Christian” in contempt. In a December 18 post on X, he wrote:

“I am a Christian, not a Judeo-Christian. My faith is the Christian faith, not Judeo-Christian faith. I believe in and am a follower of Jesus Christ, not Jesus Judeo-Christ. I try to live by Christian values, not Judeo-Christian values.”

Such ignorance reflects blatant disregard for basic biblical history.

Without Judaism, Christianity would not exist. The Tanakh constitutes most of the Christian Bible. Christianity’s fundamental moral framework came from those Jewish scriptures, especially the Ten Commandments. John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” reflected the Mosaic Law’s demands for sacrificial atonement.

Jesus was Jewish. A genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel traces Jesus’ ancestry to David. All of Jesus’ earliest followers were Jewish, as the first nine chapters of the New Testament’s Book of Acts demonstrate. They worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple. Peter was on his way there when Acts 3 describes him healing a lame man sitting at one of the Temple’s gates.

If the earliest Christians were not Jewish, the Sanhedrin would have had no authority to interrogate Peter and John in Acts 4 nor Stephen in Acts 7.

The Sanhedrin also had the authority to try Jesus but no power to execute capital punishment. Only the Romans, the civil authority, had it. That explains why the Sanhedrin transferred custody in John 18 to Pontius Pilate, Judea’s governor. Though Pilate had the power to release Jesus, as John 18 and 19 describe, he placated a mob by refusing to exercise that power. Roman soldiers then tortured Jesus before crucifying him. Thus the Romans bear the ultimate responsibility for killing Jesus.

Before his death, however, Jesus made an astonishing claim.

“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again,” John 10 quotes Jesus as saying. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Centuries earlier, in a passage Christians consider to be messianic prophecy, Isaiah wrote something even more audacious:

“It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.”

So who killed Jesus? The Jews? The Romans? God, whom Jesus claimed to be his father?

In the final analysis, all discussion about culpability vanishes in the face of Christianity’s ultimate claim: Jesus rose from the dead to make reconciliation between sinful humanity and a holy, righteous God possible. As Paul the Apostle—a former Pharisee devoted to persecuting Christians—wrote to believers in a major Greek city, Corinth:

“If Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. ... if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost!”

In terms of Christian theology, therefore, it matters not whether the Jews, the Romans, the Martians, the Klingons or any other group killed Jesus. It only matters to those who wish to promote a pernicious ideology.

Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

Pascal, writing in the Pensées (c. 1658), argued that the continued existence and distinctiveness of the Jewish people constituted evidence for the truth of scripture. His argument was modest: a dispersed people survived intact across millennia, fulfilling ancient prophecy. At best, this observation amounted to an interesting apologetic note—but not a proof.

I decided to rebuild that argument from the ground up: to extend it across seven independent domains, test it against a control group, and stress-test it for self-consistency. What follows is the result.

I. The Historical Pattern: Civilizational Inflection Points

Where Pascal noted Jewish survival, I found something far stranger: at every major civilizational collapse in recorded history, while all other peoples were diminished, the Jewish people received an upgrade. This is not survival. This is anti-fragility at civilizational scale.

1. The 4.2 Kiloyear Event (~2200 BC)

A catastrophic drought lasting approximately 200 years collapsed the Akkadian Empire, destabilized Old Kingdom Egypt, and disrupted the Indus Valley Civilization simultaneously. This is among the most significant systemic collapses in the ancient world.

If the traditional chronology of the biblical narratives holds—and here I am working with the dating proposed by W.F. Albright and Nelson Glueck—this period corresponds to the patriarchal era. While surrounding civilizations fragmented, Abraham’s lineage was consolidating a distinct covenantal identity: the foundational act of Jewish peoplehood. The dating of the patriarchal narratives remains contested in scholarship. The correspondence is suggestive rather than demonstrative.

2. The End of the Bronze Age (~1200 BC)

The most dramatic systemic collapse in ancient history: the Mycenaean civilization, the Hittite Empire, Ugarit, and numerous Late Bronze Age polities all collapsed within a fifty-year window. Egypt survived but was permanently weakened. Virtually every major civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean either vanished or was gutted. The era between 1100 and 750 BC was marked by the loss of Linear B writing, the abandonment of cities, and the breakdown of trade networks. Written language disappeared. Monumental art, large-scale architecture, and high-quality pottery ceased to be produced. The whole of the Near East went silent—with one exception. A small monarchy was entering its golden age.

This is precisely when Israel emerges as a recognizable, named entity. The Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BC) provides the earliest external attestation. The vacuum created by the collapse gave room for the consolidation that would eventually produce the Davidic monarchy.

Subscribe now

3. The Babylonian Exile and Return (586–538 BC)

Destruction of the First Temple, deportation to Babylon, loss of land and political sovereignty—these were the conditions that dissolved every other ancient people who encountered them. Instead of assimilating into Babylonian culture, as conquered peoples invariably did, the exiles returned with a deepened and codified religious identity. The Torah in its canonical form crystallized during this period. Destruction produced consolidation.

4. The Russian Pogroms (1880s–1920s)

Systematic massacres and expulsions across the Pale of Settlement killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. The intended outcome was elimination or permanent marginalization. The actual outcome was mass emigration that built Jewish communities in New York, Chicago, London, and Buenos Aires into enormously influential cultural, intellectual, and economic centers. The destruction of Eastern European Jewry paradoxically amplified Jewish presence and influence across the Western world.

5. The Holocaust (1939–1945)

The most industrialized genocide in human history—a deliberate, technologically sophisticated, state-organized attempt to eliminate European Jewry entirely. One third of the global Jewish population was murdered. Within three years of the war’s end, the State of Israel existed.

The causal relationship between the Holocaust and Israeli statehood is historically complex. Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, and a serious case can be made that the destruction of Europe’s most Zionist-oriented communities delayed rather than caused independence. My argument here is narrower and does not depend on a causal claim: an event specifically designed to permanently end Jewish peoplehood failed to do so within three years of its conclusion. The mechanism inverted its own intended outcome. That inversion is the datum, whatever its mechanism.

6. The 20th-Century Dissolution of Empires

The Ottoman, British, French, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires all dissolved, contracted, or collapsed within a fifty-year window. The Jewish people went from stateless diaspora—minorities everywhere, majorities nowhere—to sovereign statehood in 1948. As empires fell, the one people without an empire gained one.

The pattern across all six inflection points is identical: conditions that diminish or eliminate other peoples produce upgrades for the Jewish people. This is not survival. The pattern holds across six independent historical junctures spanning more than three thousand years.

II. The Generativity Argument: Civilizational Source Code

Pascal argued that the Jewish people persisted. I am making a stronger claim: the Jewish people produced the philosophical operating system that the majority of humanity now runs on. No other civilization independently derived the same package. Individual ideas appear elsewhere in isolation; what appears only once, in this tradition, is their unification into a coherent, internally consistent, and globally transmissible worldview.

Linear Time

Almost every ancient civilization operated with cyclical time: Greco-Roman eternal recurrence, Hindu cosmic cycles, Mesopotamian repetition. The Hebrew Bible introduced time as a directed narrative—with a beginning, unfolding meaning, and a destination. Without this foundational move, the concepts of progress, development, and history as meaningful sequence become incoherent. Secular progressivism is this idea with God removed but the architecture intact.

Universal Human Dignity

The concept of Tzelem Elohim—every human being made in the image of God—appears in Genesis 1:27 and applies without qualification to every person regardless of status, origin, or function. Not just kings or priests. Every person. This is the actual philosophical foundation of universal human rights. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) does not acknowledge its source, but it is this idea, secularized.

Consent of the Governed

The Sinai covenant is a mutual agreement: God proposes, the people ratify. The prophetic tradition then holds kings accountable to that covenant—Samuel explicitly warns about tyrannical kingship (1 Samuel 8), and the prophets repeatedly address the obligations of rulers to the covenantal community. The king is under the law, not above it.

Rule of Law

Deuteronomy 17 requires the king to write his own Torah scroll and read it daily—the sovereign is explicitly subject to the same law as the citizen. This is the conceptual grandfather of the Magna Carta (1215), constitutionalism, and judicial review.

The point is not that each of these ideas exists in isolation elsewhere. Greece had rule of law; Zoroastrianism had a version of directed time; China had sophisticated ethics. The decisive point is that no other civilization unified these ideas into a coherent, mutually reinforcing, internally consistent worldview capable of global transmission as a single package. Every other civilization produced one or two modules. Only one civilization shipped the complete kernel—and then watched it become the operating system of modernity. The probability that a Bronze Age shepherd arrived at this entire package independently, without transmission or design, is left as an exercise for the reader.

III. The Pattern-Breaking Argument: When Sociological Laws Fail

The social sciences have produced some of their most reliable findings in the study of group persistence and assimilation. These are not tentative hypotheses—they are patterns so consistent across cultures, centuries, and continents that they function as empirical laws. They hold without exception. Until this case.

Dispersed minorities assimilate within three to five generations. This has been documented across every immigrant community studied in the modern era. The mechanism is consistent: majority culture exerts demographic, economic, and social pressure on minority identity until it dissolves into the host. The Jewish people have been a dispersed minority for approximately 1,700 years. The law did not apply.

Peoples without territorial sovereignty lose their distinct ethnic identity within a few centuries. Without a homeland to anchor collective memory and organize the reproduction of culture, group distinctiveness diffuses over generations into the surrounding population. The Jewish people spent seventeen centuries without territorial sovereignty. The law did not apply.

Communities under sustained persecution without political power dissolve culturally. Pressure without protection destroys cohesion. The Jewish people were subject to sustained, multi-generational, continent-spanning persecution without political protection for the entire length of the diaspora. The law did not apply.

Languages without a living territory die and stay dead. Peoples subjected to industrial-scale genocide do not reconstitute as sovereign nations within three years of its conclusion. The law did not apply. The law did not apply.

The Jewish case does not merely challenge one sociological law. It challenges all of them simultaneously, in the same direction, across 3,500 years. When a single anomaly contradicts a law, the anomaly is investigated. When a single subject contradicts every law in the field simultaneously—and does so consistently across millennia—the anomaly has become the most important datum in the discipline.

IV. The Control Group: The Coptic Church

Being a Copt; an Egyptian, I compared the history of the Jewish people with the history of my own people. After all, we went through remarkably similar experiences—we were conquered and occupied by the same civilizations, from the Greeks to the British. So I am using my own people as the control group.

The Coptic Church of Egypt provides a near-perfect experimental control for isolating the variable responsible for Jewish survivalism—though the analogy requires care, and the disanalogies are worth stating before the comparison is made.

The Copts are not a globally dispersed diaspora. Unlike the Jewish people, we retained our homeland throughout our history of subjugation, and the dynamics of a persecuted territorial minority differ structurally from those of a stateless people hunted across multiple continents simultaneously.

This asymmetry should be kept in view. Nevertheless, the Coptic Church matches nearly every other initial condition of the Jewish experience: an ancient people, a distinct religious community, a persecuted minority with continuous identity and liturgical tradition—and with considerably better starting conditions than the Jews possessed.

The results are precisely inverted. Better conditions produced dramatically worse outcomes across every measurable dimension.

The language comparison demands particular precision. What Coptic demonstrates is the maximum achievable through religious preservation alone: clergy knowledge, liturgical continuity, and a handful of words repeated in prayer by a congregation that does not understand them. The chain of vernacular transmission is broken entirely.

The test for whether a language is alive is not whether priests recite it at services. The test is whether a secular, non-believing member of the community speaks it as a native tongue—whether the language exists outside the ritual container. Hebrew passed that test. The State of Israel contains Hebrew-speaking atheists who argue philosophy, write novels, and raise children in the language. Coptic did not pass that test. It did not come close.

Acknowledging the structural disanalogy between Coptic and Jewish experience makes the comparison more striking, not less. We Copts had the easier conditions: territorial continuity, no continent-spanning persecution, no industrial genocide. If natural variables account for what happened to the Jewish people, then we should have matched or exceeded the Jewish outcome. We did not. The inverse result—better conditions producing dramatically worse outcomes—eliminates entire classes of natural explanation simultaneously.

V. The Linguistic Argument: The Only Language Revival in History

Languages die constantly and stay dead. Latin, Ancient Greek, Sumerian, Coptic, Old Norse—all attempts at revival have produced at best liturgical preservation or academic curiosity, never a living vernacular with native speakers. The chain of intergenerational transmission, once broken, has never been repaired in any other case in the entire history of linguistics.

Hebrew went from purely liturgical use across approximately 1,700 years to the native first language of millions within a single generation. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s project in the late 19th and early 20th century accomplished what has no parallel in the entire recorded history of human language.

Language is the most fragile carrier of culture. It requires unbroken daily use to survive—not ceremonial use, not scholarly use, but the unremarkable, secular, ordinary use of daily life: arguing over prices, telling jokes, raising children, writing bad poetry. Hebrew had that chain completely severed and still returned as a living vernacular. A Hebrew-speaking Israeli atheist is an entirely unremarkable figure. That fact is, on examination, one of the most anomalous in the history of human civilization.

VI. The Biological Argument: The Only Extinct Species Revival

The Judean date palm (Phoenix dactylifera, Judean variety) was extinct since the Crusades. Seeds recovered from the archaeological site of Masada, dormant for two millennia, were successfully germinated by Dr Elaine Solowey in 2005. The resulting tree, named Methuselah, has since been joined by additional successful germinations from the same ancient seed stock.

A species declared extinct—defined biologically as having no living representatives—has been reconstituted from archaeological remains. Nothing equivalent exists in botanical history. Seeds dormant for decades are occasionally viable. Seeds dormant for two thousand years producing healthy, reproducing trees is without precedent.

This event occurred in Israel, from seeds recovered at one of the most symbolically significant sites in Jewish history—a site of mass resistance against Roman destruction—at the same historical moment as the broader reconstitution of Jewish nationhood.

The coincidence of domain, location, and timing is noted without asserting a causal interpretation. The reader may assign it whatever weight they judge appropriate.

Subscribe now

VII. The Compounding Case

The domains documented in Sections I through VI are genuinely independent of one another—historical, sociological, intellectual, pattern-breaking, methodological, linguistic, biological. They share no common methodology, no common timeframe, and no common evidentiary standard. A challenge to one domain leaves the others standing.

When independent anomalies accumulate across firewalled domains, their evidential weight compounds rather than averages. This is not a rhetorical claim. It is how probability works: the joint probability of independent events is the product of their individual probabilities, not their mean. Each domain, assessed honestly, is extraordinary on its own terms. The product of extraordinary events across seven independent domains is something of a different order altogether.

The precise calculation is left to the reader. The inputs are the observations in the preceding sections. Assign your own probability to each domain—be as skeptical as intellectual honesty requires—and multiply. The argument does not depend on any particular figure. It depends on whether, after an honest assessment of each domain separately, the product remains extraordinary. My judgment is that it does—by many orders of magnitude. But the reader’s own arithmetic, arrived at independently, is more persuasive than any figure I could supply. The invitation to calculate is not a dodge. It is the argument’s confidence in its own inputs.

One irony deserves acknowledgment before any such calculation begins. The tool the reader is about to use—probability theory—presupposes linear time, universal abstract invariants, and a cosmos governed by reproducible law. These are not culturally neutral assumptions. They are specifically the philosophical inheritance that this tradition transmitted to Western civilization, as documented in Section II. The skeptic who reaches for these tools to evaluate the evidence is not standing on neutral ground.

The investigation is being conducted with instruments manufactured by the subject of the investigation. This is not a flaw in the argument. It is an additional data point for it.

VIII. The Transcendental Challenge: Borrowed Tools

The preceding sections constitute an evidentialist argument. This section goes deeper. It examines the conditions under which any argument about this question is possible at all—and finds that those conditions are not neutral.

Consider what any natural explanation of Jewish survivalism must employ:

Logic—which requires non-contradictory, directed, linear inference.

Mathematics—which presupposes universal abstract invariants that hold across all

minds and all times.

Probability theory—which is only coherent if time is linear, events are distinct, and the future structurally resembles the past, because we inhabit a universe governed by reproducible universal laws.

The scientific method—which assumes a cosmos under rule of law, with results reproducible across times, places, and observers.

Every single one of these tools presupposes the worldview documented in Section II. Linear time is the distinctive philosophical contribution this tradition transmitted to the West. The universality of human reason is grounded in Tzelem Elohim—the claim that every person shares a common rational nature because every person bears the image of the same God. The rule of law in the natural order mirrors the theological framework of Deuteronomy. Probability theory as a coherent discipline requires directed time and the meaningfulness of historical sequence.

The skeptic who reaches for these tools to evaluate the evidence is not standing on neutral ground. There is no neutral ground. The tools themselves are downstream of the tradition they are being used to examine.

The skeptic faces an inescapable dilemma: use rational tools—and thereby presuppose the Jewish worldview, conceding the generativity argument—or abandon rational tools—and thereby have no argument at all. There is no third option. It is as if someone attempted to disprove the existence of oxygen while breathing.

IX. Objections Considered

Objection 1: Survivorship Bias

The most common objection runs as follows: we notice peoples who survived because they survived. The historical record does not preserve the vanished. We are therefore drawing the target around the bullet holes after firing—the classic error known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

This objection mistakes this case for its structural opposite. The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy applies when survival is accidental—random populations randomly persisting, with the observer drawing the target retrospectively. The Jewish case has the opposite structure. The targeting was deliberate, named, and premeditated—by Pharaoh, by Haman, by Antiochus Epiphanes, by Rome, by the Inquisition, by the Cossacks, by the Third Reich. Each attacker explicitly identified the target in advance, mobilized significant state power against it, and announced its eliminatory intent publicly. The target was drawn before the shot, by the attacker, not retrospectively by the analyst. The Akkadian Empire is gone. The Hittites are gone. Rome is gone. The Third Reich lasted twelve years. The target of each campaign is still here. The eliminators are history. The eliminated are history’s most documented living people.

This structural inversion transforms the objection into additional evidence. Survivorship bias would predict random survival across random populations. What we observe instead is the consistent survival of the most deliberately and repeatedly targeted population in recorded history, under conditions specifically engineered for elimination. The more sophisticated and intentional the elimination attempt, the more anomalous the survival.

The comparison with other persecuted peoples sharpens this further. Indigenous American populations were catastrophically destroyed—but primarily by disease, an accidental vector of contact that required no particular targeting. The mechanism was biological and largely unplanned. Jewish elimination attempts were the opposite: maximally intentional, organizationally sophisticated, and distributed across completely different civilizations with no shared methodology—Babylonian, Roman, Catholic, Islamic, and finally secular-bureaucratic Nazi. All of them failed. Survivorship bias explains accidental persistence. It has no mechanism for deliberate, repeated, sophisticated failure-to-eliminate followed by systematic enhancement.

Objection 2: The Domains Are Not Truly Independent

A more technically sophisticated objection targets the compounding logic. The linguistic revival, the national reconstitution, and the biological argument are all connected to the same twentieth-century Zionist project. Connected domains should not be treated as independent events.

This objection also inverts into evidence. The relevant question is not whether the domains are logically connected. It is what conditions prevailed when those connected achievements occurred.

Connected systems fail together under existential pressure. This is the universal pattern: when a civilization collapses, its language, its institutions, its cultural output, and its biological legacy collapse simultaneously. The interconnection of these elements is precisely what makes civilizational destruction so total.

The Jewish domains were connected in exactly this way—linguistically, culturally, biologically, institutionally. They shared identical kill conditions across seventeen centuries. Under those conditions, connected systems should have failed together, as they always do. The Hebrew language was preserved and revived while the people who spoke it were being hunted, their literature burned, their communities destroyed, and their children forcibly converted. The Masada seeds survived in soil soaked with the blood of the last defenders of Jewish sovereignty. The interconnection tightens the noose. The fact that connected systems survived it anyway is the argument, not a weakness in it.

X. The Witness

Every version of Pascal’s argument is vulnerable to a single dismissal: bias. The Jewish person has self-interest. The Christian has a theological agenda. The Western academic has a cultural inheritance. The Israeli has a political motivation.

I developed this argument as an Egyptian Reformed Christian—someone formed in an honor-shame culture with strong social, familial, and civilizational incentives to resist this conclusion. The cost of following the evidence was not abstract. I lost friendships. I was labeled a Zionist collaborator. I was accused of complicity in the killing of children. The sincerity of my own faith was questioned. None of these accusations engaged a single premise of the argument.

They are noted here not as grievance, but as data—testimony about the social temperature surrounding conclusions the evidence appears to require, and about what kind of pressure this argument had to be developed against.

This is not merely biographical detail. It demonstrates the argument’s generativity claim in practice: producing its most unlikely advocate not through inheritance or tribal loyalty, but through the compulsion of evidence followed honestly across every domain to wherever it led.

Subscribe now

XI. Jeremiah 31:35–36—Prophecy as Physics

“Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord of hosts is his name: If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the Lord, then shall the offspring of Israel cease from being a nation before me forever.” (Jeremiah 31:35–36, written approximately 600 BC.)

Pascal quoted prophecy. He did not quote this one. He should have—because this text does something categorically different from general prophetic assertion. It does not merely predict Jewish survival. It specifies the mechanism, the guarantee, and the conditions of falsification with the precision of a physical equation.

The guarantee of Jewish continuity is explicitly tied to the solar constant, to lunar orbital mechanics, to stellar physics, and to ocean wave dynamics. These are not poetic ornaments. They are physical constants. Jeremiah is explicitly anchoring the permanence of the Jewish people to the same layer of reality as the laws of thermodynamics. The falsification condition is stated with logical precision: if the fixed order of the cosmos departs, then and only then shall Israel cease. The contrapositive is equally precise: while the cosmos holds, Israel holds.

Written approximately 600 BC—before the Babylonian exile it was predicting survival through, before the Hellenistic period, before Rome, before the diaspora, before every pogrom, before the Holocaust, before 1948, before Ben-Yehuda, before the Masada seeds—this text did not merely predict the outcome. It named the domain in which the outcome would be decided.

The multi-domain analysis in this document, built from history, sociology, linguistics, and biology, arrived at the conclusion that Jewish continuity operates at the level of physical law. Jeremiah said that first. In 600 BC. The text did not just see the data coming. It named the domain in which the data would operate, 2,600 years before the data existed.

That is not prophecy as fortune-telling. That is prophecy as physics.

XII. The Kernel Argument: Function Within the Whole

The generativity argument established that the Jewish people authored the philosophical operating system that most of humanity now runs on. The accumulated evidence across all preceding sections suggests something further: the Jewish people did not merely contribute to the operating system. They wrote the kernel.

What a Kernel Does

It runs below everything else—invisible to most users. It cannot be removed without the whole system collapsing. Everything that appears to operate independently is actually running on top of it. Its operations are presupposed by every process, including processes that deny its existence.

How This Maps

Secular democracy runs on the kernel—it presupposes human dignity, linear historical progress, and consent of the governed, all of which originate there. Modern science runs on the kernel—it presupposes a cosmos under rational law, reproducibility across time, and the meaningfulness of history. Human rights law runs on the kernel—it presupposes Tzelem Elohim even when it has forgotten the name. Even the arguments against the kernel run on the kernel—they use linear logic, universal reason, and rule of law to make their case.

Function, Not Superiority

This is not a claim of Jewish superiority. That framing misses the point entirely. The heart does not consider itself superior to other organs. It performs a function within the body. The question of superiority does not arise—only the question of function. The evidence across seven independent domains converges on the conclusion that a function was assigned, and that the assignment has proven extraordinarily resistant to cancellation across 3,500 years.

As Paul wrote in Romans 11:29: “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.” The evidence, examined from the outside, appears to confirm the claim from the inside.

XIII. The Pascal Irony: The Father of Probability Missed the Proof

Blaise Pascal was arguably the greatest probabilist of the 17th century. He invented expected value theory. He built one of the first mechanical calculators. He founded modern probability theory in correspondence with Fermat. He understood combinatorics, odds, and the mathematics of uncertainty more deeply than virtually any thinker of his age.

And he looked at the most probability-defying phenomenon in human history—a phenomenon sitting directly in front of him, which he explicitly chose as the subject of his apologetic argument—and wrote a few paragraphs.

The father of probability theory failed to apply probability theory to the single event that most demanded it. He had every intellectual tool required to produce the argument in this document. He used none of them in that way.

Why He Missed It

The explanation is precise. Pascal could not see the kernel from inside the kernel. The Jewish worldview had so thoroughly saturated the intellectual atmosphere of 17th-century Catholic France that Pascal was breathing it without knowing it. Linear time, universal human dignity, rule of law, the meaningfulness of history—these did not register as data points. They felt like air: the self-evident background conditions of rational thought.

It took someone formed outside the kernel to step back far enough to see it as an object, examine it, and recognize what it was. In this case, that meant me: an Egyptian Christian, shaped in a civilizational tradition with different foundational assumptions, with every cultural incentive to reach a different conclusion.

Pascal missed the proof because the proof was already working on him. He was, without knowing it, Exhibit A of the generativity argument he was attempting to make. He was swimming in the evidence. He could not see the water.

The Irony Stated Precisely

The father of probability theory, writing an argument about Jewish survivalism, did not calculate the probability of Jewish survivalism. The argument was completed 370 years later, using the tools he invented, by someone his own civilization would have considered an unlikely candidate for the conclusion.

That is either the greatest irony in the history of philosophy—or evidence that the kernel has a sense of humor.

XIV. The Text Saw You Coming

There is a final observation that does not fit neatly into any of the preceding categories because it is not an argument. It is an event.

I set out to audit this question rather than confirm it. I followed the evidence across seven independent domains—historical, sociological, intellectual, pattern-breaking, methodological, linguistic, biological—and arrived at Jeremiah 31:35–36.

Not at a general sense of the divine. Not at a vague spiritual intuition. At a specific text, written in a specific language, by a specific tradition, approximately 2,600 years ago, which had already named the mechanism, specified the physical constants, and stated the falsification conditions of the conclusion my analysis had just independently reached.

My response was an involuntary desire to sing a doxology. This is worth examining carefully—not as emotion overriding reason, but as reason arriving at its own outer edge and recognizing that something is present beyond it, with the appropriate human response expressing itself.

Jeremiah 31 was written in approximately 600 BC. At that time:

• Egypt was a great power. Israel was about to be destroyed.

• Islam would not exist for another 1,200 years.

• Probability theory would not exist for another 2,250 years.

• The Holocaust would not occur for another 2,540 years.

• The State of Israel would not be reestablished for another 2,548 years.

And yet the text, written then, in those circumstances, produced a statement that an Egyptian Christian using 21st-century probability theory would arrive at independently, from the other direction, 2,600 years later.

The pun—that the father of probability missed the probability argument—was unintended by me when I noticed it. The joke, apparently, was not unintended by whoever constructed the situation in which it arose.

The text did not just predict the survival of a people. It predicted this discussion. It was waiting.

XV. Summary and Conclusion

Pascal’s original argument was a mildly interesting apologetic observation. The argument reconstructed and expanded here is something categorically different.

The Bayesian conclusion is straightforward. The domains documented in this argument are genuinely independent. Their evidential weight compounds. Under the null hypothesis of natural processes, any honest calculation of the joint probability of the observed data yields a figure that strains the descriptive capacity of ordinary language.

Under the hypothesis of a common cause—call it providence, design, or covenant—the probability of the observations rises dramatically. When the likelihood ratio becomes sufficiently extreme, rational inference compels updating toward the alternative. That is not theology. It is probability theory applied consistently.

Jeremiah 31:35–36, written 2,600 years ago, tied the permanence of the Jewish people to the fixed order of the cosmos—solar, lunar, stellar, tidal. The multi-domain analysis in this document, conducted with 21st-century tools, arrived at the same conclusion from the other direction: Jewish continuity operates at the level of physical law. The text named the mechanism before the data existed. The data confirmed the mechanism without knowing the text.

Pascal had a sketch. This is a proof. The proof uses tools that are themselves part of the proof. And the text that predicted the proof was written before the tools existed.

The stars are still there. So are they.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

A peace agreement between the Ethiopian Government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) formally ended the fighting in 2022. However, it did not end the human rights violations.

Over the past seven years, Ethiopian Christians have been subjected to extensive human rights abuses. These violations are marked by recurring incidents of massacres, extrajudicial killings, drone strikes, forced displacements, sexual violence, and mass arrests, amongst other atrocities.

Such acts of violence are orchestrated by far-left armed groups. These incidents often involve the complicity or passive acquiescence of local authorities. They are predominantly driven by ethnic and religious discrimination, leading to substantial casualties.

Subscribe now

Ethiopia is an ethnically diverse nation with around ninety distinct ethnic groups. Oromo, the country’s largest ethno-linguistic group, constitutes more than one-third of the population and is home to the largest Muslim community. A significant portion of the Oromo population also identifies as Christian. The Amhara, who are Orthodox Christian, are the next largest ethno-linguistic group in the country. Other major groups include the Somali, Tigray, Sidama, Gurage, Welaita, and Afar.

Ethiopia primarily adheres to Christianity (~60%) and Islam (~33%). The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (~43%) is dominant, particularly in the north, while Protestantism (20%) is growing in the south and west. Islam is prevalent in the Afar, Somali, and Oromia regions.

Escalating Violence

The Amhara people in Ethiopia have faced persecution and massacres for several decades. Various groups, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA)/Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which are rooted in Marxism-Leninism and ethno-nationalism, as well as the ruling Prosperity Party (PP), are accused of orchestrating these crimes.

Meanwhile, violence has escalated in the Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions and surrounding areas of Ethiopia since the beginning of this year. Rising tensions between the Ethiopian government and Eritrea regarding their disputed border territory have also brought the November 2022 Peace Agreement to the verge of collapse.

The Amhara Association of America (AAA), in a February 8 press statement, said the war was being carried out by the ruling Prosperity Party in cooperation with the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and allied forces, including Oromia Region Special Forces. “Abuses were predominantly identity-based, targeting ethnic Amhara communities and persons affiliated to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC),” the statement said.

In January 2026 alone, AAA’s initiative Amhara War Updates (AWU) recorded battle events and human rights incidents across 106 distinct districts in 19 zonal administrations in four regions (Amhara, Oromia, Benishangul-Gumuz, and Addis Ababa). “While the majority of human rights incidents implicated Oromo Prosperity Party (OPP) regime forces, other perpetrators included Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces, Oromia Region Forces, Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) militants and Gumuz militants,” AWU said.

Since January 2023, there have been consistent reports of the Ethiopian government orchestrating discriminatory displacements, targeting primarily non-Oromos, especially Amharas, in the vicinity of the capital.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) reported:

“The prevailing anti-Amhara sentiment is closely tied to an aversion to the Orthodox faith, as most of the Amhara people are Orthodox Christians…

“The human rights violations range from forced displacement and mass arrests to systematic massacres and ethnic cleansings. For instance, on June 18, 2022, the Amhara community in Wollega within the Oromia region of Ethiopia was brutally slaughtered in what is now called the Gimbi massacre. The victim count is between 400–500 people. The modus operandi involved extreme cruelty, including the burning alive of individuals and the mutilation of pregnant women…

“These violations not only qualify as crimes against humanity but also evince a systematic trajectory toward genocide.”

In May 2022, the government reportedly detained over 4,000 ethnic Amhara individuals. This number surged following the declaration of a state of emergency in August 2023. The ECLJ noted: “While these issues have garnered international attention, the extent of the abuses, specifically those inflicted upon the Amhara population, lacks sufficient coverage.”

Tedla Melaku, an Ethiopian-American author and humanitarian advocate whose academic background is in philosophy and social sciences, is trying to raise awareness about the persecution of Christians in Ethiopia. His book Reason and the Sacred: Ethiopian Metaphysics explores Orthodox Christian theology and Christian mysticism, with a focus on Ethiopia’s unique ancient Jewish-Middle Eastern links and a Semitic tradition that blends Temple Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy—a history that stretches back to early antiquity.

In an interview with this author, Melaku said:

“The greatest challenges Ethiopian Christians face are Islamic terrorism, Marxism, ethnic fascism, and factions that seek to destroy Ethiopia’s Judeo-Christian (literally) foundations and its Orthodox Christian traditions. Wahhabi-related forces in Ethiopia, collaborating with ethno-fascist elements in power within the regime, have been massacring Christians and burning churches, while also targeting specific groups, such as the Amhara people, due to their Semitic and largely Christian heritage.

“On the other hand, Marxist forces have for decades attacked the Church and Ethiopia’s Christian heritage. This started with the murder of the last Christian Emperor in 1974 and the execution of the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They killed hundreds of thousands in a course of seventeen years during the communist Derg regime, and later, another Marxist-ethno-fascist group, the TPLF, took over to introduce ‘ethnic federalism,’ intending to disintegrate the country and weaken the Orthodox Church. Those who are now in power are also infiltrating the Church to weaken it, causing a great amount of harm.

“Far-left groups, such as the TPLF and OLF/OLA, including the current regime itself, have been waging war against the Amhara people with the intent of destroying Ethiopia’s historical identity, its noble and patriotic heritage, and its Judeo-Christian civilization. The TPLF described themselves as ‘anti-Amhara imperialists’ in the early manifesto and sought to ‘bury’ Ethiopia’s Christian monarchical structure and break the country apart to create a new ethnostate; while OLF/OLA sought to destroy the Semitic heritage as whole, destroy Ethiopia itself which they perceive as an ‘Orthodox Christian expansionist force with Semitic roots.’ Both terror groups caused the death and destruction of innumerable people and Christian heritage over decades. The current regime has also been at war with the Amhara people who are fighting for their survival as a community and to protect their heritage.

“The current US administration and other pro-Western organizations should understand that the Amhara are fighting for their survival and to preserve Ethiopia’s longstanding heritage—one of the oldest Christian cultures, whose alliance with Christian Europeans can be traced back to antiquity when Ethiopia’s Axumite Empire and the Byzantine Empire collaborated. It is also a prestigious, biblical culture, albeit facing serious challenges, originating in the ancient dominion of the Queen of Sheba, and her visit to ancient Israel to meet King Solomon. These far-left forces are committing cultural erasure, as well as ethnic cleansing and genocide in order to destroy and bury this heritage and change the demographics of the region. The forces that are actively destroying Ethiopia’s Judeo-Christian heritage and committing massacres, mainly targeting the Amhara community, should be recognized as terror groups.”

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

Several faith and ethnic inspired attacks murdered dozens of Ethiopians over the last months. During the last week of February and early March, for instance, militants carried out coordinated attacks in which over 30 people were killed in Arsi Zone of Oromia Region, according to church officials who spoke to BBC.

Christians in the country are mainly targeted by two groups: Islamic forces and far-left groups, with the complicity of the government and local authorities.

The first part of this series analyzes the Islamic groups targeting Ethiopian Christians. The second part concerns the Marxist and other far left as well as the ethnic-based violence they are facing.

Ethiopia ranks 36 in the World Watch list of Open Doors, which monitors global Christian persecution.

Subscribe now

How did Islam arrive in Ethiopia, a historically Christian country, and grow there to the point that it is still a major source of persecution for Christians?

Ethiopia is a country located on the Horn of Africa and has a population of approximately 138 million people. It is home to a diverse array of cultures and ethnicities: it has over ninety distinct ethnic groups with unique languages and traditions.

Ethiopia established Christianity as its official state religion in the early fourth century (circa 330–340 AD) under King Ezana of Aksum. Based on church tradition, Ethiopia’s conversion to Christianity is traced to the Ethiopian Eunuch, a high official baptized by the Apostle Philip (according to the New Testament’s Book of Acts).

This move established the Aksumite Empire (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) as a major early Christian power, and the faith has been integral to the region’s culture ever since. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the world’s oldest churches.

The Bible mentions Ethiopia multiple times, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains a rich, ancient tradition. Christianity has served as a unifying force which has for centuries shaped the literature, art, and identity of Ethiopia.

Islam, however, arrived in Ethiopia during the early seventh century, primarily through the First Hijra (613–615), when Muhammad (Islam’s founder) instructed his followers to leave Mecca and seek refuge in the Christian Kingdom of Aksum. Early Muslims settled in areas like Negash (Tigray), which became an important center for early Islamic history in Ethiopia.

Between 1527 and 1543, however, Ethiopia faced repeated attacks followed by a military occupation from a Muslim sultanate. During this period, Ethiopia was occupied by a jihadist army raised from the sultanate of Adal, which grew from the remnants of Ifat in the late fourteenth century. Ifat was a medieval Sunni Muslim state in the eastern regions of the Horn of Africa between the late 13th and early 15th centuries. It was formed in present-day Ethiopia in the region of Ifat. The Islamic kingdom ruled over parts of what are now Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, and Somalia.

The 16th-century jihad led by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (Ahmad Gragn) of the Adal Sultanate aimed to conquer Ethiopia, resulting in widespread destruction of churches, forced conversions to Islam, and the temporary collapse of the Christian Ethiopian empire.

Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne, a professor of history, notes:

“The jihad of Ahmad ultimately had as its object the conversion of Ethiopia to Islam. Śihāb ad-Dín, Ahmad’s Yemeni follower and chronicler, constantly referred to Ethiopians as ‘infidels’, ‘polytheists,’ and ‘idol-worshipers’ who deserved to be fought, converted, and enslaved. With the exception of those located in inaccessible areas, all churches and monasteries were looted and razed to the ground and an estimated nine out of every ten Christians converted to Islam.”

During the Ethiopian-Adal War, Ahmad Al-Ghazi’s forces were Ottoman-backed and involved a coalition of several Islamic forces and ethnicities (at least six) that included Arabs, Somalis, Hararis, Harla, and a number of other tribes.

In addition to genociding Christians and burning churches, they looted copious amounts of gold from the Ethiopian kingdom and are recorded (in Futuh Al Habasha) to have melted down a church entirely plated in gold leaf known as “Mekane Selassie” (Abode of the Trinity) in Amhara, a wonder which Ahmad’s forces said they had never seen the like of it anywhere, and which had taken the Emperor Na’od thirteen years to build.

The campaign was a major effort to establish dominance over the Christian Kingdom. This jihad, supported by Ahmad’s Muslim allies, resulted in heavy material, human, and territorial losses for Christians. According to historian Tegegne,

“The Muslim seizure of Ethiopian provinces led to a tremendous expansion in the slave trade within the region, and included the enslavement and forced conversion of Christians… In fact, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, jihad was a primary method of obtaining Ethiopian slaves.”

The jihad ended in 1543 following the death of Imam Ahmad in battle against a combined Ethiopian and Portuguese force, restoring the Christian Solomonic dynasty.

In 1548, King Gälawdéwos of Ethiopia issued a royal edict, now held at Tädbabä Maryam, which banned the sale of Christians to Muslims and other non-Christians. This decree sought to combat the intensified 16th-century slave trade, particularly after conflicts with the Adal Sultanate.

Today, Ethiopia is a majority-Christian country (61 percent), with a large Muslim minority. Approximately 43% of the population identifies as Orthodox Christian, 33% as Muslim, and 20% as Protestant. In the eastern and southeastern regions Islam is predominant.

Open Doors reports that Islam is increasing its influence in Ethiopia at local, regional, and national levels, placing Christian communities, especially converts, in a vulnerable position:

“In Muslim-majority rural areas, Christians often face harassment, exclusion from communal resources, and violent attacks, some of them fatal. Converts from Islam are particularly at risk, frequently disowned by family, denied inheritance and child custody rights, and targeted for public shaming or assault.”

The spread of Islamic radicalism from neighboring countries like Somalia and Sudan has further deepened the threat, as cross-border radical networks affect Ethiopia’s border regions, adds Open Doors.

In an interview with this author, Tedla Melaku, an Ethiopian-American humanitarian advocate and author of the book “Reason and the Sacred: Ethiopian Metaphysics,” said:

“Ethiopia’s Christian kingdom, through its leadership, the Solomonic dynasty, successfully fought against Islamist powers and their expansion since at least the medieval period, protecting the Church: The Sultanate of Ifat in the 13th-15th centuries, and the Adal Sultanate, which it eventually defeated; it fought and overcame several regional emirates, prevented Ottoman expansion into the interior of Ethiopia, and defeated the Mahdists and the Khedivate of Egypt at war, too. Ethiopia’s ancient Christian tradition was preserved through resistance, martyrdom, and alliances with other Christian nations—namely, the Portuguese in the 16th century, who intervened to defend Ethiopia against the ottoman-backed Adal Sultanate.

“Many Islamist attacks and invasions took place, resulting in forced conversions and the destruction of magnificent Christian monuments and relics as chronicled in the Futuh Al Habasha, a 16th-century Arabic chronicle detailing the Ethiopian-Adal war; but due to a strong Christian leadership that understood what was at stake, Ethiopian Christians were able to protect the Church and their Christian heritage through great sacrifices. The West could learn that what is at stake, when allowing Islamist expansion, is far greater than anything imaginable, and that Europe’s Christian civilization and identity must be protected at all cost, as it was in the past through its Christian kings and leaders. Christianity is to be protected by God-fearing, strong leaders.”

---

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI