God Is Sending ‘Muslim Avengers’ To Kill Americans Because Of Abortion?

After years and years of blogging about American Christianity, you start to think you’ve heard it all.

You start to think that nobody could say anything that would leave you even momentarily speechless.

And then you see something like this and remember that the depths of religiously fueled fear and xenophobia know no bounds.

The ironic thing about folks like Rick Wiles (the guy in the video) and his ilk (other than the fact that in this video Wiles makes God guilty of the very sin we are supposedly being held accountable – mass murder) is that he’s constantly branding other people – mostly Obama – the Anti-Christ, and yet there is nothing more anti-Christ than the hateful, marginalizing vitriol Wiles spews on his Muslim neighbors.

Even when it comes to ISIS – which makes up a tiny portion of the global Muslim community – Jesus is clear about how his disciples should respond: “Do not be afraid of the one who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” And again, “But I say, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

That doesn’t mean Christians have to just lay down and die at the feet of ISIS (far from it), but it does mean that stirring up fear in the hearts of others and painting all of our Muslim neighbors, like Jim Bakker does, as “the most evil force on earth” is the absolute antithesis of both Jesus’ teachings and his actions and, therefore, the very definition of anti-Christ.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Bakker and Wiles’ hate and fear-mongering in the name of Jesus if it weren’t for the fact that it is becoming increasingly embraced by Christians across the country as some sort of neo-orthodoxy to be defended by the true remnant of the persecuted faithful. From the random troll on Facebook to “Christian leaders” like Franklin Graham whose utterly abhorrent and unequivocally unchristian daily rants spread like wildfire across the Christian corners of Facebook to the inexplicable evangelical love for Donald Trump, this sort of unambiguously anti-Christ rhetoric is increasingly being proclaimed as if it’s the Gospel itself.

To be honest, I don’t know how to turn the tides of sanctified xenophobia.

We live in a time of dramatic change in nearly every facet of life and as is almost always the case, with change comes fear of the unknown. When that fear is sanctified by religious rhetoric it creates a toxic force that is incredibly difficult to overcome.

But no matter how powerful that force might be, as Christians we have a responsibility to speak up when the gospel is hijacked by hate and fear.

Not by stirring up our own hate towards them or fear of what they might do, but by holding our brothers and sisters accountable to the Gospel by naming their sanctified xenophobia whenever and wherever we see it for what it truly is.

Anti-Christ.