Raymond Ibrahim: Believers in Jesus must not 'abstract Christianity' into oblivion
All throughout Western Europe, Muslims are transforming churches into mosques. They are not doing this by force and conquest, as their ancestors once did, but legally: Europeans are selling or in some cases donating churches into becoming mosques.
In a video uploaded on Aug. 16, 2023 (see below), a Muslim man, while videotaping a church in the UK, said:
You’ll be excused to think that this is a church. But as is the case across the UK, we’ve took it over. It’s now, actually, a mosque, a masjid. Christianity is depleting; atheism is unfulfilling; Islam is here and is here to stay. The British people, they may not like it but as is the case with many things, there may be something which you don’t like which is good for you [Koran 2:216]. So, carry on making those churches for us. Keep them empty, we’ll buy them in a few years’ time and we’ll make them into a mosque.
The video continues by showing several other UK churches and cathedrals now turned into mosques.
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While the abandonment of these churches is reflective of shrinking attendance, that, in itself, is not limited to shrinking numbers of Christians, but of growing numbers of Christians who see in churches nothing more than a building, one which, whether it stands or falls, has absolutely nothing to do with their internal faith.
Such nonchalance stands in stark contrast to how previous Europeans saw and understood church buildings – and their response to any Muslim who would dare suggest turning them into mosques.
Indeed, it was to liberate one particular church, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – which, built on the site of Christ’s resurrection, had been repeatedly desecrated by Muslims – that European pilgrims sacrificed everything and marched thousands of miles to fight and die in the Crusades.
In 1217, for example, a Crusades preacher paraphrased Lamentations 5:2 – “Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners” – to express Christian outrage that the Holy Land and its many sacred sites and churches were in Muslim hands: “the Land of Promise,” he preached, “is our inheritance and the place where Christ was buried and suffered is our home. And this inheritance is given into the hands of [Muslim] gentiles…. Now our holy inheritance is seized; the holy places are profaned; the holy cross is made a captive.”
Today, of course, almost every Western Christian would cringe at such words. To them, churches are just buildings. All that matters is if one is saved.
Right or wrong, such thinking is reflective of the ongoing “abstraction” of Christianity – the transformation of it into a thought, an idea, a set of beliefs, to be preserved only in the individual Christian’s mind. Outward manifestations – in this case, church buildings—are meaningless.
Thus, if Christians once spent so much to erect massive cathedrals all throughout Europe – formerly booming with masculine voices of confident worshippers – today these buildings are the haunt of little old ladies lighting candles for their departed loved ones – that is, when these buildings are not actively being pawned off to exultant Muslims who transform them into mosques. In France alone, one church is “disappearing” – one way or another – every two weeks.
Self-professed Christians who see no problem with this, who care little for concrete manifestations of the faith, should be mindful lest they abstract Christianity into oblivion.
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