The Lure of Theocracy - Christianity Today Magazine

Philip Yancey takes a dive of logic into a dry pool. He equates Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. He plumps for a secularistic, hedonistic society as the principle most in need of defense.

He does open with one provocative statement:

I find no guidance in the Qur'an on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society and no guidance in the New Testament on how Christians should live as a majority.

That, of course, is because Christianity was born as a minority faith. The best-ever Christian nation, the United States of America (before the Darwinian rot set in), derived its principles of religion and of government from refugees--specifically, the Pilgrims, and after them thousands of French Huguenots and German refugees from the Thirty Years' War. I know--I am descended from all three groups.

But Yancey ignores one key fact: good Muslims have followed their Koran into careers of terrorism and piracy since long before the Crusades, and never let up until a stronger power forced them to. A Moroccan diplomat famously and brazenly told Thomas Jefferson that the Barbary pirates were acting according to religious precept, and that Morocco would continue to issue them letters of marque and reprisal to continue their activities. When Jefferson became President, he gave the Moors his answer, in the person of Commodore (that is, one-star admiral) Matthew Preble.

But that did not mean that Jefferson was an epicure. Yancey utterly fails to understand that ours is a three-cornered war, not two: Christians, Muslims, and secular epicures. And the Beast of Revelation will be an epicure; Revelation 9:20-21 leave no doubt on that score.