Evangelical Author: Western Christians Don't Care Enough About ISIS' 'Once-in-a-1,000-Year Threat' to Christianity
Evangelical author and former vice president of Liberty University, Johnnie Moore, asserted in a book to be published in April, that Western Christians don't care enough about the threat posed by the Islamic State, which is attempting to wipe out Christianity in the Middle East.
"I am convinced that one of the reasons why Christians in the West haven't been more supportive of Christians in the East is not that they don't care about the situation, they just chose not to care for it," Moore asserted in a Monday interview with The Christian Post. "It is just not relevant to their lives. Everybody has their own lives, and their own problems, and their own jobs, and kids and all these things."
Moore traveled to the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq last October to hear first-hand accounts from refugees on how barbarically ISIS treated Christians when it took over much of its territory in Syria and Iraq last summer. Afterwards he was inspired to write his new book, Defying ISIS, so that westerners can fully grasp the magnitude of what ISIS' rise to power means for the future of Christianity in the region.
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"We are watching a once-in-a-thousand-year crisis. We are witnessing the elimination of ancient Christian communities from the Middle East, communities that thrived for over 2,000 years," Moore explained. "And, it is happening under the watchful eyes of the West and all the sensible nations of this world. If we don't do something about it, we are going to be responsible for it."
In the book, which was released as an e-book last Friday, Moore explains that ISIS takes particular joy in killing Christians and destroying Christian holy sites within the region. He explained that ISIS' extreme ideology has led to mass killings, rampant rape, and decapitations of Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities.
He chronicles ISIS' lethal and systemic mistreatment of Iraqi and Syrian Christians by highlighting the stories of Christians who were beheaded for failing to convert to Islam, the young boy who was cut in half for being Christian, and the countless women that were enslaved by ISIS militants as sex slaves.
Although Iraq used to be home to over 1.5 million Christians, only 10 percent of those Christians remain in the region. As more and more Christians are fleeing from the area, Moore says that the Christian communities that were once home to many biblical figures, like the prophet Jonah and Abraham, are now on the verge of extinction along with Jesus' native language of Aramaic.
Moore reasoned that Christians in the West may also not care enough about the dire situations of Mideast Christians under ISIS' rule because the media has downplayed the threat the group poses to Christianity.
"Until the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, the press rarely covered the particular threat against Christians which is a threat that has existed at least since 2003 and has been escalating almost by the day since last summer," Moore stated.
He also put some of the blame on Western church leaders for not emphasizing regularly how much of a problem ISIS presents to the future of Christianity.
"Churches in this country don't need to be treating this as just something that they need to pray about. This is a once-in-a-thousand-year crisis," Moore asserted. "Every single church in America, every single Sunday in this country, ought to be praying for this and telling their congregations about this. This isn't 'Let's have a persecution Sunday next month because this is happening.' This is like every single time a leader of the church in this country opens their mouth, they need to be talking about this issue."
Although Christians in America might wonder how they are directly affected by the decline of Christianity in the Middle East, Moore warned that if action is not taken to stop ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the threat will ultimately reach the American homeland.
"If we don't deal with it there, we will face it here. It is not a matter of whether or not we should be involved. It is a matter of where we are going to have to be involved," Moore contends.
Moore adds that there is evidence that ISIS ideology has already been adopted by many in the U.S.
"One of the points I make in the book is that ISIS is already at work in different ways in every developed country in the world, or ISIS sympathizers. They may not be attached to the organization but they sympathize with it," he notes. "Here in the United States of America for instance, one university studied Arabic language tweets and one out of five Arabic language tweets in the United States that mention ISIS were in support of ISIS. Google openly announced that their censoring apparatus can't keep up with the amount of jihadist propaganda showing up on the internet everyday."
Defying ISIS available here
