This address was given in 2024 to the North Atlantic Polemics Conference and is published here to celebrate NAPC 2026, which is happening this week!
GOD willing, I am going to talk about the Enlightenment as a defining dynamic of the Church’s relations and interactions with the Umma. The Church in the West and around the world interacts with the Muslim community, the Umma, within a paradigmatic context, which we call the Enlightenment; which is the backdrop in which we operate, whose reality, in framing our thinking, is oft not considered; and to which much of the Church is not alive to its influence.
We must go way back and start with the emergence of the Enlightenment. The gentle breezes of which announced themselves with the works of people like:
- John Locke (Christian) (1632–1704): Locke argued for the idea of natural rights and was the father of liberal political ideology. The idea of inherent rights that cannot be taken away by governments. He also advocated reason & empirical observation in human knowledge.
- Montesquieu (heretic) (1689–1755): Montesquieu argued for the separation of powers & limited government, separating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to prevent tyranny
- Voltaire (heretic) (1694–1778): Voltaire argued for free speech, religious tolerance, the use of reason and empirical observation, and was scathing of religious dogmatism.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (heretic) (1712–1778): Rousseau argued for the idea of individualism and the social contract between state and citizen. He argued for democratic government to counter society’s corrupting influence.
- Immanuel Kant (heretic) (1724–1804): Kant argued that true knowledge was based on experience and reason, but with limits to both, and that reason was the basis of morality, as well as advocating individual autonomy and human dignity.
- Adam Smith (heretic) (1723–1790): Smith argued for free markets, specialization, and division of labour, and argued that these economic principles were the key to wealth and prosperity.
Others like Isaac Newton, Hume, René Descartes, and more besides led to a re-forming of the world along liberal lines, which was pretty much established by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The Enlightenment was born out of the trauma of the wars of the Reformation period, a Christian civil war which raged between 1517 and 1648 in which Europe and its Christian consensus in the West was torn to pieces; and resulted in nearly 30 years of continuous war at one point and led to deaths of an estimated eight million people. The distraction of huge resources that could have been spent pushing back Islamist jihadis, which might have saved Constantinople and liberated Jerusalem! The despair of those wars led people to look for a way to stop the fighting. They literally had to re-invent, as it were, civilization to do that; the first cornerstone of this was the birth of the nation-state through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, at which it was agreed that whatever the religion of the monarch was, the religion of the country, and no one would try to change it by force; thus, foreshadowing religious tolerance. This raised the question of how to understand this new reality in a Christian way, which quickly gave birth to a political discourse that would later give rise to liberalism.
Central to liberal thought was a new set of values: tolerance became an important value so that Protestants would tolerate Catholics and Catholics would tolerate Protestants, and both groups would tolerate Jews, and all could live side by side as citizens in the newly emergent states. Individuality also emerged as an important concept within the Enlightenment, which has its antecedents within the Christian faith but became more emphasized within the contractual nature of citizen and state. We see this new way of thinking erupt violently upon the world state in two revolutions, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, in which religious pluralism and freedom from religion as the loci and focus of identity were seen as important values, and so the state became secular. The idea was that religion was not the basis and locus of societal organization, but the nation state was, and the nation itself would be religiously plural and free from religious influence. Religion was moved culturally to a private matter and was seen as a low-intensity activity – low heat; this was to prevent wars of religion, as religious zeal and political religion were seen as a path to conflict! The irony being that new nation states immediately started killing one another for national interests – without scruples from the late 1700 up to the mid 1900; zealotry for the nation state was seen as a noble and good thing, but zealotry in religion was maligned as fanaticism! The wars for the Americas and the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and every nationalistic war that’s ever been fought ever since, including the Crimean War, World War One, World War Two, and so on and so forth.
These moves were accompanied by a scientific revolution, which undermined the place of revelation in our way of making sense of the world, and the industrial revolution, which tore up the social rhythms of life as people moved into the new emerging cities. A shift occurred in culture to a ‘this world’, ‘this life’ attitude; along with a materialistic outlook on the world which became systemic. Civilisational changes seem to take around 400 years from their start to their finish; and the sense of the collapse of Christianity in the West has only really become established from around the 1960s. The long retreat of the Christian faith as it roared backward, leaving eddies in its wake, meant that political ideologies like liberalism, and its bastard children, communism, fascism and Nazism, humanism, and now environmentalism, have attempted to take its place. The ideologies went on to overlay the conflicts of the nations as to what should guide them!
Essentially, this has meant that by the time that large Muslim immigration occurred into the Western world, from around 1945, the Church had already evacuated much of the thinking of the Western mind. The Christian worldview had already been heavily syncretized with this new philosophy and diluted by the values and beliefs of this new paradigm. Therefore, we as Christians need to be far more contentious and robust apologetically and polemically, not just with Islam – but with the liberal Enlightenment; this must express itself politically, economically, socially and culturally.
Just to define these terms quickly for us:
- Politics: Any relationship in which power, authority, or influence is conspicuously at play.
- Economics: Our commercial activity.
- Socially: Any kind of institution or organization, formal or informal, that operates within society.
- Culture: Expression of values or beliefs through customs, traditions, or arts.
Christians need to be far more forceful, far more confident, far more confrontational, and far more outward-facing in all these spheres. Therefore, Christians must not allow liberals, progressives, Muslims, communists, nationalists, or any other group to define for us or frame for us how we operate in those spheres. We cannot accept anything other than the total rule of Christ in our lives in all these spheres. Therefore, we must define the praxis of our faith in all of these spheres in our own terms and towards our own ends, from our doctrines and values. In other words, we need to reassess whether we’re happy with the Enlightenment, whether we’re happy with the settlement that has emerged since the Enlightenment, and whether, actually, as Christians, we need to revisit some of those questions that for a long time have been settled questions amongst us.
Christians, for their part, have absorbed into their worldview many of the settlements of the Enlightenment, which we assume as normative. We don’t even think to question the nation state, individualism, secularism, and so on. Indeed, some Christians express the faith in those terms. I’m willing to bet a large part of you have bought into those ideas to some degree, and you would seek to defend those ideas if challenged to abandon them. But I wonder whether you’ve sat down and interrogated whether those ideas are actually intrinsically Christian. And if they’re not, why are you holding on to them? Why defend them?
The irony is, of course, some of those idea emerged directly as a result of the Reformation, so when Luther sent out his appeal to the German nobility, the Reformation restructured how a person in the West could think of themselves as being Christian – in the sense that you could be a more German Christian, or an English Christian, or a French Christian, with a politics to match, divorcing, for instance, loyalty to Rome from politics (which was always a tenuous proposition anyway). The West recaptured an Eastern Orthodox understanding of national Churches, but without the doctrinal, organizational, and cultural unity. The Baptist idea of adult baptism had a massive impact on the later idea that religion was one choice amongst many in a liberal society. Thus, Reformation ideas played into liberal ideas but not in an authoritative sense, but more as the backdrop from which they emerged. Then, liberal ideas leached into the national Churches, and more recently the Catholic Churches, particularly since Vatican II. I think for this reason, many Christians, sometimes, can’t delineate where the lines of the Enlightenment stop and the Christian faith begins, and vice versa.
I put it to you, Church, that as Christians, we’ve lost a lot of our own identity since the emergence of the Enlightenment, particularly in the public space. Due to the fruits of the Enlightenment, such as nationalism, individualism, secularism, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of rationalism and empiricism, the emergence of the Religion of Humanity, and, in recent years, the cult of self, Christians have lost a lot of the Christian worldview and are unable to properly distinguish between what is Christian and what is not. To put it succinctly, we are looking at the world not through a Christian prism but a liberal one, while thinking it’s Christian!
Now the religion of humanity is a religion that emphasizes everything that is in common amongst humans, and it dilutes and whitewashes that which distinguishes difference, and frames it all within a Western rationalized worldview, whereas Christianity historically has always been a religion of difference: We were different to the pagan Romans, we were different to the Jews, and we were different to Islam when Islam emerged. So, this begs the question: why are we not different to the liberal world around us? The answer is that in the Enlightenment, all aspects of civilisation serve the state – thus, religion must serve the state as well. This required a muted religion that emphasized commonality over difference that would pick up where the state left off, keep civic tradition, and build a sense of national identity, making good citizens, not good saints. In other words, a non-toxic, non-confrontational, and non-problematic religious force.
Other fruits of the Enlightenment’s liberal secularism are multiculturalism and moral relativism, which are taken as cultural norms; these result in an imbalance in public debate. Christianity must be dethroned for others not to be oppressed; we must reframe society in the terms of the ‘oppressed.’ This is the context in which the Church and Umma relate now! However, the Muslim community has come substantially as a migrant community of countries that didn’t experience the Enlightenment as an eruption from within its own paradigm, but as something outside of them, brought to them through foreign rule. To the Umma, the Enlightenment is an alien matrix into which the Muslim does dawah, compared to the Christian, who, for want of clarity, is trying to preserve the very matrix that works against him. This is our context: the liberal elites offer deference to the Islamic community in both terms of interpretation and criticism, because it is merely seen as a minority ‘culture’.
Liberals talk of Islamophobia, not Christophobia; courts and parliaments presume to lecture Christians in ways they do not dare speak to the Islamic community. There are countless other examples that we can talk about: the Muhammad cartoons vs. the Jerry Springer opera on the BBC, for example, in 2005. The reason for this is that, in the eyes of the liberal, Muslims are equal to an ethnicity; as most Muslims are from other ethnic backgrounds than white British, religion and ethnicity are confused! Criticism of Islam is often confused with racism; some strategically minded Muslims even play on this confusion effectively to silence criticism of Islam – labelling it Islamophobia. Another of the fruits of the Enlightenment is the fascination with the new, the novel, the exotic; this became a cultural trait because of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution – when the Western mind began to worship at the altar of technological innovation – an obsession that is cultivated in capitalism so that we buy the latest thing. This is something, again, which favours the ‘alien’ nature of Islam to the Western perception and again something which some strategically minded Muslims have sought to capitalize upon. That, and the fact that Islamic radicals have pushed Islam violently to the top of the news agenda, means that everyone is aware of Islam. When they consider questions of religion, Christianity appears on the horizon only because of its historical precedence. Islam holds a genuine fascination as the exotic, slightly risky alternative to Western liberalism. The Islamic community also benefits from what’s called the Benedict Option, which is when religious adherents pack into an area to become its dominant group, shaping all aspects of that area according to their own norms. Muslims consolidate geographically and then, by becoming the majority in a geographical space, they start to influence the local economy, the local politics, the local culture, the local feel of the area. We are now seeing that plainly in the UK, and in France, and parts of the Netherlands, and Germany; and this we call Islamization, a direct result of the application of Benedictine-style communities. There’s a great book called The Benedict Option written by Rod Dreher; if you haven’t read it, read it.
The other aspect of this dynamic is that for many of the migrant Muslims who come to Europe, they express Islam as a culture, and that is particularly appealing to a world that’s been ravaged by individualism. Our world is looking for an identity, and identity is expressed through cultural totems. The Church has lost this art to communicate a culture, and when it does, it is often not a Christian culture but a liberal national one. A strong identity is appealing because it presents a sense of belonging and purpose, two things for which the human heart yearns. We must remember that the Islamic religion is just as missionary as ours, and that currently, whereas every mosque is doing dawah, not every Church is doing evangelism. Therefore, I want to suggest it’s more important for every Church to have a full-time evangelist than a full-time worship leader. In the mosques, one will hear a robust critique of liberal secularism and Christianity; very few Christians participate in polemical or apologetical discourse. I want to suggest that any Church that is not teaching apologetics and polemics is actually part of the problem! Islam overall in the UK is of either Barelvi or Deobandi forms; however, Salafi forms of Islam are strongly emerging undercurrents and are disproportionately influential due to their backing by the Saudi state, all of which have a religion of difference stance. Most Christians in the UK are either Church of England or Roman Catholic, both of which have embraced a ‘religion of humanity’ approach; religions of difference eat up religions of humanity for breakfast! The church must develop a robust critique of both Islam and the liberalism of the Enlightenment.
Now, while Christians are also divided institutionally, the Muslim world is just as divided – it has just as many sects and groups, and they are just as competitive. However, the popular culture of the Western world does not see the divisions of the Umma. The world only sees the Sunni–Shia divide because of Iraq. Some may even be aware of the Sufi and Ahmadiyya, but this is rare. Beyond these, there’s no real knowledge of the divisions outside of specialists. Do you know, for instance, about Barelvi, Deobandi, Ibadi, and Ismaili communities? Do you know they fight, compete, and debate? The world does see, however, our divisions: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Orthodox, and it scandalises them. Our visible divisions cause the world to doubt the faith! I think in response to this, Christians need to return, double down on, and rediscover their full identity as the people of God; being the people of GOD has to be the building point of a common identity amongst Christians, that indeed we are the people of God, the holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people set apart, as it says in 1 Peter 2:9. This should be the loci of our identity; not some nationalistic identity. It should come prior to any denominational identity. Thus, it allows Christians to push a common identity out into the world and find solidarity with one another as the Father’s children, priests, and the holy nation. Too many Christian fellowships, particularly in the more ancient churches, tend to follow a kind of civic religion which is more about ritual, festival, being the keeper of times and rites of passage, of marriages, birth certificates, confirmations, that kind of thing, than they are a living, breathing expression of the people of GOD working for the Kingdom. Some fellowships try to avoid this and fall into the trap of operating like a social club or worse, a business, where people use the fellowship as a supplement to a life oriented around themselves; you tend to see this more in mega churches and Pentecostal churches. Many churches, to avoid either of these pitfalls, turn themselves into an NGO of society, where charity becomes the whole reason for themselves to cohere with one another, such as fellowships that work with the poor, or excluded groups like refugees, for example. These models of Church repeat ad nauseum the same efforts because they are also divided by denominations. All these limited, but valid forms of Church are created by the shortage of resources and time spent amongst believers, and the ‘custom’ that this is how you are supposed to do Church.
Christians feel more comfortable talking about doctrines and values than about political aspirations; and I imagine even the very suggestion that we should talk about political aspirations makes some of you in this room feel reticent. However, like night follows day, it follows that if we genuinely are a people, then we genuinely have political concerns. Every real community has political concerns by the fact that it exists. Any group with values, any group with beliefs has this world’s political concerns. Politics is simply where power, authority, and influence are conspicuously at play; this must be negotiated through your values and beliefs. I forget which church father said it, but he said something like: if the Church should give up power, it should give up having families. The choice of what your children are taught is a political question.
So, now that we have set the context, let’s look at some of what our response should be to this equally zealously missionary community. How should Christians respond to efforts of Islamization in all its forms? The first challenge is one of attitude: Christians need to embody fully and completely and as publicly as possible all that our faith teaches, in terms of its doctrines, values, ethics, including customs and traditions, as a culture in society. Secondly, we need to collectively rediscover our history and our telling of that history, because history frames public debate. We face a fundamental problem in that a lot of Christians don’t know the history of the Church, which means others are framing the present for Christians. Thirdly, we need to express the fullness of our faith as a political, social, economic, and cultural project; an aspiration for a new Christendom. Fourthly, we need to cultivate a spirituality that is comfortable with that conflict; we should not retreat from that conflict, and we should demand and fight for the same spaces in public life as everyone else; we should claim territory in every sense of the term, without accepting no as an answer. Fifthly, stand up to those that seek to tell us that we can’t and otherwise try to hinder us. Sixthly, we should cultivate a spirituality of martyrdom and suffering for the causes of the Church by drawing on the stories of previous martyrs and the confessors and champions of the faith. The Christian world has not always been this conflict-averse; it has not always been so limp-wristed, and it is only so because comfortable Christian leaders do not want to live uncomfortable lives, and braver leaders lack imagination and inspiration. We must rediscover the heroism of martyrdom, and when we rediscover the heroism of the confessor, and those who have suffered for the faith, and we celebrate those things as our Lord commanded us to do; we will have a much more seriously minded Church able to advance in the world; and an advancing and confident Church fills the world with disquiet and unease! As a norm.
We need to consider the challenges faced by the body of Christ in the West as our churchianity takes shape. What are those challenges? Well, the churches are in a state of demographic collapse; we are simply not having children, we are not creating families! We are a house divided against ourselves, and we are too spread out to maintain a grip on our own institutions. We lack significant impact in our society for the same reason. We are facing increased discrimination in the West and even the first hints of the persecution faced by Christians in other parts of the world. A more Muscular Christianity would address those issues head-on and do what is necessary to tackle them, organizing the people of GOD accordingly. I believe there is one move we could make sociologically to address many of those challenges at once, and that is to adopt a Benedict Option form of doing Church. The Benedict Option is when Christians move into an area geographically by the thousands; this results in the people of GOD being a geographic majority, which inevitably leads to an increase in our influence on the local economy and the school education boards as our children fill the schools. The people of GOD become the ones that get recruited into the local police, thus shaping policing. The people of GOD then vote for their own to the local and national government. The people of GOD then increase both their stake in and influence over the world around them. We would create a more Christianized society, one that is more open to the gospel. The Benedict community is the one move that, as Christians, we can make to address a lot of the real issues all at once. It’s not a silver bullet, but it will be a great help. The Benedict Option allows for better and easier organization and resourcing as well as better communication. When you only have to walk ten minutes down the road, rather than travel across the city to a meeting point, it becomes easier to get things done, and you can spend more time doing it! The Benedict Option allows for better networking and cross-pollination of good ideas and practices. It will also profoundly challenge the Christians taking this option to grow in holiness and the practice of the faith.
How, as Christians, can we pull together? We need to build greater unity in common Christian causes, such as being pro-life, being pro-family, being pro-evangelism, being pro-the persecuted church; and if you agree, then you can see there is clearly a Christian political consensus shared by all Christians for the church to pursue. I’m baffled by Christians who want accommodation rather than Christianisation! Why don’t we want to see every mosque converted into a church? Why don’t we want to see everyone baptized? Why do we whisper this aspiration with a sense of embarrassment? Why? Why are so many Christians instead aspiring for the complete triumph of the church over all instead of working towards some kind of accommodation? We should stand up and be seen defending the persecuted Church; yet many Christians can barely raise a whimper! Why are we not doing that more, with more gusto, and with much more vigor? The reason, I suspect, is that the church is the captive of the fears of comfortable Christians, with too much to lose and too much invested in the current system! No! These are our brothers and sisters! If your family was being attacked, are you somehow wrong because you decide to speak up for your family or act in their best interest? Christians need to lose some of their reticence for engaging in controversial issues. We need to have far greater solidarity with one another than anyone else in the world. We need to develop our own criticism of liberalism and Islamization. We need to become deliberate about creating families and consciously abandon the Hollywood-esque romantic model of chance encounters in ungodly settings. That’s not even remotely Christian. We must aspire to create an alternative society, an alternative civilisational project. The average age of a Christian in the UK is 51; the average age of a Muslim is 27; and the average age of the wider population is 41; what went wrong, Church? Why have we stopped having children when we are supposed to be pro-family and pro-life? The issue is, we have turned relationships within the churches into an in-fellowship thing, limiting options, and created a culture that is embarrassed about finding a partner, adopting the models of the world to do so!
The Church should not limit its political engagement to influence alone, as some exegetes are inclined to do, but rather to possess and wield authority and power as well. Christ said to build a city on a hill! The only effective route to all three forms of political engagement is ‘to build a city’ – to build Benedictine-style communities. St. Benedict modelled the idea of building these alternative societies amongst the Arian and pagan kingdoms; they served as light in the darkness, as a radical embodiment of Christian life; this led to the Christianisation of Europe. Our current models of Church are no longer working effectively because they are not radical; with fewer and older Christians, there is not the skill set to make them work.
The Church must face up to the obvious reality that our Churches are not full and have little prospect of being so if things continue the same; and thus, since the faith cannot be at fault, it must be our Churchianity that is simply not working. Churches are closing, and the Christian population is reducing. We have misapplied the truths of our Lord to our context; our Churchianity is at fault! We need, therefore, to adopt different ways of doing Church and abandon ways that are not working.
If we believe that Christ’s teachings are the truth, then we must be faithful to them; this is the measure of success for the Christian, not numbers. However, numbers still do count and should not simply be dismissed as if they are completely unimportant. The traditional Church models are failing because there are too few Christians to run those kinds of Churches, and they fall into terminal decline or abandon the faith; to allow more people to participate, the Benedict Option avoids both pitfalls.
Now, changing gears slightly, I want to address directly those who insist we should double down on liberal secularism. You are poor students of history! Christianity, and the Church, has historically always done better, advanced further and deeper when it has been backed by the state, not when the state has been indifferent to it! Currently, the Church has no backers. Those who want to double down on secularism ignore the consistent pattern of secularism’s inability to stop forces of Islamization. Secularism has failed in Nigeria, France, America, Sweden, India, Pakistan, and Turkey, all of which have seen the success of religious ideologies over secularism, and all of which have seen the progress of Islamization. We should not keep backing failure – we need to find and tread out another path. Western secularism, because of its origins, only sees political Christianity as a threat; any other form of political religion it mischaracterizes as ‘cultures’ to be tolerated! Christians must recognize secularism is not going to protect us!
GOD builds from the bottom up, and the Christendom of old lies now in ruins. We as Christians must once again begin the process of building a new Christendom. We must think generationally and raise our children to think in terms of generations. Our role is to begin to dig out the foundations and clear away the rubble of the last Christendom, so that the next can lay the foundations. We must build from the bottom up, and new Benedictine-style communities are going to be essential to that building; should the Islamists gain the upper hand, the preservation of the Church. We must prepare now for what might come if the worst horizon becomes the direction of travel; then the Church should be ready for that. We must found new Christian communities deliberately where Christians are the majority. Paul sought to convert King Agrippa and Caesar himself; therefore, it is legitimate for Christians to seek positions of authority and power, and to rule the state. Influence is the default axiom of political relations, but we are not bound to never progress beyond that.
Where the Church has successfully converted the social and political elites, the conversion of society has followed; this is a strategy the Church, bafflingly, has seemingly abandoned in these latter days, settling for social work for the homeless instead. Noble as that is, it is not going to lead to the conversion of society as a whole. Most people are sheep; we must ensure – we are the shepherds. Today’s kings are the celebrities and political class, such as the Bushes, the Clintons, and the Kennedys.
The Church must once again learn how to use sociology to help guide its evangelistic strategy, and use the political arts for the benefit of the Church and the advancement of the Kingdom. Consolidation is the theme of our current age; the Church must consolidate its resources, energies, time, and efforts, and combine this consolidation with militant, targeted evangelism! The Benedictine communities we create must evangelise within themselves to those not yet Christian, and along the edges of its existence to those outside of the community. If we control the schools and populate the schools, the teachers cannot force LGBTQ ideology on our children any more than an Islamist can impose Islam.
The concern for evangelism often distorts people’s thinking about these questions and, ironically, leads to far less successful evangelism. Nothing about this idea reduces a concern for evangelism or an ability to evangelise. The original monasteries were evangelistic and were established as missionary outposts. One of the biggest problems the Church faces is poor community, which contributes significantly to poor discipleship. Programs and Sunday sermons do not make disciples; people make good disciples of other people. It’s all about the human connectedness of the community, which cannot be facilitated if your average contact time with other Christians is five or fewer hours a week. The creation and support of families is essential to good discipleship, as most spiritual formation happens at home, and families would be better supported if they lived in a wider Christian context, not least because they can connect with other Christian families.
There is a massive drop-off amongst Christian children between the ages of 13–18; not because Christianity cannot be attractive, but because our Churchianity looks indistinguishable from the world, but is an unattractive version of it. We need to face this fact head-on and not keep doing things the old conservative way, because we think that is what we must do – because that is how you do church, and because that is all we know. Why defend failure – why keep trying to flog a dead horse? There are successful models of youth retention we can learn from in the Body of Christ: the Amish have a 90 percent retention rate of their youth; Muslims also have a high retention rate. Both of these communities create a cost for apostasy and adopt ways of life which make the ’English’ alien to their children. We balk at those ideas only because of liberalism. The model of letting our children grow up in non-Christian cultures is costing us the apostasy of most of our children. Do you not have a demographic blind spot in your church between 13–24, in your church? Do a head count in this room, or in your church. You will see I am not wrong! We cannot keep defending a way of doing Church that loses most of our youth to the world.
The discussion around authentic faith also distorts these discussions. Our current models have not stopped at all the presence of cultural Christians amongst us, but it is clear that in former times when Christianity was the paradigm, there was a greater concern for the things of GOD. Since we will have cultural Christians in either case, it is better to have faux Christians in a presumed Christian state in which it is socially advantageous to side with the Church, as there will be more actual Christians in such a society. In such a context, even faux Christians will contribute to the work of the Church at some level and in some way. Better that than our current situation in which there are insincere Christians still, and the whole of society is structured against the Kingdom of our GOD.
Most Churches are only kidding themselves when they say they are being an alternative society, because I do not know of any society in which the contact time of its members is around five hours a week. That is not a society; that is a club! Lots of Christians are defeatist about much of this, because they lack both ambition and imagination. So, for them, they see no way forward or no means to make progress, and because the progress will not deliver the goods in their lifetime, they don’t even try. But that is not how you build cathedrals; between the foundations being laid and the roof being put on, and the interior being finalized, can be centuries! That is how we must think!
We must awaken within our brothers and sisters a sense that we are a distinct and different people to the nations around us, and that we too, as the people of GOD, also have political concerns; also have political aspirations; and also have political objectives, that emerge from a clear understanding of our doctrine and values. We must build, accordingly, Benedictine-style communities to allow for easier building of such a political vision of the Kingdom of GOD, affecting the politics, economics, and culture of a society in a local area; a truly alternative society.
Now, in terms of our current context and situation, and particularly amongst Muslim witnesses, we need to evangelize and angle our evangelism to those who are already partially out of Islam or on the peripheries of the Muslim community, because some aspect of their Muslim life has failed, and they are not integrated into the heart of their own community. This, however, comes with a cost, as we will be bringing into the church those with a higher level of social dysfunction into our fellowships, which we will then need to address through discipleship. Rarely do I see Churches, attempt to address social dysfunction in their members, despite how this can, if left, contribute to bringing down a fellowship or harming it.
