It’s December 1 and now legal to decorate and play Christmas music.
I help lead a ministry at our fellowship called “Alpha” and, as the emcee, I am tasked with telling a joke each week that ties in with the topic. Last night was our last session and the topic was “The Church.” Here’s the joke:
A mother goes into her son’s room one Sunday morning to get him up for church.
“Rise and shine! It’s time to get up for church!”
Pulling the pillow over his head, he groans and says, “I’m not going to church!”
“Why not?” asks mom.
“Two reasons,” he responds. “First, they don’t like me; and second, I don’t like them. I’m not going!”
His mother replies, “I’ll give you two reasons why you should go. First, you’re 54-years-old. And second — you’re the pastor!”
That’s funny, but what’s not funny is the amount of anti-Christian hatred that’s rising in Europe and in the West, generally.
A new report is documenting a drastic rise in anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe. The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) published its annual report last week, detailing a 44% increase over the course of 2022 in social hostility towards and violent attacks against Christians as well as acts of vandalism and desecration against churches.
According to the report, 748 anti-Christian hate crimes were committed in Europe last year, 38 of which were violent physical attacks and three of which were murders. Arson attacks were also more common than in years past and churches were targeted for firebombings and vandalism, especially in France and Germany. In fact, arson attacks nearly doubled over the course of one year, rising from 60 attacks in 2021 to 106 in 2022.
When you don’t believe in God and reject the Judeo-Christian values that used to sustain this country, they become relics that are in the way of “progress” and must be removed. It’s happened before.
The OIDAC Europe report noted that “there had been a surge of clear extremism-motivated attacks.” The majority of these attacks were committed by groups with far-left, satanic, Islamic, feminist, or LGBT affiliations. In comments to The Washington Stand, Irish Freedom Party founder and president Hermann Kelly said, “The increase in the number of anti-Christian hate crimes is truly shocking in a supposedly Christian continent. The presence of many millions of the Islamic faith which preaches hatred, domination, and annihilation of all non-Muslims has no doubt added greatly to the rise in anti-Christian violence.”
“A supposedly Christian continent.” I’ve got news for you. Just like in the United States, Europe only bears a light resemblance to what was once a robust Christian faith that saturated it’s domain. These are Christians in name only. Not for every single person, mind you, but the culture is no longer “Christian” in the same way it was historically.
As Bob McManus writes in The New York Post,
It has correctly been noted that Israel stands today in the same space it occupied millennia ago — with its language, customs and culture fundamentally intact.
If that’s not authenticity — if that’s not legitimacy — then nothing is.
Moreover, Israel endures as the wells-spring of Western civilization itself — for all its warts and wrinkles, the Judeo-Christian ethic has produced the freest, most enviable culture in human history.
That’s what is at issue when the Palestinian flags came out Wednesday.
They represented an assault by advocates of a dark, theocratic worldview on a particular American institution, sure — but also on Western values generally.
They want to tear down our democracy, our economy, our very way of life.
The point of his essay is that the Palestinian flags being raised in protest against Israel’s war against Hamas is only the superficial facet of the protest. The deeper agitprop is about destroying the Western world as we understand it.
That’s the goal of all these groups banding together in protest against Christians.
The hostility against followers of Jesus will eventually arrive here, and in some ways, it already has. Christians should be thinking of how to prepare for the inevitable persecution that all followers of Christ will face … especiallly in the United States.
Have a good weekend.