Why are Christians leaving for Islam?

I recently posted a clip about the thousands of Christians who leave the faith to become Muslims, which drew a response that disturbed me almost as much as the loss itself. Most people basically said, “good riddance.” If they were truly Christians, some argued, they would never have left.

That response contains a theological truth about being truly born again, but it also carries a dangerous temptation. It allows the Church to explain every departure by looking only at the person who left and never at the community he or she left behind. Scripture does not permit that kind of self-exoneration. Before we ask what has happened to America, we should be willing to ask what has happened to the Church.

That question matters because America’s crisis is not merely political. A culture cannot be politically restored to virtues its people have spiritually abandoned. Government can restrain evil. It can protect borders, punish crime, defend religious liberty, and preserve public order. It cannot create holiness. It cannot regenerate the human heart.

The Old Testament repeatedly shows what happens when moral rebellion becomes social order. Israel abandons God, idolatry spreads, disorder follows, enemies prevail, the people cry out, and deliverance comes only after they return to Him. Judges closes with the chilling diagnosis that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Before Israel lost its security, it lost its obedience.

America is not ancient Israel, and Christians should be cautious about assigning a specific act of divine judgment to every national calamity. Yet the moral principle is not difficult to see. Paul writes that “whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” Romans 1 describes judgment in an even more unsettling way — God “gave them over.” Sometimes judgment is not a thunderbolt from Heaven. Sometimes it is God allowing human beings to experience the consequences of the autonomy they demanded.

This should change the way Christians think about Islam in the West. The theological and political challenges posed by Islam are real. I have spent much of my adult life speaking out against them, and as a former Muslim, I have no interest in minimizing the profound differences between Islam and Christianity. Sharia, persecution, religious liberty, immigration, and Islamist political movements require serious public debate and response.

Yet Islam in the West also exposes a deeper question. What happens when a civilization loses confidence in the faith that formed its moral vocabulary?

Christians confronted a version of that question long before us. During the seventh-century Arab conquests, Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, did not view the armies approaching Christian lands only as an external military problem. He interpreted the catastrophe through the spiritual condition of Christians themselves. He writes:

“Thus, not because He loved them [Muslims] did the Lord God give them power to seize the land of the Christians, but because of the lawlessness of the Christians.”  

The invaders were enemies, but Christian sin was part of his explanation for why conquest was possible. His instinct was not passivity. It was repentance. 

That distinction matters. Christians can recognize an abominable external threat, but they also need a healthy dose of introspection.   

First Peter says that judgment begins with the household of God. That should unsettle a Church that is often far more comfortable cataloging the sins of the culture than confronting its own. Where are the fathers discipling their children? Where are the marriages that demonstrate covenant faithfulness? Where is sexual holiness? How did a civilization saturated with churches produce generations increasingly unable to explain what Christianity teaches, much less why it is true?

Those questions are more painful than blaming Washington, Hollywood, or Islam. They will also matter more in shaping our future.

Politics has a legitimate role. Romans 13 assigns government the task of restraining wrongdoing. Christians should care deeply about who governs, what laws are enacted, and whether our constitutional freedoms are preserved. Political disengagement is not a biblical virtue. Political idolatry is not one either.

The government can change the law, but it cannot give a person a new heart. Ezekiel describes God replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Jesus tells Nicodemus that a man must be born again. Paul says that anyone in Christ is a new creation. Legislation can constrain behavior, but only regeneration changes desire.

That is why our response to Islam cannot be driven primarily by contempt for Muslims. Our love for Christ must be greater than our anger at Islam. Jesus never told us to blur theological distinctions or pretend falsehood is truth. He warned us the world would hate us because they hated Him first. However, the greatest commandment is to love God completely and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We are told to pray for those who persecute us. So, the Christian objective cannot simply be fewer Muslims. It must be more disciples of Jesus Christ.

I know the difference personally. There was a time when someone could have looked at me as a Muslim and seen only part of a cultural or ideological problem. Christ saw someone He intended to redeem.

That reality places an uncomfortable burden on Christians. What kind of Christianity do Muslims encounter when they look at the West? If “Christian” civilization appears synonymous with broken families, pornography, consumerism, sexual confusion, and spiritual indifference, Christianity will look less like an alternative to Islam than a religious label attached to secular hedonism.

A serious Christian witness is therefore not peripheral to the cultural battle. It is our most powerful answer to it.

Jesus called His followers the light of the world. Peter instructed Christians to live such honorable lives among unbelievers that their conduct would point people toward God. Paul went further, writing that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God is made known even to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” The Church is not merely one interest group competing for influence. It is supposed to be the visible testimony of what God can do with redeemed human beings.

This is why revival must begin with us. Second Chronicles 7:14 is often invoked as though it were a campaign slogan for national restoration, but the text begins with a far more demanding phrase — “if my people.” The call is first to the people who bear God’s name.

Perhaps we have reversed the biblical order. We want cultural renewal before personal repentance, political victory before spiritual discipline, and national blessing without the costly work of holiness.

Jesus never offered that bargain. He told us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. Christianity was never designed to make believers comfortable enough to preserve a preferred culture. Christ forms a people holy enough to represent Him faithfully, so they transform the culture they inhabit.

The crisis outside the Church should therefore drive us toward revival inside the Church. Fear, anger, and political victory cannot produce what only conviction, repentance, discipleship, and the power of the Holy Spirit can create.

Our hope is not that politics will save Christianity. Our hope is that a revived Christianity can once again transform people, families, and ultimately the culture around them.

The West does not merely need better management of its decline. It needs to remember the God it abandoned.