An evocative inside look into the Evangelical crusade for Muslim hearts.

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

by Haroon Moghul (Religion Dispatches)

I’m the one they’re after. I’m “the enemy,” the believer in the “false idol,” “the darkness” Jesus needs to cast out of America, the reason they’re spending all night in Detroit’s Ford Field, sending prayers over Michigan mosques “like sending special forces into Afghanistan.” And there are thousands of them, come because Pastor Lou Engle asked them to.

Founder of TheCall, Engle warns that an Islamic movement is rising in Dearborn, Michigan—“Ground Zero” for America’s spiritual future (and site of a new TLC reality show, All-American Muslim). When I heard the goals for TheCall Detroit—healing America in a time of crisis, accomplishing racial reconciliation, and (here’s where I come in) bringing Jesus to Muslim hearts—I figured a Muslim in the crowd could be a nice twist.

So I was there with them for hours into the late night and hearing their ex-Muslim speaker ridiculously early in the morning, the undercover Muslim surrounded by tens of thousands beside me, praying for Jesus to invade my heart. My plan was to report from the inside, to talk to the attendees as one among devoted thousands (though probably not revealing my religious background, unless I had to and knew where the exits were).

I’d observe firsthand what goes on at a gathering like this. I’d try to understand how such Christians understand Islam. Lou Engle’s world is alien from my New England roots and New York life. I’d attended churches before, but nothing like this. We need to know where this fear and hate come from, what its intentions are, and who it appeals to.

But as the day approached, Engle’s connections to a network of right-wing activists and political Christians came into focus. From the involvement of US Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin (who has helpfully compared Islam to a diabolical religion), to a Michigan Call coordinator named Rick Warzywak (who believes that Christians should “go back and occupy or take back the land” of American Muslims), to a particularly weird twist on the theme of racial reconciliation (involving sending Detroit’s African-American Muslims, or ex-Muslims, to the Middle East), it was clear that this might be an uncomfortable assignment.

So I shaved my beard down to a goatee. Just in case.

But that anxiety only confirmed the importance of what I was doing. I needed to see this for myself. Americans, and American Muslims especially, need to know how certain interpretations of professedly apolitical Christianity become allied to a far-right agenda of foreign wars and domestic austerity, glorifying the rich while demonizing the poor.

Political Christianity’s treatment of Islam is one of the few points, and perhaps the only point, at which right-wing, political Christianity’s radical agenda is revealed, for its attitude to Islam speaks both to the narrowness of its domestic vision (America for certain Americans) and the aggressiveness of its foreign vision (going abroad to find monstrous Muslims to convert). Don’t let the language of love fool you.

A Pep Rally for Jesus

I was sure I’d be one of very few non-white folks in attendance, yet when the gates opened on Friday afternoon, I was struck by the diversity—and the juvenile vibe. I took my seat close to the stage, surrounded by people of every color, finding it hard to focus because of the pounding Christian rock music shaking the stadium. Folks were on their feet, dancing and swaying. Rather than stick out, I blended in perfectly.

People have tried to compare Islamophobia to old-school racism. And I’ve repeatedly disagreed. We have a tendency to accuse arguments rooted in religion and tradition of reaching back to the past; the truth, however, is much more complicated. As much as religion shapes the world, it is shaped by the world. Even when we invoke the past, we must accommodate the language and conclusions of today. Just fifty years ago, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann would not have been viable candidates. Hell, they wouldn’t have been candidates at all. And so too with TheCall.

The rally formally opened with a Native American band (actually, since they were Canadian, a First Nations band). Everybody seemed into it, on their feet and swaying to the beat. Judging by those first hours, this was worship at the altar of a multicultural Jesus, advertising its many ethnicities, stressing the need for racial reconciliation and forgiveness, encouraging populations pushed apart by suspicion to come together in Jesus’ name. I found it encouraging and I found it worrying.

The diversity was nice. Different languages were spoken on the stage, many different ethnicities were represented. But that diversity could be used to excuse a more subversive intolerance, all the harder to detect for the polyglot multiplicity. It’s not so different from how, since the 1960s, consumer culture has appropriated the language of diversity, and even its attitude, without dealing with its underlying and democratic point. And so we have elite institutions that are ever more racially diverse, who increasingly deploy people of different colors and backgrounds in their advertising and hierarchies, even while social mobility goes into steep decline and the middle class is eviscerated.

I’m sure Engle believes in a Christian movement that transcends race, to reach around the world. Just as I’m sure he’d be greatly pleased by my conversion to his Christianity. But this misses the deeper point, the truly political and partisan nature of TheCall; I saw this as far more than a spiritual exercise in part, I think, because I was forced to process what was happening around me as an outsider. Because, after all, religions are not interchangeable, like different color cars of the same make and model.

Raised in Sunni Muslim tradition, I always experienced worship as the effort to establish an immediate, intimate, and contemplative connection with God; in Sunni mysticism, observing the law is a necessary condition of spirituality. I say this not to establish distance, or to enforce division, but to draw our attention to how religion can be either a source of strength or a source of harm. To make a long point short, Islam is a religion of moral law; when the institutions that produce its legal scholars (who are, ideally, also spiritual authorities) are subverted, undercut, or simply insufficiently rigorous, the resulting interpretations of law become irrelevant—or dangerous.

Keeping that in mind, I found TheCall was immediately shocking.

A friend called a few hours in, concerned that I might be kidnapped (I’m sure he was joking—I hope), and asked what I made of the whole thing. And the first thing that came to mind was: “It’s like a pep rally for Jesus.”

So that Jesus Might Invade Their Dreams

Even when there were speakers, they were bookended by passionate music, deeply emotional calls to prayer, folks spontaneously joining hands and forming prayer circles, turning not to established rituals but whatever the moment led them to. A man behind me started speaking in tongues, and within a few hours, people were fainting and falling to the ground. I had never experienced anything like it.

But with all the transport out of and away from yourself, there was little time to digest what the speakers were saying, little time to think through the implications of their exhortations. In fairness, that didn’t seem to be a problem right away. As I said, the first few hours seemed to be a public relations dream come true; I heard little overtly anti-Muslim sentiment (and no mention of homosexuality).

A look at the program confirmed why. The section titled “Dearborn Awakening” was dumped in dead time, 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. Since Dearborn is home to many Arabs and Muslims, as well as one of the largest mosques in America (a Twelver Shi’a mosque, incidentally), I knew this must be the part of TheCall that would confront Islam. Likely the organizers wanted to shift the more controversial stuff to when nobody would be paying attention; according to Rachel Maddow, this might also have been in the hope that, with Michigan Muslims asleep, Jesus might invade their dreams.

Engle underestimated this Muslim’s desire to see through the subterfuge.

I left Ford Field after five hours, frankly exhausted by the emotional commitment requested by TheCall. A friend took me to an Arab restaurant, where all the waitresses wore hijab. That, and seeing Arabic signs and advertisements everywhere, only fifteen minutes from Ford Field, was pleasingly jarring (and strategically reassuring: In case things turned ugly, I knew where to run, and had a reasonable sense of how fast).

I explained to one of the friendly, all-American, veiled waitresses what I was doing in Dearborn. She seemed skeptical. So I shared TheCall’s promotional literature, and she was stunned. This poor girl hadn’t realized she was part of any “Islamic movement in America” (in America, but not “American”). That night, I spoke to other Muslims about TheCall. They were either deeply concerned or just shrugged it off. As of Friday night, I would’ve been with the second group.

At midnight, I was back in my hotel, stuffed full of shish tawouk, Arab pastries, and chai. I took a two-hour nap, and then went back for more.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood used to have a popular slogan: “Islam is the solution” (Islam huwa al-hall). “Jesus is the answer” is the same kind of sloganeering. I’m not just saying that because I know it would drive Engle nuts. It is an overly and therefore problematically easy answer to some very knotty problems. And hearing Engle insist on this point brought me back to the very format of TheCall, which rushes through speakers, condenses their points, and squishes them between loud music and unreflectively emotional appeals. There’s little time to ponder what it means for America if only Jesus can solve our problems.

In an introduction found in the event program, Engle wrote:

Revolution is in the air. But the revolution that is needed is not a revolution of snarling protesters or angry mobs; it’s a Jesus revolution, a revolution of forgiveness, racial reconciliation, compassion.

It’s one thing if he genuinely disavowed politics, but time and time again his supposedly apolitical efforts have an undeniable political goal. In fact TheCall is deeply and suspiciously political, and—at least here he is honest—revolutionary. It seeks to heal America by making a different America in its place, one whose moral conversation displaces its political discourse, one whose reference point is Jesus. Rick Perry’s prayer rally The Response was modeled on Engle’s interpretation of the solemn assembly described in Joel 2, which in turn shaped TheCall. Engle himself has traveled to Sacramento, Washington, and Kampala to praise efforts to restrict the rights of LGBT people and has led elected Republicans in a prayer session that predicted God would punish America for passing health care reform.

But most relevant here was the vacuity of the content: The solution to America’s great crisis was prayer, from start to end, and apparently little else. Any religiosity that encourages worship without broader social engagement—non-Christians were barely acknowledged over the course of an event designed to heal America’s profound crisis—while allying with those who seek to do away with much of our government is anything but apolitical. It just doesn’t have the courage to admit it.

Engle argues that America is in crisis. So do a lot of folks. But then he argues that the only way out is through Jesus. Undoubtedly every political and social crisis has a moral dimension, though to admit that means little. What matters more is to think this logic through: How will we solve political and social crises if we read them through religious lenses? While a universalized, transnational Christianity has its appeal, it doesn’t leave much room for other Americans—or America as a political project. The more I listened to Engle diagnosing America’s problems, the more I thought of old-school Islamists.

Moozlums Allergic To Jesus

Of course, I had come to hear what TheCall would say about Muslims. Engle’s disavowal of any political agenda is, on this point, either evidence of duplicity or naiveté. We are at war in numerous Muslim-majority countries, facing an America in fiscal crisis, fighting a magnificently costly war on terrorism with no defined end, and watching a movement to ban Shari’ah law to save the Constitution while our civil liberties are increasingly challenged. There is no way that any conversation about Islam in America cannot have political implications. Long story short, I’m glad I was wide awake and raptly attentive at 3 a.m.

“Dearborn Awakening” began with a preacher who could not pronounce “Muslim.” He seemed to think it was “Mooz-lum.” I wanted to raise my hand to correct him, but everyone else had his or her hands raised (for different reasons). In the singing, one of the chorus lines was “Gather the remnants/among the Muslims”—a reference to the remnant of Christians remaining during the Tribulation who will evangelize the non-Christians so they will be saved before Jesus’ return. Another speaker clued us in on Jesus’ attitude to the Muslims: “You love them, and there’s nothing they can do about that.” Leave it to TheCall to make love sound alarming, even terrifying.

But the best was yet to come, and his name was Kamal.

Kamal was the reason we were here (and awake). I didn’t know who Kamal was, and would only later learn his identity, although while he was speaking, I suspected he was a fraud. (I’m not the only one who finds Kamal Saleem dubious). Kamal introduced himself as an ex-terrorist, which usually makes me wonder, considering how others have made lucrative careers profiting from ignorance, paranoia, and naïveté. (Imagine how much money I could make as a “former Muslim” on the incestuous right-wing circuit. I’m imagining it right now, and am mildly depressed.)

I’m not saying Kamal Saleem is definitely a fraud; it may simply be that he was raised by one of the dumbest Muslim families in the world.

Kamal claimed that he was raised in “jihad” in Lebanon, and kindly shared the implications with an audience that knew no better. For example, he said, when a Muslim’s blood is first shed in the path of God, he becomes a Messiah. (Unfortunately for Kamal, there is only one Messiah in Islam, and it’s Jesus—who, to take the previous speaker’s logic to its conclusion, loves us even if Lou Engle doesn’t want him to.) Kamal then told us that Islam teaches that there is only one way to go to heaven, and that is war. In fact, he shared many “facts,” the full effect of which was to convince the audience that Islam is purely demonic. Indeed, numerous references were made to “the darkness,” “the enemy,” and “false idols,” oblique enough to avoid outright outrage, but obvious enough to anyone more than half awake.

Stressing his Muslim credentials, Kamal said that one of his uncles was “the holiest of holies,” the Muslim Pope. There is no Muslim Pope, though to be fair, Kamal’s uncle might just have been lying to the poor boy. Kamal then told us that he was recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood and the PLO (a secular organization) and went on his first mission into Israel—we’re assuming that this was a military operation—at the age of seven. At the age of eight, he went on his second mission. Years later, when he first met Christians in America, Kamal was repulsed. His initial reaction was: “I’m allergic to Jesus.” (The audience loved this part.) Unfortunately for the supposed former Muslim, nobody taught Kamal that a Muslim who does not honor Jesus is by the consensus of every school in Islam not a Muslim.

Kamal then turned his sharp mind to theology, and distinguished the Muslim concept of God from the Christian, arguing that what Muslims believe in is a false idol. Christians, on the other hand, believe in the true God of love. Nobody told Kamal that one of Islam’s ninety-nine names of God is al-Wadud, the Loving, and that many other names express compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. Pretty much everything Kamal praised about the “Christian” God, short of the Trinity, could easily square with Islam’s understanding of the Divine: God is loving, forgiving, merciful, and personally concerned with us. Kamal closed with his conversion story, and a reminder that since converting, Saudi Arabia, the PLO, and the Muslim Brotherhood had all put a price on his head.

All the friendly diversity from Friday night, the warm and smiley openness, had vanished. Love and freedom were convenient catchphrases justifying the identification of nearly one-quarter of humanity with the demonic. It’s one thing to say that you’d like Muslims to convert to Christianity. Fair enough. Many Muslims want Christians to convert to Islam. It’s another thing to so brazenly misrepresent Islam. Conflicts in the past could be safely broached, but when it came to today’s war on terror, the disingenuousness and ill-spiritedness of choosing a former Muslim with the worst possible perspective on Islam revealed Engle’s agenda and its overlap with fearmongering Islamophobes.

After Kamal, there was mostly prayer and music, and prayerful music, until 6 a.m., at which time the first prayer of the day came in (I prayed at the hotel, just to be safe). Afterwards I took a long nap and came back to TheCall by late morning. But by then much had changed. Ford Field, which at best was half full, was empty and dulled. And it was hard to talk to people. Folks were friendly, but rarely chatty—though to do them justice, most of them were fasting, and probably hadn’t slept the night. The conversations I had with participants and performers were generally rushed. I didn’t want to be too obvious by raising the topic of Islam, and so it never came up.

Meanness of Spirit

Even back at the hotel, I didn’t get much traction. Most folks focused on the intensity of the experience, although my coming all the way from New York intrigued some. While taking a shower on Sunday morning, I heard a man in the room next door passionately scream Jesus’ name, but on reflection, that might have been something else entirely. There wasn’t much else to do, and I wanted the other side of the story. Saturday afternoon, I headed for Dearborn’s giant mosque, the Islamic Center of America, where I spent an hour asking the folks I met what they thought about TheCall. One activist noted that he hadn’t made any initiative to reach out to Engle; as an African American, he noted, he wouldn’t reach out to David Duke. For him, Engle was another piece of the Islamophobia puzzle.

After praying at sundown—the first time, incidentally, I’ve prayed in a Twelver Shi’a mosque (this trip was full of new religious experiences)—I visited a mosque in Rochester Hills, this one mostly South Asian and Sunni, where I was also able to get some local Muslims’ reactions to TheCall. There was of course concern, and some surprise. Many had heard, but many had not. More of the Muslims were more interested in hearing what it was like to be there. I’d live-tweeted TheCall and issued far too many Facebook updates, so some looked for clarification or explanation of certain points. I went back to the hotel by midnight and fell asleep fast, and didn’t begin to reflect on the whole experience until Sunday morning.

I was naturally disheartened, considering that the participants probably thought Kamal Saleem represented Islam. But on the drive to the airport that disappointment lifted. America is in crisis, as Engle warned, but its solution can be intimated in the popular energy that has animated engagement from Wisconsin to Wall Street to Tahrir—on the way to the airport, I drove past Occupy Detroit.

Our imaginations are once more open, as we consider the incompatibilities of unchecked capital and genuine democracy. In this time of reconstructing the way our world works, a polarizing and exclusive religious vision is not particularly relevant. America is also inescapably and increasingly diverse, and its domestic and foreign policy requires finding a method of engagement with difference that is reasonable and respectful.

But there is a more inescapable truth about Engle’s “Dearborn Awakening.” He chose a speaker who lied, obfuscated, and confused. Should any of the participants want to learn more about Islam, if even to bring Jesus to Muslims, they have already heard the worst of the worst. And they’ll quickly find out that Islam is very different from what they were told it is. All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud.

As much as TheCall prayed for “Jesus to cover Dearborn in light, and cast out the darkness,” Kamal Saleem was the one speaking in the dead of night. Engle should pay more attention to his own moralizing etiology of America’s crisis. Democracy, like a free-market economy, operates on trust, and when that trust is lost, it is very hard to recover. The relationship of the faithful with their leaders is much the same. Those many thousands who were clearly lied to on Saturday morning will find out. Perhaps not immediately. But eventually. And then they’ll begin to wonder what else was a lie.

Be careful, Lou Engle.

Lou Engle wants to convert Muslims by invading their dreams, I guess that beats literally invading their countries. (hat tip: M)

Detroit prayer rally aims to convert Muslims

An evangelical group known a The Call, headed by Lou Engle, is planning a prayer rally at Ford Field in Detroit in Nov. 11 with the goal of converting Muslims before they turn Michigan into an Islamic state.

In a Youtube video, Engle and another pastor, Rick Joyner, say that the event will use prayer to send dreams of Jesus to the Muslims and convert them:

Joyner: One of the things Detroit has become known for in our nation is the largest Muslim community in our nation, and Dearborn, it’s growing. Many havesaid there actually is an attempt to make Michigan our first Muslim state…. You cannot understand our modern world today without understanding Islam, and the Lord called them hypocrites who did not know the Signs of the Times. We need to know and understand this issue, we have to. And Islam is in our face, everywhere we return. And here, in America, this is the one place where it is most in our face, right now…

Engle: At 11-11-11 the Lord just clearly showed to us, you got to pray all night long because it’s when the Muslims sleep and all over the world right now Muslims in the night are having dreams of Jesus, we believe that God wants to invade with His love Dearborn with dreams of Jesus. We’re gathering together to say God, pour out your grace and revelations of Jesus all over Dearborn and the Muslim communities of North and South America.

Joyner and Engle were also two of the primary movers behind Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s prayer rally in Houston in early August.

Lou Engle, a Joel's Army pastor

Fathima Rifqa Bary, has claimed that her parents are “radical Muslims,” yet the reality seems to be that it is actually she herself who has fallen into the ranks of radicals.  We’re already very familiar with the extremist church she is involved with, the Global Revolution Church, which preaches that there is today an Armageddon between good (the Christians) and evil (the Muslims).

Now, let’s look into a different group she has associated herself with, namely The Call, another End of Times Armageddon invoking group. Here she is on a conference call with Lou Engle, the fanatical leader of the cult:

Up until about four minutes into the video she sounds fairly sane,  but at about 4:20, suddenly she becomes possessed by what we can only assume is the Holy Spirit.  She enters a trance-like state that to us normal human beings seems bizarre, to say the least.  I’ve seen some preachers, Imams, and Rabbis have some crazy highs and lows in their speeches, but usually they build up to it.  On the other hand, Fathima Rifqa just turned on the crazy from the very start; one second she’s talking like a normal human being and the next she starts yelling in a crazed delirium, reaffirming the view that she’s been brainwashed by fundamentalists.

By 5:44, she does her best Glenn Beck impression, i.e. fake crying. When the initial story broke, I saw some YouTube users claim that Fathima Rifqa was fake crying.  I was skeptical, and gave her the benefit of doubt but when I saw the video of her talking to Lou Engle, I was really forced to reconsider my benevolence.  It does seem that she can turn on the fake crying at will.  It is therefore not so difficult to believe that she could also be faking this entire thing.

One other thing: in the Lou Engle conference call, pay close attention to the end of the video: they make it clear that Fathima Rifqa doesn’t care about her own safety; she will–as she says herself–go wherever God takes her.  The reason for all of this–according to these people–is not to protect Fathima Rifqa Bary (since she is ready to be martyred) but to advertise Christianity to 50 million Muslims who need salvation.  But wasn’t the entire court case about Fathima’s safety?  I think the video really shows that it’s not about that at all; it’s about publicity.

A writer for RightWingWatch.org wrote:

For the last few days, I’ve been covering the right-wing effort to mobilize it own Christian forces to counter the “dark spiritual content” of the upcoming Muslim prayer rally.  Tonight, activists gathered for a conference call/prayer rally hosted by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, headed by Shirely Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Lou Engle of The Call, and featuring other activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Cindy Jacobs.

Tonight, this effort revealed itself to be part of the much larger Religious Right battle against Islam in America when the Religious Right’s latest cause célèbre, Rifqa Bary, joined the conference call.

At the beginning of the clip, Lou Engle is told by one of the other participants that “their little sister” is on the line, at which point Engle introduces Rifqa Bary to the conference call participants and asks her to share her story.  Bary, sounding like a somewhat nervous but otherwise perfectly average teenager, recounts her conversion to Christianity and her decision to flee from the home of her Muslim parents in Ohio.  Following that, Engle declared Bary to be “an Esther for such a time as this” and asks her to lead the call in prayer, which she agrees to do, at which point she becomes seemingly hysterical and rather incoherent while sobbing and praying, making it nearly impossible to understand what she is saying outside of her repeated cries to Jesus.

And then, just like that, she stops, seemingly catching the other participants off guard until Engle then chimes in with his own fervent prayers to God to “use Rifqa to be an Esther.” Soon Engle is joined by various others, all of whom pray for this modern day Esther who will lead Muslims out of Islam and into Christianity while asking God to spread Rifqa’s “so that the testimony of Jesus will go out to CNN, will go out to talk shows and use this little story so that all across America the Gospel will be preached” and to “expose the hidden darkness that is rolling into the nation through these ideologies.”

Eventually, Engle unmutes the conference call’s participants and asks them all to pray for Rifqa, at which point the call the descends into little more than chaos and static.

So this is all a publicity stunt to advertise Jesus.  Here’s what I think happened: Fathima Rifqa was attracted to some fringe Christian groups due to their rhetoric.  These Bible thumpers saw Fathima Rifqa as a tool they could use to boost their own publicity–a way to call the Muslim heathens to Jesus.  They convinced a young and impressionable Fathima Rifqa that she wasn’t just some ordinary high school student but a prophet sent to the heathen nations.

Let’s investigate Lou Engle and The Call to see what kind of company Fathima Rifqa keeps.  Engle is quite the loon.  At first, I thought he had what psychiatrists would call akathisia, or the inability to sit still–a common side-effect of anti-psychotic medications.  On closer examination though it seems that it’s malingering–part of his ploy to dupe impressionable young people that he speaks through the Holy Ghost.  One mainstream Christian critic of his wrote:

As he spoke, Lou Engle constantly rocked back and forth, as apparently he almost always does now when preaching, under what he would claim to be the anointing of the Holy Spirit. His spiritual manifestations are supposed to be a sign that he speaks under the unction of the Holy Spirit and when the jerks, grunts, twiches and miscellaneous experiences and feelings get stronger, they supposedly bear witness to him and the audience that what he says is true and prophetic and the ‘glory’ and ‘anointing’ of the Lord is there testifying to it.

To see this conman bobbing and rocking, watch this here (it’s long so just watch a bit of it to see what I mean):

And here he is doing the same even when nobody is in the room except for the camera:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, cites Lou Engle as a prominent Joel’s Army pastor.  Proponents of this theology (considered heretical by mainstream Christians) believe that the Christian youth will become a part of Joel’s Army that will physically “conquer the earth” and forcibly convert “the nations” to Christianity.  Democracy will be overthrown and a literalistic Biblical law will reign supreme.  Keep in mind that the Islamophobes like Robert Spencer and Pam Geller try to convince us that Muslims secretly want to conquer the entire world for Islam, overthrow democracy for a harsh understanding of Sharia, and convert the world to their religion.

Yet, here we have a girl (Fathima Rifqa Bary) associating with a man (Lou Engle) who is linked to a warlike theology that endorses the idea that Christian youth armies will conquer the entire world for Jesus, overthrow democracy, and forcibly convert non-believers to Christianity–and look at what side Spencer and Geller are on!  On pp.226 of his book The Pathetically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Spencer demands that Muslims must “renounce sharia’s expansionist imperative,” yet I don’t see him demanding that radical Christian dominionists must renounce their desire to conquer by force the entire world for Christ.   Well, it’s not surprising, since in his book, Spencer himself calls for a Crusade against Islam (Ibid., p.231), not unlike these Joel’s Army lunatics.  So we’re coming full circle here.  The nutters defending each other.

I urge you to read the article by SPLC, as well as this expose by another hate watch site known as the Box Turtle Bulletin.  Here is an excerpt:

Lou Engle also echoes Brown’s embrace of martyrdom. Engle, whose own ministry is known as “The Call,” is closely aligned with a militant Christian Dominionist movement known as Joel’s Army.

Going back to the earlier article, Casey Sanchez (of the Southern Poverty Law Center) describes Engles as follows:

Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers…

Joel’s Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they’re members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel’s Army…

“The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008,” writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. “One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors.”

‘Snorting Religion’

Joel’s Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism…Joel’s Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city…

The atmosphere is less charged with violence at “The Call,” a 12-hour revival of up to 20,000 youths led by Joel’s Army pastor Lou Engle and held every summer in a major American city (this year’s event was scheduled for Washington, D.C. in August)…

As even his critics note, Engle is a sweet, humble and gentle man whose persona is difficult to reconcile with his belief in an end-time armyof invincible young Christian warriors. Yet while Engle is careful to avoid deploying explicit Joel’s Army rhetoric at high-profile events like The Call, when he’s speaking in smaller hyper-charismatic circles to avowed Joel’s Army followers, he can venture into bloodlust.

This March, at a “Passion for Jesus” conference…Engle called on his audience for vengeance.

“I believe we’re headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground,” said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

“There’s an Elijah generation that’s going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion,” Engle continued. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire.”

Although Joel’s Army theology is mainly directed at people in their teens and early 20s via events like The Call and ministries like IHOP, sometimes the target audience is even younger. In some of the most arresting images in “Jesus Camp,” a 2006 documentary about the Kids on Fire bible camp in North Dakota, grade school-aged kids dressed in army fatigues wield swords and conduct military field maneuvers. “A lot of people die for God and they’re not afraid,” one camper told ABC News reporters in a follow-up segment.

“We’re kinda being trained to be warriors,” added another, “only in a funner way.”

Engle has a bunch of other views considered heretical by mainstream Christianity, such as the belief in “God men” and blood atonement.  It is strange that so many Christians would want to place their trust in Fathima Rifqa Bary who has made her bed with such shady groups and people.

Her fascination with Lou Engle began long before.  As Davi Baker of the SF Examiner notes, it was discovered that Lou Engle’s book entitled Digging the Wells of Revival was part of Fathima Rifqa’s reading material. Additionally, the group she found refuge in, the Global Revolution Church, has similar metanarratives. Baker writes:

On the pen drive found in her room was a reading list, and on that reading list was a book titled “Digging the Wells of Revival” by Lou Engle.  The final chapter of that book is titled “The Hinge of History: Raising up the Nazirites.” …Some have teased that Rifqa’s writings indicate that she wants to be a prophet, but this is exactly what Lou Engle has in mind. Lou writes that God said to him, “America is receiving Her apostles, prophets, and evangelists, but She has not yet seen Her Nazirites!” Lou Engle has a long history of claiming direct communication with God, as well as prophetic dreams…

They seem to imagine some kind of army of super Christians who will appear in a moment of National crisis and win the day. What’s the crisis? Consider these statements from Lou’s homepage, TheCall.com. “There is a great spiritual conflict with a rising tide of Islamic boldness being manifested… we must have spiritual discernment as to the spiritual dark powers that are being invoked into our nation.” Compare that with similar statements from Blake Lorenz, the pastor of Global Revolution Church who housed Rifqa, “These are the last days, these are the end times, and this conflict between Islam and Christianity is going to grow greater. This conflict between good and evil is going to grow greater.”

The radical cult members and Fathima Rifqa are feeding off of each others’ delusions.  As one astute blogger wrote:

These Evangelical Fundamentalists see signs and wonders everywhere while they look for the new prophets among this last generation the Elijahs and the Esthers who will lead others into the battle against the Devil. So as we have noted Lou Engle,Bill Johnson & other Evangelicals who adhere to these beliefs read into certain situations what may be more than what’s actually there.

So enter Rifqa Bary a convert from a Muslim American family who refers to herself as an Esther chosen to play a special role in the last days by God.She says she has had visions of angels and demons of God and Satan and hears God speaking to her directly . So to some she is a prophet to others possibly just a rather enthusiastic convert to Christianity and to others they wonder if she is either just delusional or whether the Evangelicals with whom she was in contact encouraged and fed her delusions. For instance like any true prophet she too must suffer and be ridiculed and harassed and victimized by non-believers so she may exaggerate all out of proportion certain events and encounters and the speech of others. In her case with the help of these anti-Islamic Evangelical Christians she has come to believe her parents want to kill her or that other Muslims are looking for her so they can kill her.

These “True Believers” latch onto her narrative and so believe that Rifqa is being persecuted by her family by Islam and by those who are in authority in part because they recognize who Rifqa is though they may not know this on a conscious level. So all facts surrounding her case are seen through this prism of signs and wonders and the persecution of the “Real Church” or “body of Christ” so they are not going to be easily convinced that they are wrong about Rifqa that she may just be another confused impressionable anxiety ridden teenager with a touch of meglomania.

I think Fathima Rifqa Bary, the Global Revolution Church, and The Call have used the psychological defense mechanism known as projection: they themselves are the radicals and extremists, but they project that onto Fathima Rifqa’s parents and the Mooslims in general.  From what we can tell, Fathima Rifqa’s parents don’t seem too passionate, zealous, or dogmatic about their religion, not nearly as much as Fathima Rifqa and those she has joined.  So the real question is: who is the real extremist here?  Who is espousing the whole ‘holy war between Christianity and Islam’ ideology?  Ironically, the group that Fathima Rifqa has associated herself with is linked to a theology that dictates that non-believers should be forced into the faith of Christianity.

We can draw some broader conclusions from this: those Islamophobes who have taken up the Fathima Rifqa case as their casus belli–including Robert Spencer and Pam Geller–are the real extremists, not the vast majority of Muslims whom they always point the finger at.  It is after all Spencer, Geller, et al. who believe in a modern day Crusade, one they justify by fear mongering about the other.  What peace loving people should ask–when confronted by their rantings–is: who are the real extremists here?