261005 – Why are Christians Leaving for Islam

by | Oct 6, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

Judgment Begins at the House of God

Christians Who Leave for Islam, and the Church They Leave Behind

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 6 October 2026

For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? — 1 Peter 4:17

Occasion. This week an article titled “Why Are Christians Leaving for Islam?” circulated on MSN. Its author is a former Muslim who has spent much of his adult life speaking against Islam. He had posted a short clip about Christians who convert to Islam, and he was disturbed by the response more than by the conversions. Most commenters, he reports, said in effect “good riddance”: if those people had truly been Christians, they would never have left.

His argument, in my paraphrase, runs this way. The commenters state a real theological truth about the new birth, but they use it to excuse the Church from looking at itself. America’s crisis is spiritual before it is political; the state can restrain evil, but it cannot regenerate a heart. Israel lost its obedience before it lost its security. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem during the Arab conquest, saw Christian sin as part of why the conquest succeeded, and he called his people to repentance. Judgment begins with the household of God. Our love for Christ must be greater than our anger at Islam, and the goal must be more disciples of Jesus, not merely fewer Muslims. Revival must begin with “my people” (2 Chronicles 7:14), and the West needs to remember the God it abandoned.

I agree with nearly all of it. This essay sets the article beside what this fellowship has already written about Islam — chiefly The Revolutionary and the Devotee (12 September), The Sharper Stick and the Liberty in Christ (21 September), the recaps of 20 and 27 September, and To the Fellowship and Our Muslim Friends (15 May) — and asks what we should do with it. Where the article stops at the Church’s door, I go a step further into the civil order; where it speaks of revival in general, I try to name what revival would look like on a Sunday afternoon in our own houses.

I. Good Riddance? The Verse and the Shepherd

The commenters have a verse: They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us (1 John 2:19). A man who has been born again has received a new heart, and a new heart does not trade the indwelling Christ for a recitation. I hold that. When a professing Christian bows toward Mecca, something was missing before he left.

But John wrote that verse about antichrists who had left the church to deny the Son, to steady those who remained. He did not write it so those who remained could stop asking what was missing. The same Scripture that says the departed were not of us also says this:

  • The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost (Ezekiel 34:4). God did not indict the scattered sheep. He indicted the shepherds.
  • What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? (Luke 15:4). The shepherd does not say good riddance; he goes looking.
  • Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death (James 5:19–20).
  • And of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire (Jude 22–23).

So two things are true at once. The one who left is responsible for leaving; no one apostatizes on another man’s behalf. And the community he left is responsible for what he found there before he left — or failed to find. The first truth belongs to God’s judgment of him. The second belongs to our judgment of ourselves, which is the only judgment we are commanded to make first (Matthew 7:3–5). The “good riddance” response takes the first truth and uses it to cancel the second. That is the self-exoneration the author warns against, and he is right to call it a temptation rather than a doctrine.

There is also a plain pastoral fact. We do not know which of the departed were never regenerate and which are prodigals who will come home. Peter denied the Lord three times and was restored on a beach at breakfast. A man who writes off the departed in advance has decided not to be the one waiting at the end of the road when the prodigal turns around.

II. Proportion: What the Numbers Say

The movement is real, but it runs in both directions, and it is not a flood. I have said before that hyperbole is lying by proportion, so the size of the thing matters before we draw lessons from it.

The best American data remain Pew Research Center’s 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims. Roughly a quarter of Muslim adults in America (23%) are converts, and among converts about half (53%) were Protestant before converting and another fifth (20%) Catholic. So the article’s premise holds: most American converts to Islam come out of Christian homes. But the same survey found that about a quarter of those raised Muslim (24%) no longer identify as Muslim. Pew’s summary is that Islam gains roughly as many converts as it loses. Muslims remain about one percent of the American population.

Worldwide, the flow the other way is significant and often hidden. Iran’s underground church, North African house churches, and the former Muslims now sitting in Western congregations — Danny Burmawi, whose interview we examined on 12 September, among them — are evidence that Christ is still drawing Muslims out of Islam, often at great cost.

So the honest frame is not “Christianity is losing to Islam.” It is this: in a nation that is shedding its Christian identity in every direction — into the “nones,” into vague spirituality, and in a smaller stream into Islam — some of those leaving are going somewhere that offers what they did not find with us. The Islam stream is small, but it is the most instructive, because Islam is the one destination that demands more of a man than the church he left. That is the subject of the next section.

Note (sources and limits). Pew Research Center, “The share of Americans who leave Islam is offset by those who become Muslim” (26 January 2018), reporting its 2017 survey. The figures are American only and now nine years old; European patterns differ and are not addressed here.

III. Why They Go: The Hunger for Discipline

A man who leaves a church of soft expectations for a faith that wakes him before dawn to pray is not fleeing holiness. He is looking for it. In The Revolutionary and the Devotee I wrote that the lack of moral advocacy and practice in modern Christianity has driven some to find stability in the strict discipline of Islam, and that the fact that some Westerners are leaving Christianity for Islam shows a hunger for discipline and for a holistic embrace of God in every part of life. The article reaches the same diagnosis from the other side: when “Christian” civilization looks like broken families, pornography, consumerism, and spiritual indifference, Christianity stops looking like an alternative to anything.

Consider what the convert to Islam actually receives:

  • A rhythm. Five appointed prayers a day, a month of fasting, a calendar that orders the year.
  • A standard stated out loud. Clear rules on drink, dress, sexual conduct, and food, held by a community that expects them to be kept.
  • Men with a job. A role for the father and husband that is named, demanding, and honored.
  • A community that notices. Absence from the mosque is seen; conduct is supervised.
  • Seriousness. A faith that claims the whole of life, public as well as private, and does not apologize for it.

Every item on that list belonged to the Church first. Daniel prayed three times a day with his windows open toward Jerusalem (Daniel 6:10); David prayed evening, morning, and noon (Psalm 55:17); Peter and John went up to the temple at the hour of prayer (Acts 3:1); and the Didache, one of the earliest Christian manuals, told believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily. Fasting, Sabbath, catechism, church discipline, fathers who led family worship — the Church did not lack these. It let them lapse. The convert is buying from Mecca what he could not find at home, though it was always in our storehouse.

But the discipline rests on something different, and that is the whole difference. In The Sharper Stick and the Liberty in Christ I summarized Islam as Old Testament Christianity with a sharper stick and more supervision. It supplies an enforcement team for people who admire the Christian virtues but cannot govern themselves. What it cannot supply is the liberty in Christ — that is not sold at the Islamic kiosk; it is sold next door. Islam offers discipline as the price of standing before God. The gospel offers standing before God as a gift, and then a discipline that grows from the gift as fruit grows from a tree: For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world (Titus 2:11–12). Grace is the teacher; holiness is the lesson.

The Church’s error was not that it preached grace. It preached a grace that taught nothing — a free gift with no change in the life of the one who received it. The answer to the departing convert is not to copy the stick. It is to recover the holiness grace was always meant to produce, so the hungry man finds the discipline he wants along with the Father he did not know he needed.

IV. Sophronius and the Road to Bethlehem

The article’s photograph shows a cross in Bethlehem with a minaret rising behind it, and its central historical witness is a patriarch who could not get to Bethlehem. On Christmas Day of 634, Sophronius of Jerusalem preached to a congregation that could not make the five-mile journey to the Church of the Nativity, because Arab raiders held the roads. He compared his people to Adam shut out of Paradise by the flaming sword. He did not soften what the invaders were; he called them godless. But he told his flock that the enemy’s success was bound up with the Christians’ own sins, and that the remedy was repentance. Three years later he surrendered Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar, and he died soon after.

That is exactly the posture the article recommends, and it is the posture of Scripture. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place (Revelation 2:5). As I noted in September, all seven churches of Revelation 2–3 stood in what is now Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation. Islam was the instrument; the cause was churches that had stopped doing the first works. Conquest does not happen to a church on fire. It happens to a church that has become a museum of its own past.

The picture I used then still fits. In Hagia Sophia the Christian mosaics were not chiseled off; they are curtained during prayers. The West’s Christian inheritance — its law, its hospitals, its universities, the imago Dei (the teaching that every man bears God’s image) beneath its doctrine of human rights — is still on the ceiling. We simply stopped looking up, and another worship moved into the room beneath it. The Christian who leaves for Islam is often a man who looked around the room and saw no one worshipping.

Sophronius held two things together, and so must we. He named the external threat plainly; he did not call conquest a cultural exchange. And he turned the hardest scrutiny on his own house. Those who want only the first half end in rage; those who want only the second end in surrender. The patriarch’s instinct was neither. It was repentance with open eyes.

Note (the Sophronius quotation). The substance of the Christmas sermon of 634 — the blocked road to Bethlehem, the Adam-and-Eden comparison, and the attribution of the invaders’ success to Christian sin with a call to repentance — is well attested in the scholarship on the conquest (e.g., Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 1997). The article’s exact English wording (that God gave the Muslims power not because He loved them but because of Christian lawlessness) should be checked against a published translation before it is quoted on the site; I have paraphrased rather than quoted it here.

V. Judgment Begins at the House of God

The article asks a set of questions that are more painful than blaming Washington, Hollywood, or Islam: Where are the fathers discipling their children? Where are the marriages that show covenant faithfulness? Where is sexual holiness? How did a nation full of churches produce generations that cannot explain what Christianity teaches, much less why it is true? I take these as the right questions, and I would add one: how many of us could sit across a table from a thoughtful young man weighing Islam and tell him, from Scripture and from our own lives, why Christ is better?

The author is careful not to assign a specific act of divine judgment to each national calamity, and I share that caution. But the principle is not obscure. Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap (Galatians 6:7). Romans 1 describes judgment in its quietest form: God gave them up to what they wanted (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Judges closes with the diagnosis of a nation coming apart: every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25). Sometimes judgment is not fire from heaven. It is God letting a people have the autonomy they demanded, and letting them feel its weight. A Christian drifting into Islam may be one of the ways that weight is felt.

In the 21 September conversation with Isak, I answered whether Christianity could become the thing it opposes by drawing a distinction I want to repeat here. Christianity done wrong is not Christianity; it is a counterfeit wearing the cross. A coercive “Christianity” has no power to transform anything, and an indifferent “Christianity” has no power to keep anyone. The young man who leaves a church of consumer comfort for the mosque has not left Christianity done right. He has left a soft counterfeit and found a hard counterfeit. Neither one has the power of the real thing.

The real thing, as I have said before, is a one-trick pony: the changed heart. God puts a new heart in a man, oriented toward the highest morality, which is the person of Christ, and the governing rule becomes to love others as we were loved. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). The article says the same: legislation can constrain behavior, but only regeneration changes desire. Judgment beginning at the house of God means asking whether our houses show that change — whether a visitor could tell, from how we speak to our wives, raise our sons, spend our money, and use our evenings, that something has been done to us that was not done to our neighbors.

VI. The Lock and the Empty House

The article holds a balance I want to keep: political disengagement is not a biblical virtue, and political idolatry is not one either. Romans 13 gives government the task of restraining wrongdoing, so Christians should care who governs, what laws pass, and whether constitutional freedoms survive. But no statute gives a man a new heart.

This fellowship has said the same in its own words. At the end of The Revolutionary and the Devotee I wrote that the Church has not been losing a legal battle these fifty years; it has been losing a persuasive one. A lock on the door is worth having; it is not worth much on a house where no one is living. The article and this ministry agree that the house must be lived in again, and that only the Spirit of God can do that.

Where I go further than the article is on the lock itself. The author names sharia, immigration, and Islamist movements as matters for serious public debate, and leaves it there. I have argued, following Danny Burmawi, that Islam is not only a religion but a civilizational order that has a religion: its prayers, fasts, and creed are worship, which the First Amendment rightly protects, but its program to replace the civil order with Islamic law is a political program, and the state may judge a man’s allegiance even though it may not judge his worship. The instruments already exist. The naturalization oath requires an applicant to renounce foreign allegiance and support the Constitution, and federal law (8 U.S.C. §1424) already bars naturalizing those who advocate establishing a totalitarian form of government in the United States. I have asked that these laws be applied honestly to the Islamist political program, and that the nation say out loud what it stands for.

I also acknowledged the weakness of that gate: an oath is made of words, and words cost nothing to speak. And in the 27 September discussion we noted the form in which such a test is most likely to stand in court and most fair in principle — a set of constitutional commitments asked of every applicant of every faith, judged by conduct and advocacy rather than by creed. I hold the position as advocacy with reasons, open to a better argument. But the point of this section is the one the article makes, and I endorse: even a perfect gate would not save a nation whose own people no longer believe what the gate protects. Sophronius did not abandon the walls of Jerusalem, but he knew the walls were not what had failed.

Note (law). The naturalization oath is at 8 C.F.R. §337.1; the bar on advocates of totalitarian government is 8 U.S.C. §1424(a); the courts’ deference to the political branches on admission is stated in Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972). Article VI forbids religious tests for federal office, which is why the allegiance question must be framed as allegiance, not creed. I am not a lawyer; these citations are given for further reading, not as legal advice.

VII. Love Greater Than Anger

The author writes that our love for Christ must be greater than our anger at Islam, and that the Christian objective cannot be fewer Muslims but more disciples of Jesus. He speaks from experience: there was a time when someone could have looked at him and seen only a piece of an ideological problem, and Christ saw a man He meant to redeem. This is the rule we adopted in September: love the Muslim and hate Islam, as we love any sinner and hate the sin. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good (Romans 12:9) applies to a system of ideas. Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44) applies to the man.

The same rule applies to the Christian who left. He is not an enemy to be dismissed; he is a brother who has wandered, or a neighbor who was never home. Either way, he is someone to pursue.

In May I wrote a set of questions to ask a Muslim friend before trying to witness to him. They work just as well as questions for a Christian who has gone over to Islam, and — harder still — as questions for ourselves:

  1. What did Islam give you that you most value? The rhythm of prayer? A clear standard? A community that noticed you? Asked of the convert, this tells us what he was hungry for. Asked of ourselves, it tells us what our church did not feed him.
  2. What did it ask you to give up, and is the cost worth it? The assurance of salvation, which classical Islamic theology withholds until the Day of Judgment; the freedom to leave without penalty; a Father who comes to dwell in you rather than a distant sovereign.
  3. Does your faith call you to the kind of person you most want to become? This is the decisive question for him and for us. If our Christianity does not visibly call people toward holiness, joy, and courage, we should not be surprised when they look for it elsewhere.

The author asks what kind of Christianity Muslims see when they look at the West. The departing convert is the man who looked and did not like what he saw. His leaving is a report on us. We can throw the report away, or we can read it.

What we offer him when we read it is not a better law. It is what I tried to describe in May as the liberty in Christ: all that is not prohibited is allowed; all that is allowed has its perfect time; and the Holy Spirit, living in the believer, leads him into the next moment of greatest joy, meaning, and service to God, to his neighbor, and to his own becoming. That is a discipline — the most demanding one there is — but it is the discipline of a son in his Father’s house, not of a servant under a master’s eye. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15).

VIII. “If My People”: What We Can Do

The article observes that 2 Chronicles 7:14 is often quoted as a slogan for national restoration, but it opens with a demanding phrase: If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. The call is first to the people who bear God’s name. We have reversed the order — cultural renewal before personal repentance, political victory before spiritual discipline. Our rule in this fellowship is that an essay which ends at understanding is not finished, so here is what the order looks like when it is put right in our own houses.

  1. Pursue the one who left. If you know someone who has left the faith — for Islam or for anything else — call him this week. Do not argue. Ask the three questions of Section VII and listen to the answers. You may learn more about your church than about him.
  2. Restore the rhythm. Islam did not invent fixed hours of prayer; it borrowed them. Choose set times — morning, midday, evening — and pray the Lord’s Prayer at each, as the early Church did. Add one day of fasting each week. Keep the Lord’s Day as a day apart. Discipline that grows from grace is still discipline, and the hungry will recognize it.
  3. Fathers, lead at home. Read Scripture and pray with your wife and children at a regular time. A son who has watched his father kneel is less likely to look for a man who kneels somewhere else.
  4. Be able to give the reason. Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear (1 Peter 3:15). Each of us should be able to explain, in five minutes, who Jesus is, why He died, why we believe He rose, and how the Jesus of the Gospels differs from the Jesus of the Qur’an — the Jesus who said of His life, No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself (John 10:18), set against the Islamic account in which another man dies in His place. The reading list we posted in May is the place to start.
  5. Pray by name. For the author of this article and for every former Muslim who now speaks for Christ at real cost. For Christians we know who have gone over to Islam. For the Muslim families in our own towns, that they may meet the Jesus who did not run from the cross.
  6. Open the table. The Muslim neighbor and the departed Christian need the same thing first: to be known and welcomed by someone who loves Christ and lives like it. Invite one of them to dinner before you invite him to an argument.

None of this is a program to make the nation Christian by Thursday. It is the leaven of Matthew 13:33, worked into the dough one household at a time. That has always been how the Kingdom spreads; the conversion of a nation is the sum of the conversion of its homes.

IX. Back on the Road to Bethlehem

Sophronius preached on Christmas Day to people who could see Bethlehem from the hills and could not get there. That is a fair picture of the Western Church. The place where God became flesh is still on the map; the mosaics are still on the ceiling; the Bible is still on the shelf. The road is blocked, and the enemy on the road is real. But the patriarch’s counsel was that the road would open by repentance before it opened by arms.

The article ends by saying that the West does not merely need better management of its decline; it needs to remember the God it abandoned. I agree, and I would make only one pronoun change. Before the West remembers, we must remember — the fathers in this fellowship, the households represented on Sunday mornings, the man writing this essay. The Christian who left for Islam was looking for a faith that claimed his whole life. If he had found one among us, he might have stayed. If we become one now, some who left may come home, and some Muslims who are watching may come with them.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1) — not the bondage of the stick, and not the bondage of a comfort that asks nothing.

— Thomas

Notes

Note (the author). MSN republished the article without a readable byline, and I could not confirm the author’s name or the original publisher. He describes himself as a former Muslim who has spoken against Islam for most of his adult life. His name and original venue should be added before this essay is posted.

Note (photograph). The article’s photograph, dated 6 January 2022 (Orthodox Christmas), shows a cross at the Church of the Nativity with a mosque’s minaret behind it — almost certainly the Mosque of Omar across Manger Square. The caption misspells “minaret.”

Sources

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

 

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