Where It's Dangerous to Be a Christian: An Interview with Johnnie Moore

Hey there. Thanks for listening to the Greg Laurie Podcast, a ministry supported by Harvest Partners. I'm Greg Laurie encouraging you.

If you want to find out more about Harvest Ministries and learn more about how to become a Harvest Partner, just go to harvest.org. No question about that. No question about that. Well, you know, every time we turn around, and we wouldn't be shocked if we went home tonight and heard of another terrorist attack. It's becoming so commonplace right now. And this group, ISIS, initially dismissed as a JV team, have certainly distinguished themselves as horrible as Al-Qaeda was and what they did on 9-11. These people at ISIS are using social media like we've never seen it used before, recruiting people. I mean, they call them lone wolves.

What does it matter? They're reaching out through social media, getting hold of young men and radicalizing them, and who go out and commit these horrific acts of violence, usually that ends in the loss of their own life. And then we see persecution. I know in your book you write about how this is targeted toward Christians in particular. And I think ISIS just sent some kind of a memo out telling their people that support them to target Christians.

So this is very specific. And do you think persecution against Christians has increased around the world and even in the United States? It's not even my opinion. I mean, this is the opinion of the State Department of the United States. I mean, the State Department doesn't talk about Christian persecution that much, but the State Department official number is in 60 countries around the world today. It's dangerous to be a Christian, and it's actually probably more like 80 or 90. I mean, we are seeing first century persecution in the 21st century on a scale like we've rarely seen in history. I mean, we haven't seen Christians paraded. Take Libya, when those 21 Egyptian Christians were beheaded, and the video was entitled A Message in Blood Written to the Nation of the Cross. We haven't seen this since the Roman Colosseum.

That's true. It is an unprecedented rise in Christian persecution. I mean, take for instance, Pastor Craig, the population in Iraq and Syria, right? The Christian population in those two countries alone in the last less than a decade, maybe five or six years, has declined by over two million people. Over two million Christians.

I mean, this is crazy. There are churches in Iraq and Syria that had continuous worship services. Every single day, they had a service happening for 1,500 years, and almost all of them have been destroyed. Almost all of them have been destroyed. You know, this is the land of Abraham. There is many Christian holy sites in Syria as in Israel, and now all across that part of the world, Christianity is bleeding.

Churches are in rubble. And by the way, because the world hasn't responded to that, now we're seeing the duplication of it around the world. And now it's dangerous to be a Christian in Libya, in Nigeria, in Kenya, of all places, all across the world. I mean, five years ago, there was one failed country in the world, Somalia. Now Somalia is a failed country. Syria is a failed country. Libya is a failed country. Iraq is a teetering country. Afghanistan is a teetering country. The northeast of Nigeria is basically a failed state within a state.

And in every single one of those circumstances, the first people these bad men target are Christians. So this group ISIS, sometimes called ISIL, sometimes called Daesh, why have they been so successful, if you want to use that word? Effective, maybe, would be a better word.

In their eyes, I mean, they've been very successful, very effective. And I think it's because, like in California, we're used to disruption, right? Up in Silicon Valley, you know, some 10-year-old will have an idea that will change all of our lives. And, you know, employ millions of people and unemployed millions of people. They disrupt things.

It's a technological term. Well, ISIS has done that in terrorism. They've disrupted terrorism. And, you know, a lot of leaders would say, we didn't see this coming. It was a total surprise.

But it wasn't a total surprise. This organization, ISIS, has existed since at least 2003 or 2004. It was an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. By the way, the first thing that Baghdadi, who leads ISIS, now did when he took charge of the organization in 2010 was he attacked a Catholic church in Baghdad.

So even the Christian persecution thing isn't new. But ISIS has disrupted terrorism in three ways. They've done it tactically, technologically, and theologically.

Tactically, they've traded scale for repetition in terms of their attacks. Al-Qaeda would plan for years and years and years. They'd get Americans, they would get, you know, Middle Easterners here. They would train them.

They would fly pilots into buildings. Most of the time, their terrorist attacks failed. ISIS has said, we don't need that level of complexity.

We just need someone that agrees with us with a weapon in a soft target, a public place, tactically. Theologically, they've disrupted terrorism. They have made the caliphate happen. You know, this was the dream of Osama bin Laden, to have a caliphate.

But he never believed it would happen. In a way, they've made it cool, for lack of a better word, to a generation of young people. Oh, you know, because you even read about girls, especially in Europe, who will go to become the wives of these people and are beaten and are murdered. But there's something that appeals. It's a strange thing. If you are that very, very, very small group of Muslims that believe in this ideology, when you look at it through their eyes, you say, I may disagree with the tactics of ISIS, the beheading and all of this.

I may disagree with all kinds of things, but it looks like a fulfilled prophecy. ISIS captured one contiguous piece of land larger than the United Kingdom between Iraq and Syria. Larger than the United Kingdom. They were withholding all the Western powers of the world. And so you could actually be that very, very small percentage of Muslim around the world that believes in this, and you feel theologically obligated to get to the caliphate, whether you agree with it or not. Theologically, they invaded. And technologically, if you wanted to be a terrorist, you used to have to go to Afghanistan, right?

How do you even get there? You go to some training camp, a language you don't know, a culture you don't know. Well, they outsourced the training to our cell phones, to social media. And so now you can be some kid sitting in any community in this country.

By the way, the FBI has active investigations into ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states in the United States of America. You could be some kid sitting, looking at your cell phone, being radicalized, and it's so easy to do. And we're seeing it again and again all over the world. And you would describe what's happening, especially in the Middle East, as a genocide against Christians.

Why do you use that word and illustrate that for me, if you would? Well, it's a genocide in every way. I mean, it's a genocide because they've said it's a genocide. In every single public speech or written statement that Baghdadi, the head of the caliphate, has made, he says that they will march all the way to Rome and all along the way they will break the crosses of the Christians and they will enslave their women and their children.

I mean, that's what he says, every single statement. Every time they've encountered a Christian community in any of those parts of the world, and all the way down into Africa and ISIS affiliates, they have done that. It's convert or die.

Sometimes they say, well, you can pay a tax, but the tax is too exorbitant to pay in the first place and they consider your children property. So I have the price list. It lists the slaves by age and by religion.

Christian Yazidi girl, an ancient Iraqi religion Yazidi, one to nine years old, 150 US dollars. Open slave markets. This is what they've done. And they've done it on an egregious scale.

And this is not like a controversial opinion. The United States Congress, the UK Parliament, all voted unanimously this is genocide. We fought really hard, by the way, to get that to happen. And you know, not a lot has been done since it happened. In fact, I've got a piece going up on Fox News tomorrow.

And the question I ask is, is it not more immoral to declare a genocide and do nothing than to have not declared it at all? Yeah. So, OK, that brings us to the next question. What do we do? What can we do? We're listening to this and we're overwhelmed by all this information.

It's honestly kind of depressing. But yet, you know, what can we do? And that's reality. So what do we do? Like, OK, we hear about military solutions and, you know, question is asked and we need more boots on the ground. There's the airstrikes that we're engaged in right now.

Of course, we have counterintelligence happening all the time. But do we have to do more than merely provide a military solution? What else can we do?

Well, I think we need to start with what we can do. Right. I don't have a red phone.

It's a good thing I don't have a red phone. Right. Because I know a lot of these people.

These are friends of mine in the Middle East. It's a very good thing. But most of us don't, unless you're like an elected official, we don't have that type of power. What we do have is we have what we have, which is we can we can fight for justice for these people beginning on our knees.

I mean, do we pray for the persecuted church? This is a once in a thousand year crisis. I remember this. Well, just stop there. That's an amazing statement. This is a once in a thousand year crisis. So we think, well, this has always been going on, not on this scale. So this is unique.

What are we going to tell our children? Yeah. I went to Iraq.

My daughter was one month old. Yeah. And I went because I had this image in my mind of my daughter and my son coming back from school like 15, 20 years later, learning about Christianity in the Middle East and the eradication of it, saying, Dad, what did you do?

Yeah. And I wouldn't. I just had to be able to say I did something. You know, I wasn't alive during the Holocaust.

Nothing I could do about that. But I am alive when this is happening. And we need to, as the body of Christ, be praying like we've never prayed before. We need to be praying for the safety of our world. You know, there's an amazing verse in Isaiah 54, verse 14. It says that, you know, pray that we might have a secure government and that terror will not come near. You know, we don't pray as passionately as we talk about the Orlando attack or the San Bernardino attack, do we? And you sometimes wonder what our world would look like if we prayed more. That's right.

Right? And I think it begins there. Secondly, we care for the church and we care for the world. You know, Galatians 6, 10, it says, as we have opportunity, that we're to care for the world. And then it's comma, especially for the family of believers.

We're to do both. You know, the Bible says that we're to care for those that are different than us and that believe differently than us. And we're also to care for the church.

You know, and the Bible says if one member of the body suffers, everyone suffers. You know, this nun I met in Iraq, Iraqi nun, been there her whole life, she said to me, she said, Johnny, I love America. It's a beautiful country, wonderful people. She said, I have a doctorate degree from an American university.

I spent six years there. She said, you care for your pets so well. And then she said, so when are you going to care about your brothers and your sisters in Christ?

She said, why are you so silent in the face of our genocide? And a lot of us have been silent. We got to speak up.

We got to raise our voice. We got to give to organizations that are helping sustain these people. What are some good organizations you think to give? You mentioned Samaritan's Purse, and I'm friends with Franklin Graham who runs that, and we've worked with them for many years with Operation Christmas Child and other things. What are some other good organizations that are working in that part of the world? When I got to Iraq, the one organization I found that was at work there was Samaritan's Purse. All the other humanitarian international ones, almost all of them, had left. They had left it to the United Nations, and yet Samaritan's Purse stayed.

And so when the crisis happened in northern Iraq, Samaritan's Purse already had the credibility that could help. But any organization, I work with World Help a lot, a small NGO that does a lot of good work, but any organization that's working in the Middle East, we need to help these people. We need to pray for them like it was our children. We need to give to them like we would want people to give to us. We need to raise our voice for them the way we hope someone would raise our voice for us. This is the crisis of our time, and we used to think all that stuff happens over there. It doesn't happen over there anymore.

Istanbul, Brussels, Paris. If it wasn't for the security apparatus of the United States of America, it would have happened a lot more here, and we need to pray for safety in our country. But we also need to show compassion, and we need to show compassion to our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ who are wondering what happened to us. Not long ago, the rabbi in charge of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Beverly Hills, we were having a conversation with him, and he said, he's a great advocate for Christians in the Middle East, and he said, during the Holocaust, before the Holocaust, there were 20 million Jews in the world, 20 million. He said, we lost 6 million. He said, but there were only 20 million of us. There's more that we could have done, but there were only 20 million of us, and the world left us. And he said, what I don't understand about the Christian community is there are like over 2 billion people around the world that call themselves Christians. So why do you have a few hundred thousand people that are homeless and hungry and persecuted, and the number one thing they told me when I was over there is they feel forgotten.

And we would have no church history if it wasn't for their church history. We owe it to these people. And by the way, we also owe it to them to be a light to the people in our community that are Christians. This is not the time to run away from loving the Muslim community. It's the time to love the Muslim community. So we have a large Muslim community right here in Orange County.

So we see folks everywhere. And how should we approach them and engage them? Because look, one of the things that's happening, I don't know if you know Joe Rosenberg, he's a friend of mine, but Joe's talked about just how thousands of Muslims are coming to Christ, and some of them are having visions of Jesus. It's interesting how God is reaching them in different parts of the world, but it seems like we had to build a bridge. And if you lead a person to Christ, that's a person that will change their ideology altogether. Yeah, this is ultimately an ideological problem.

That's what it is. And by the way, the Apostle Paul was a terrorist on a road to Damascus before God changed, as Jesus appeared to him. We need to pray that those things happen. And we also need to make sure that there's not a single Muslim in our community that doesn't know the love of Jesus Christ through our service to them. Every single Muslim young man or young woman that ends up in ISIS or something, they have been propagandized. And part of that propaganda is they call us a bunch of crusaders. Every act of love we do for one of these people is our own war against ISIS because we make it more difficult for them to propagandize people. And then we need to pray that not only will there be first century persecution in the 21st century, but that there would be a first century harvest in the 21st century.

I mean, God plays chess, okay? See, what the enemy means for evil, God is using for good all over that part of the world. And the stories are unbelievable. I was just talking to this lady just yesterday. She's a middle-aged woman in Los Angeles. She went to Syria and she's been preaching the gospel all over that part of the world. And as she was leaving Syria to go back into Lebanon, there was a border guard there and she was scared to death she was going to get out of the country. And the border guard said, I know who you are.

I saw you on the internet. I'm now a Christian too. And he let her go. There's this story I just read the other day that I sent a former student of mine at Liberty all around the world for three months interviewing people for another book I'm writing called, Blessed, the trial and the triumph of the persecuted church. And he was recording all these stories around the Middle East.

And it's amazing the stories, these miraculous stories. And we found this one guy that came to Christ in a Muslim country. And after, this is a year before 9-11, he came to Christ and he's sitting down with the African believer that led him to Christ. And he opens up his wallet and inside of his wallet, there was a picture inside of his wallet. And the picture was, the picture was of his former teacher. And it was Osama Bin Laden.

That guy would have ended up a suicide bomber. But Jesus got to him first. Just as we're sitting here right now, I believe what's happening is what Romans 16 verse 20 says. Romans 16 verse 20 says, soon the God of peace will crush Satan underneath our feet. And he does it. He does it through us.

And he's doing it all across the Middle East. This is not the time to withdraw from the Muslim community. This is the time to move in and show them the love of Jesus Christ. Well thank you so much for being here.

And I want to have another conversation about this in the future. But Johnny brought some of his books to find ISIS if you want to know more about it. And why don't we just pray right now. In fact, Johnny, maybe you'd lead us in that prayer. And then next Thursday night what we'll do is we'll designate our offering to the suffering believers in, well, somewhere in the Middle East.

And we'll give it to Samaritan's Purse and ask them to use it where needed. And so we'll put feet to our feet. But lead us in prayer right now if you would please. Because I remember in your word, Romans 13 verse 3. Remember those who are in prison as if you were right there with them.

And that's hard for us to do here tonight in the security and the comfort of the United States of America, of Southern California where we live. But we pray that you give us empathy. And we pray right now for the thousands of believers around the world that are imprisoned for the Christian children that are on the slave markets. For the pastors who have chosen not to convert but are willing to die. For the churches that are being planted in the underground. For those who will come to faith in you tonight because of some supernatural thing.

For something that you're working on right now in the life of a terrorist who you might produce a church planter out of as you've done in history. I pray that in this moment where we are alive, where we're experiencing this great suffering around the world, that we would see not just what we saw in the first century in the Colosseums, but what we saw in the first century in the streets. That you would birth a revival.

That the 1040 window would be a eradicated vocabulary word in our generation. That every single person on planet earth would have the opportunity to know you. May we here live for what they're willing to die for. And in their deaths sometimes, and in their constant suffering, may your light shine like never before in the most unlikely places. Help those who are suffering. Help those who are mourning their life. Even now, I just remember right now, in Lebanon, the village on Monday.

Christian village in Lebanon. Eight suicide bombings on Monday. One in the church mourning the lives of those who have been lost earlier in the day, targeting that Christian community. We pray for them right now.

Heal their broken heart. And may their response to that terrorism, may the blood of the martyrs become the seed of the church in that part of the world. May you, the God of peace, crush all of this hatred, crush Satan underneath your feet. May we see something exceedingly abundantly above and beyond what we've ever been able to imagine. Keep us safe. And may your light shine more brightly in this darkness than ever before. In Jesus' name, Amen. Thanks, Johnny. God bless you, man. Wow.