Pastor Bob Roberts Jr. seems to spend his entire public career promoting an idea he knows is false. As a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian himself, he must accept the Bible as truth, and at the end of his video ‘Why Evangelicals Hate Muslims: An Evangelical Minister’s Perspective’ for the Emir-Stein Center, he says that Christians must follow the Gospel, all of it. Why a Pastor who recognises this would spend his time trying to legitimise a false religion is a worrying question to ask, but this is far from the most damaging activity Roberts undertakes.
The entire video is based on a faulty premise. According to Roberts, the question the video poses ‘may sound like a negative thing, but unfortunately it’s true’. Who says? Well, Bob Roberts, of course. He says that ‘[our] own research says that 57% of evangelicals have a negative view of Muslims’. His 57% is substituted for evangelicals across the board, and even more startlingly, ‘a negative view’ is substituted for ‘hate’, which completely changes the premise. Also, any Christian who is faithful to scripture and professes Jesus is Lord, which is the qualifier, loves even his or her enemies, and prays even for persecutors, as opposed to hating them. I might as well entitle this article ‘Why does Pastor Bob Roberts Jr. lie so much?’ without giving evidence for the claim that he lies in the first place.
Roberts makes three clear points in the video. After getting past a facile deer-hunting analogy which does not legitimise any of his points (aside from that fact he is an ignoramus for assuming the imam would shout ‘Allahu akbar’ while hunting), Roberts claims that evangelicals hate Muslims because they do not know any. I believe this is a complete projection of Bob Roberts’ own prejudiced experiences rather than an accurate representation of evangelicals or Christians in general, but there is abundant evidence that the claim is false, since the usual intention of evangelicals, specifically, in speaking about Islam is to reach Muslims or tell others about how to reach Muslims with the Gospel. But if evangelicals are reaching Muslims, they must know some. This shows that an across-the-board assertion about a lack of contact is not logically possible to sustain.
Roberts’ grand solution to the great divide that the Emir-Stein Center professes to be seeking to end is to have discussions with Muslims. The examples he provides of Christian families speaking about how similar the Muslim families they meet are to them are irrelevant; how does this legitimise Islam as a peaceful way of life? The only way to differentiate between Muslims or Christians who claim to be such is to see if they are acting according to scripture. We find in Surah 98:6 that ‘Surely those who became infidels, from the People of the Book and polytheists, will abide in the fire of hell forever. Those are the worst of the creatures’ and in Surah 5:51; ‘O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Nasara (Christians) as friends. They are friends to one another. And whoever among you takes them as friends, so surely he is of them’. In light of the certainty that some Muslims will take these statements seriously and act upon them, those friendly Muslim families are hardly a fair representation of how Muslims are prescribed to act by their own holy book.
Whether those families are ‘just as scared of ISIS as we [the Christian family] are’ is also irrelevant, if the people of whom the Muslims (and Christians) are scared are doing things that are justified in Islam. Roberts then claims that ‘more Muslims are persecuted by the extremists than any other group’. This is actually testimony to the authority of the Qur’an when it discusses hypocrites, a group that includes those who do not go to war for Allah: ‘And that he might know the hypocrites, and it was said to them, “Come, engage in war for the sake of Allah, or contribute.” They said, “If we knew how to engage in war, we would have followed you.” They are closer on that day to infidelity than to faith. They say with their mouths what is not in their hearts, and Allah knows best what they hide.’ (3:167)
The perfect, direct, unchangeable, eternal, perfectly preserved word of Allah commands both Muhammad and Muslims to kill hypocrites. In Surah 9:73, Allah commands Muhammad: ‘O you prophet, perform jihad against the infidels and the hypocrites, and be harsh with them. And their abode will be hell, and evil is the final place’. We find commands for Muslims to kill hypocrites in 33:60-61: ‘If the hypocrites and those who have a disease in their heart and the agitators in the city do not desist, we will surely arouse you against them. Then they will not be your neighbors in it except for a little while. They are cursed wherever they are caught, seized and killed, slaughtering.’ Those Muslim families who court relationships with Christians would certainly be considered friends with them, and are therefore hypocrites whom the Qur’an says should be executed.
The second reason that evangelicals hate Muslims, according to Roberts, is lack of understanding about the end times. This is perplexing; this could not possibly cause a rationally thinking evangelical to hate a Muslim, let alone a majority of them, or as Roberts claims, all of them. Evangelicals do not agree with the premise that Islam is true, so arguments over end-time prophecy from an Islamic perspective would be irrelevant anyway.
The ultimate insult from Pastor Bob Roberts comes in his third point as to why evangelicals apparently hate Muslims: ‘we’ve rejected the Gospel’. I’m sure that as an evangelical Christian, Roberts would acknowledge the evangelical Christian belief that the ultimate showing of love would be risking everything to show someone Christ, and never letting up in trying to help someone find Jesus. Also, by ignoring the problem of Islam, we are allowing people to believe evil is good, such as killing or subjugating unbelievers, without challenge. Father Zakaria Botros, a Coptic Orthodox priest who has a $60 million bounty on his head from Al Qaeda, says ‘We should not flatter people at the expense of truth’. The first step to opening a Muslim person’s heart to Christ is to explain why Islam is incorrect, before preaching the Gospel. Do not fall for this very low guilt-tripping tactic; no one who has watched Roberts’ video here has considered Christianity, he has just given them ample material to further silence Christian voices from preaching truth.
Rather than turn to the Lord to atone for the errors of his ways and learn the truth, Pastor Roberts has turned to the Emir-Stein Center to virtue signal and throw all, yes all, evangelicals under the bus. It is interesting that a channel that claims to be bridging divides would be so heinously bigoted against an entire group rather than host genuinely positive, helpful discussions between representative thinkers.