Christianity is under attack from the inside and the outside:
Yesterday I discussed the brazen attack by a radical mob on an evangelical church in Minneapolis. I warned how the hate-filled left will undoubtedly be doing this more and more in the days ahead. And all this is being aided and abetted by America-hating politicians such as Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
Their constant hateful rhetoric and incitement to violence simply means more such attacks will occur. And the real irony is this: On December 23 Walz claimed that “ICE will target churches”. What actually happened was on January 18, anti-ICE protesters targeted churches.
Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary said these ‘leaders’ are working to protect criminals in their sanctuary jurisdictions: “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals.”
That attack was an obvious example of outsiders coming into the church to attack believers. But internal carnage is also occurring. As I said this in my piece yesterday:
Historically there have been two main ways to undermine, subvert and destroy Christianity: from within and without. Radical leftists, Communists and other God-haters preferred the latter form, by simply imprisoning church leaders, tearing down churches and persecuting believers wherever they were found.
In the West it has mainly been the former, with the white-anting of churches from within, via false doctrine, destructive heresies, full-scale worldliness, carnality and compromise. Liberal and leftist churches pushing all things homosexual and trans for example is one clear case in point. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/01/19/leftists-attacking-churches/
The mob attack on this church on Sunday seems to combine both elements. It simply confirms what we have long known: the so-called religious left is really little more than the secular left with some religious terms tossed around. As J. Gresham Machen put it in his important 1923 book Christianity and Liberalism:
“What the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.” (pp. 6-7)
And two further brief quotes:
“Despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism is not only a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.” (p. 7)
“Liberalism in the modern Church represents a return to an un-Christian and sub-Christian form of the religious life.” (p. 8)
In Machen’s view the church is being extensively eroded from within. As dangerous and destructive as all the external attacks on the church can be, the attacks from within are likely even more harmful – certainly in the long-run. Churches that have been persecuted in Communist countries for example have managed to survive and outlive their persecutors.
While we are nowhere told in Scripture to seek persecution or pray for it to come, we do know that the Christian church does indeed grow in such tough situations. But when the church is undermined from within, that is another story.
Numerous Christians have warned about this two-fold assault on the church. Four short quotes can be offered here:
“It is not the barbarians at the gates that worry me; it is the traitors within. Those who forget their Faith, who scoff at their history, and who welcome the enemies of Christ with open arms. These are the ones who will bring down Christendom, brick by brick.” Hilaire Belloc
“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.” T. S. Eliot
“Satan is most effective in the church when he comes not as an open enemy, but as a false friend; not when he persecutes the church, but when he joins the church; not when he attacks the pulpit, but when he stands in it.” Ed Mitchell
“The biggest pain that a Christian worker has is not from attacks from outside the church. Attacks from within the church are always more painful than serious persecution… The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful. Raw factionalism will do it. Rank heresy will do it.” Tim Challies
The Cross and Christian ministry: Exposition Of Selected Passages From 1 Corinthiansby Carson, D A (Author)
But one further – and longer – quote can be shared here. In his 1993 book The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages From 1 Corinthians, D. A. Carson presents five discussions of key passages from Paul’s epistle. Before sharing that quote, let me first mention what he says in the book’s Introduction:
“[No] Christian would want to minimize the centrality of the cross in God’s redemptive purposes. But if we view it as the means of our salvation and nothing more, we shall overlook many of its functions in the New Testament. In particular, so far as this study is concerned, we shall fail to see how the cross stands as the test and the standard of all vital Christian ministry.”
The quote that I have in mind comes from Chapter 3: “The Cross and Factionalism”. It says this:
The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful. Raw factionalism will do it. Rank heresy will do it. Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it-admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul. Building the church with superficial ‘conversions’ and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it. Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God. Gossip, prayerlessness, bitterness, sustained biblical illiteracy, self-promotion, materialism-all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church. And to do so is dangerous: ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple (1 Cor. 3:17).” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
These kinds of truths the factionalists of Corinth ignored. And these truths are all too frequently ignored by their modern counterparts. This calls for thoughtful self-examination and quiet repentance. (pp. 83-84)
Whether churches are being firebombed or torn down by anti-Christian despots, or simply being invaded in the middle of a worship service, those are real matters of concern indeed. But the internal destruction of a church can be even worse.
We believers must be aware of both types of assaults, and be willing to stand strong. In the West at least, these internal and external attacks will certainly increase in the days ahead.
