Are you ready to dabble in thoughtcrime?

(Any Brits reading this, make sure to have that VPN activated!)

I've had several close friends drift away from me since I've started writing for Not the Bee. These are solid Christian church friends that used to come over to my house for cookouts and Bible studies.

I'm too divisive now, is the claim - oftentimes unspoken, or whispered to my wife. Too political. Too hateful. Too un-Christlike.

Those who know me, however - who really know me - know that I don't do this job out of hate. Far from it. I'm not here to rant against the Democrats or tell you that liberals are all evil or that the GOP is God's favorite political party.

I'm also not anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim.

In fact, I bet I have had more Muslim friends and interaction with Muslims than the vast majority of you.

• My minor in college was Middle Eastern Studies, which included intensive Arabic classes, from classes on modern media Arabic to the classic Al-Fusha script to the Levantine dialect, with a specific emphasis on Transjordanian Bedouin.

• I lived in Jordan for a semester. I also spent a week in Palestinian neighborhoods of Israel, far from the tourist areas in Jewish neighborhoods.

• I was an English-language partner for two years for incoming Arab students to my Michigan college, then worked as an English teacher for two years for said students. I went to dinners at the homes of Libyans, Saudis, Tunisians, and Egyptians. I gave them rides. I helped them get groceries.

• I worked to resettle several Iraqi refugee families alongside my church; a multi-year, intensive process that involved significant effort and resources from our congregation.

• I worked at a private foundation to finalize grant proposals for tens of millions of dollars a year to over 200 Christian ministries annually, including significant funds for refugee and aid work focused on the Muslim world.

Through that interaction, I have learned to better love Muslims as human beings made in God's image. My heart longs for Muslims to be set free from a false religion of works that cannot save.

But I have also learned that their false religion of works is wholly incompatible with the moral fabric that underpins my own civilization.

Consider these examples (of many) from America:

This moral incompatibility also exists within the framework of Islamic conquest over the last 1,400 years. Despite what your history teacher told you, the Crusades were mostly justified. Arab Muslims began attacking all the surrounding empires, conquering the Sasanian Empire of Iran, large swaths of the Byzantine Empire, the Sindh kingdoms of modern-day Pakistan, the Berber kingdoms of North Africa, and the Visigoth kingdoms of modern-day Spain.

Entire cultures vanished overnight as Islam subjugated them.

Europeans responded by defending Europe in a losing battle over the next millennia. It was not until Europe developed the technology to explore and colonize the Americas that it began to gain the upper hand, and even then, the fierce Islamic empire of the Ottomans didn't stop enslaving, pillaging, and raiding Christian cities until the British Empire came to rule the seas in the 1800s.

More Europeans were enslaved by Muslims than Africans were enslaved by Europeans during the transatlantic trade (Muslims also enslaved more Africans than Europeans ever did).

As a semitic language, Arabic has three "root" letters in every word that give meaning. "Islam," "Salaam," "Tasleem," and "Muslim" all have "S-L-M" as their root letters.

"S-L-M" indicates wholeness, peace, or safety, as it means in Hebrew ("Shalom"), but in Arabic, it also indicates submission. Peace is found in subjugation, in other words.

"Islam" means "to submit to Allah," Muslim means "one who submits," and "Istislaam" means "submitting/surrendering."

Like Christianity, Islam teaches that its message will be spread to the whole world; unlike Christianity, Islam teaches that this will happen through cultural and military conquest until the entire world, you guessed it, submits to their god.

There is 1,400 years of historical evidence across multiple continents to prove that argument, but you can easily find it by simply talking to a Muslim.

When I was a student, I drove a friend from Libya to the local Meijer grocery store. In the car, he explained to me how the whole world would become Muslim, whether it wanted to or not, before the end times would come. He apologized for being blunt, but explained that this is simply what all Muslims believe.

It was the first time I'd heard that, and it got those wheels turning in my brain - the kind of wheels that public schools and politicians and the media don't like to be activated.

If the reign of the Mahdi (a mysterious figure of the apocalypse) and Jesus Christ (they use Him for their own purposes when convenient) is going to come after the whole world becomes Muslim by force, what does that mean for my family, children, city, state, country, and civilization?

Is the "peace" being offered us actually "peace" at the point of a sword?

I don't hate Muslims, but I do love my neighbors (Leviticus 19:18).

I don't hate Muslims, but I do believe in a God who does not want me, my family, or my country to follow false gods (Exodus 20:1-6).

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob commanded the Israelites to serve Him and Him alone. He also commanded them to treat foreigners equally under the law and to allow them to live in the land (Leviticus 19:33-34).

But tell me: Is God's command to allow non-Israelites to live in Israel the same as God commanding them to allow prayers to Dagon or Baal to be blasted over loudspeakers in Dearborn, Michigan?

When God commanded the Israelites to have compassion for the refugee, was he commanding them to allow worshippers of Ashtoreth and Molech to erect 90-foot-tall statues of their gods outside Houston, Texas?

The fact that God's commands under the Mosaic law were for a different political system than we have in America is a moot point.

God has not changed. His commands to worship Him only have not changed. That Christians who claim to know him have forgotten this in the name of "empathy" and "pluralism" is an affront to Him.

'If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.' - Jeremiah 18:7-10

It is true that not all Americans are Christians and thus do not follow God. But the heritage of America, like the West, is Christian. The secular West, with its ideals of human rights and liberal arts and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" spring out of the Christian ethos.

Secular figures like Bill Maher, and even avowed atheists like Richard Dawkins are starting to understand that the fate of their secular ideology is directly tied to the fate of Christendom.

If it is true that allowing Islam a foothold in our nations will lead to their destruction, then it is impossible to have a "moderate" immigration policy. It would be like saying we can let in a certain number of cancer cells into our body, as long as those cancer cells are injected legally.

This is why, in the last week, a new brand of Republican has been criticized for this opinion:

That is a moderate solution, actually.

Again, I am not here to preach hate. I do not want to see Muslims in my city - many of whom are peaceful, contributing members of the community, to be vilified or hurt. That is not how the Christian, nor the secular humanist of the West, responds.

But I am here to say that we must - absolutely must - have long and hard discussions about what it means to be an American, what our immigration and deportation policies look like, and what god we wish to serve as a nation.

If the answer is "many gods," then we who follow the God who built the West should consider if Thomas Jefferson's ultimatum about "the course of human events" must be invoked to "to dissolve the political bands" that connect us.

'But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.' - Joshua 24:15

These are not easy questions. They involve world-changing historical events.

What we need at this moment are men of God who are faithful teachers and preachers. Unfortunately, because so many pastors have prostrated themselves to the gods of pluralism and "tolerance," we have a severe shortage of such men.

You need to be preparing. Yes, this includes situational awareness and weapons training (does your church have a security team yet?) and political petitions and judicial reform. Understand, the hour is late. Things will move slowly, and then all at once:

But all this physical preparedness is useless without spiritual training.

If you wish to save the West, you must know the God who built the West.

You can only understand that God if you read His Word. Above everything else, if you wish to defeat the sword of Islam, you must become fluent in that Word.

After all, even if America is destroyed for ignoring God's commands - even if your family is subjugated at the point of the woke or the Islamic sword - if God is God, then His work is unhindered by our downfall. In the grand scheme of things, whether the West collapses or not is insignificant to the Spirit's work in spreading the good news of Jesus Christ.

So if you wish to avoid that fate, this is my application for you today:

Become a man of the God who built the West. Train hard. Train now.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.