Six years ago this week, a French schoolteacher was beheaded because an Islamist extremist believed he deserved to die for showing his students a picture.
His name was Samuel Paty. He was forty-seven years old. On October 16, 2020, he was murdered near Paris after using caricatures of Muhammad in a lesson about freedom of expression. Three years later, another teacher, Dominique Bernard, was killed in an Islamist attack. Last week, schools across France observed moments of silence for both men.
But now, another story is unfolding in France, quieter and far larger than any demonstration in the streets. The country has lost its Christian majority years ago. Pew Research Center estimates that Christians accounted for 46 percent of its population in 2020. Across Europe, the Christian share fell to 67 percent, while those claiming no religion grew to 25 percent. Muslims accounted for approximately 6 percent.
Europe’s greatest religious shift has been away from Christian identity. Islam has grown and political Islam deserves scrutiny. In 2025, France’s Interior Ministry examined Muslim Brotherhood influence through religious organizations and associations. Yet a religious statistic cannot reveal what individual neighbors believe about violence or government.
America has its own questions to answer. In 2007, 78 percent of American adults identified as Christians. By 2023–2024, the figure was 62 percent, though the decline has slowed in recent years. Muslims represented about 1.2 percent of American adults. The numbers describe a nation where fewer people even claim the name of Christ. What happens when a people inherit the language of Christianity and gradually forget its message?
To understand the religious disagreement, we ought to understand Islam itself. Islam means submission. Muslim means one who submits. Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and later claimed to receive revelations through Gabriel. His wife Khadijah became his first follower. In 622 he fled to Medina, where he became a religious and civil leader. After his death in 632, Muslim rule extended across North Africa and into Spain. The sword played a part in that history, alongside migration and family life.
Islam teaches that God is one, the Creator and Judge of all things. Muslims believe in angels, prophets, resurrection heaven, and hell. They honor Jesus only as a prophet, and they regard the Quran as God’s final revelation. Its familiar duties include confession of faith, regular prayer, giving to the poor, fasting during Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca when possible.
There is a great deal of similarity, isn’t there, between some of these teachings and Scripture? We also believe in one Creator, judgment and the obligation to care for the needy. That should not surprise us. But there is a great cleavage between the Islamic faith and the gospel. We must never play up the similarities and ignore the immense difference that remains.
That difference begins with Jesus Christ.
Muslims honor His virgin birth and call Him a great prophet. Yet Islam rejects His deity. When Thomas looks upon the risen Christ and says, “My Lord and my God,” Christianity hears a confession of worship. When John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he identifies Jesus as eternal God, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. A prophet can tell us what God commands. Only the Son of God can accomplish what helpless sinners need.
Then we come to the cross. Mainstream Islam denies that Jesus was crucified, as the Quran teaches in Surah 4:157. The New Testament is full of eyewitness testimony that the One who lived was the One who died, and the One who died was the One who rose again. Christ foretold His death. He went willingly to Calvary. There He bore the penalty of sin in the place of guilty people, satisfying God’s justice and opening the way for sinners to be reconciled to Him.
Consider what that means for you and me. Our greatest problem is more serious than the political or religious changes taking place around us. We have sinned against a holy God. Every selfish ambition, every hidden cruelty, every proud thought belongs to a record we cannot erase by promising to do better. We need forgiveness. We need righteousness through a Savior whose obedience is perfect and whose sacrifice is sufficient.
Here the New Testament gives us forgiveness and that lovely legal word justification. The righteousness of Christ is imputed to us on the basis of Another’s merits. His death was a substitution. The believer stands before God forgiven, declared righteous through faith in Jesus Christ. “For by grace are ye saved through faith,” Paul writes, “and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Our hope rests on what Christ has finished, rather than on what we might someday manage to accomplish.
What a tragedy to know the name of Jesus and miss the salvation He came to bring. What a greater tragedy if Christians become so occupied with watching the spread of Islam that we lose our eagerness to tell Muslims about Christ.
When Paul entered Athens, his spirit was stirred by the idols he saw. He reasoned with the people in the marketplace and proclaimed the God who made them, calling them to repentance and announcing the resurrection. His concern for false worship sent him toward lost people with the gospel. It should do the same for us. The Muslim family down the street deserves the truth about the Savior.
We can study what is happening in France and take seriously the dangers of violent extremism. We can recognize that America’s Christian identity has weakened. But our churches must ask a more searching question: are we still proclaiming Christ crucified and risen with the urgency these souls deserve?
It’s time for the Christian church to awaken to the fact that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
That still remains the message. The great need of the Muslim. The great need of Europe. And the great need of America.
At the University of Iowa, a student stood before Ben Shapiro and asked a question that had little to do with elections, borders or the future of the Republican Party. Why, he wanted to know, was Shapiro unwilling to become a Christian? The answer, given on October 8 at a Turning Point USA event, traveled far beyond the room. For a moment, the argument moved from the future of America to the destiny of a human soul.
Shapiro explained the teaching of his Orthodox Jewish faith. Gentiles, he said, can enter heaven by keeping seven basic commandments called the Noahide Laws. Avoid murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy and the other forbidden acts. Then came his astonishing conclusion: “If you do those things, you’re in heaven.”
Shapiro was answering a sincere question about Judaism. Afterward, he encouraged the student to keep believing in Jesus and attending church. Those details belong in any honest account. Yet the central claim deserves a Christian response, especially when spoken from a stage supported and admired by so many who profess Christ.
Seven commandments. A place in heaven and a Savior apparently unnecessary to the journey.
There is a reason this answer can sound reasonable in a political auditorium. Citizens who disagree about worship can agree that stealing is wrong and judges should punish evil. Such agreement can steady a community. Yet a country’s need for decent neighbors and a sinner’s need for reconciliation with God are different questions.
The Noahide Laws belong to rabbinic Jewish tradition, where they describe moral obligations for Gentiles. Several of their commands agree with Scripture, and obedience to God’s moral law is good. Our disagreement concerns something far more serious than the number of commandments. Can the hands that have sinned somehow wash themselves clean by keeping a few more rules?
Consider Abraham. Long before Israel stood at Sinai, God promised an aging, childless man descendants as numerous as the stars. Abraham looked into a dark sky and believed the Lord. Genesis 15:6 says that God counted his faith as righteousness. The father of the Jewish people had nothing with which to purchase that verdict. He received God’s promise.
Then picture the first Passover. Inside small homes in Egypt, families waited for judgment to pass through the land. On their doorposts was the blood of a lamb. Scripture tells us nothing about those households having earned exemption through superior conduct. Their safety rested on what God had provided and commanded. The blood stood between the people and the judgment coming through the night.
At Sinai, the rescued nation received God’s law. Notice the order. God delivered them from bondage before the commandments were given. The law revealed His holiness, exposed their sin and taught them how a redeemed people ought to live. Sacrifices followed because Israel, like the rest of humanity, could never produce the spotless obedience God’s holiness requires. At every altar, worshipers faced the cost of guilt. Beneath the priest’s hands lay an unanswered question: Who can finally take sin away?
That question runs through the Old Testament until it reaches Jesus Christ.
Paul understood the Jewish Scriptures and loved his own people enough to grieve over their unbelief. His words in Romans 10 carry the weight of affection: “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.” He knew the danger of seeking righteousness through one’s own efforts. The answer he preached was Christ, the fulfillment of the law for everyone who believes.
I think of the people who sit in the pews of our little church in the Missouri Ozarks. Some have buried people they loved and I am sure others bring regrets they never speak aloud. Down the pew, a grandmother remembers words she wishes she could take back. Even the church member whose neighbors call him a good man knows what hides behind his Sunday clothes. What can I say to such people? Keep seven rules? Try harder tomorrow? Bring the Lord a cleaner record than yesterday’s?
They need better news than that. So do I.
On a hill outside Jerusalem, Jesus went willingly beneath the judgment sinners deserve. The Son of God lived the life we owed and laid down the life we forfeited. Nails tore His flesh. Darkness covered the land. He bore sin and its penalty in the place of His people and on the third day He rose from the grave. His resurrection announces that the sacrifice was accepted and death was defeated. The gospel calls us to repent and trust Him, to receive a righteousness we could never manufacture.
That is why Shapiro’s statement cannot be treated as a harmless variation on Christian belief. We can respect his right to explain Judaism and still say, with the apostles, that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone. Nor should criticism of a doctrine turn into contempt for Jewish people. Paul prayed for his people with tears. Christian witness should carry the same urgency and affection.
What, then, about Turning Point USA? Charlie Kirk welcomed Shapiro as a speaker at AmericaFest in 2024. His appearance on a TPUSA stage is no recent theological revolution. The Iowa gathering was a civic event; TPUSA states that speakers express their own views rather than its official positions. Meanwhile, TPUSA Faith publicly describes its Make Heaven Crowded Tour as a call to repentance and faith in Jesus. Those facts deserve the same visibility as the viral clip.
Still, a Christian donor has every reason to ask careful questions. Where does my money go? Am I supporting civic advocacy, a distinctly Christian ministry, or some combination? How clearly does the organization distinguish its political partnerships from its proclamation of the gospel? TPUSA allows gifts to be directed toward particular departments, including TPUSA Faith. A thoughtful answer begins by knowing what you are helping to fund, rather than blaming an entire organization for one guest’s theology. The local church has its own calling, carried out through ordinary preaching, prayer, discipleship and mercy. Christians should never confuse supporting a movement with supporting that work.
The deeper danger may be closer to home. American Christians can become so eager for someone to defend our values that we stop asking what he believes about our Savior. We can mistake the applause of a friendly crowd for the triumph of the gospel. Even worse, we can condemn someone else’s confidence in good deeds while quietly trusting our church attendance, our moral convictions or our influence to commend us to God.
Christ did not go to Calvary to add an eighth rule to a respectable life. He went because our best record could never erase our worst sin. Political causes will rise and fall. Famous voices will eventually fall silent. The crucified and risen Jesus remains the only refuge for guilty people, whether they stand behind a microphone, write a check, or sit unnoticed in a country church.
Seven laws can instruct the conscience. Only Christ can cleanse it.
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