The lions are gone. The cathedrals are museums. Western Christianity has spent a century sanding off every sharp edge, apologizing for every crusade, and reducing the faith to therapeutic moralistic deism: be nice, recycle, and don't judge anyone's bedroom. We turned the Lion of Judah into a plush toy.
Meanwhile the world kept its claws.
Violent extremist movements — of many stripes — continue to strike across the globe. Europe endures attacks so routinely they barely make the news cycle. In parts of Britain, criminal grooming networks operated for decades while authorities looked away out of woke fear and political paralysis. In France, churches are vandalised daily. In Nigeria, entire villages vanish under the assault of armed militias whose victims are overwhelmingly Christian.
Authoritarian states — from Beijing to Tehran — persecute believers of every tradition: Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners. Faith itself is treated as a threat.
Soft Christianity doesn't scare anyone — except its own parishioners, who are leaving in droves.
Enter Raymond Ibrahim's The Two Swords of Christ, and its unapologetic message: the Church was born in blood, survived by steel, and thrived when it remembered that Christ once told His disciples to sell their cloak and buy a sword (Luke 22:36). Not as a metaphor for scented candles. A sword.
For centuries the Knights Templar and Hospitallers were Christendom's immune system: mailed fists wrapped around rosaries. They prayed the Psalms in the morning and defended the innocent by noon. They weren't "problematic." They were necessary. When Jerusalem fell in 1187, it was because the West had grown complacent. When the Holy Land was defended, it was because men remembered how to be both lions and Christians.
Today we face a triple threat that nice-guy Christianity is powerless against:
1.Extremist ideologies, whether religious or secular, that target vulnerable communities and despise the West's moral heritage.
2.Secular authoritarianism and technocratic overreach, which treat any loyalty higher than the government as subversion.
3.Cultural collapse from within — isolation, addiction, fatherlessness, demographic freefall — where the Church's only answer for decades has been acoustic guitars and a café in the foyer.
None of these yield to hugs.
Muscular Christianity is not about cosplay crusaders or gym-bros tweeting theology between sets. Those are symptoms of a hunger for something stronger than soy lattes and social-justice homilies. It is the recovery of a faith that refuses to surrender the public square, that forms men who protect their families and their civilisation, that forms women who raise the next generation with purpose rather than fragility, and that names evil without a nervous "but…" to appease cultural gatekeepers.
Look where flabby Christianity has brought us:
Empty pews while secular ideologies expand with missionary zeal.
Clergy reluctant to preach Scripture for fear of violating some new speech code.
Young men starved for transcendent purpose, drifting into rage, apathy, or ideologies that at least offer a cause worth dying for.
Meanwhile the data is clear: churches growing among under-30s are those that still preach sin, sacrifice, duty, and victory — Latin Mass parishes, traditional Anglicans, Reformed congregations, serious Baptists. The rainbow-flag "relevant" churches are becoming real-estate opportunities.
We don't need Christianity to become violent. We need it to stop being anemic.
Muscular Christianity means:
Fathers who can quote Scripture and defend their homes.
Ministers prepared to go to court or even jail rather than betray their conscience.
Communities building their own schools, associations, and mutual-aid networks because official institutions increasingly treat them with suspicion.
Young men who channel strength into protecting the vulnerable instead of wasting it online.
Young women who embrace dignity, reverence, and fertility, knowing the future belongs to those who show up for it.
The age of apologizing for historical battles is over. The age of pretending Christians were always the villains is over. The enemy is no longer at the gates; he's on the streaming services and in the HR department.
Christendom's greatest warriors were also its most devout monks. They knew the two swords — spiritual and temporal — were both gifts from the same Lord. One without the other produces either cowards who lose the world or zealots who lose their souls.
We tried the coward route for a century. It didn't work.
It's time to recover the second sword. Not out of hatred, but out of love — love for our children, for our civilisation, and for a faith that refuses to become a museum relic while the world writes new chapters in blood.
The Lion of Judah never became a lamb to be more relatable.
He became a lamb so that one day He could return as a lion.
Until then, someone has to hold the line.
That someone is us.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/a_return_to_muscular_christianity.html