March 31, 2026
By the time you read this letter many significant changes will have taken place in the current Iranian war. Yet even now as I write, many senior Iranian officials have been killed — including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
All of this a sobering reminder that everyone, irrespective of age, religious affiliation, or nationality, will die. In the words of King Solomon, “Sheol and Abaddon [the realm of the dead] are never satisfied” (Proverbs 27:20).
In Islam, as in Christianity, there is life after life (barzakh), in that the soul is said to have conscious awareness after death. While Islamic descriptions of hell are beyond gruesome, descriptions of heaven are beckoningly glorious — especially for male martyrs.
The houris of Islamic tradition are particularly intoxicating. Islamic scholars Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck note that they are “described in the Qur’an as chaste, with glancing eyes like pearls or guarded eggs, of equal age or contemporary with the male believers for whom they are intended as a reward, good and lovely, buxom and virginal.”
A fourteen-year-old would-be Palestinian suicide bomber told Israeli troops who disarmed him: “Blowing myself up is the only chance I’ve got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in the Garden of Eden.” Another fourteen-year-old explained how a jihadist recruiter enticed him to join the jihad: “He told me about paradise, about virgins, about Islam.”
This and much more is documented in MUSLIM: What You Need to Know About the World’s Fastest-Growing Religion.
Irrespective of the destruction of Iran as a nuclear power, the Muslim cult — one billion six hundred million strong and growing — is poised to fill a vacuum left by a Western culture slouching inexorably toward Gomorrah.
Demographics alone are alarming. While polygamous Muslims boast a robust birth rate, native Westerners are moving rapidly toward self-extinction. Filling the void are multiplied millions of Muslims who have little or no intention of assimilating into Western culture.
Equally grave is the specter of global Islamic jihadism now exacting mass genocide on Christians in the East and ever-multiplying terrorist attacks throughout the West.
Similarly disquieting is the co-belligerency of fantastically wealthy Saudis spending billions of dollars exporting virulent Islamic Wahhabism to the West.
Consider yet another Islamic reality. Islam has not only advanced by the sword but continues to advance through migration without assimilation, “as a python swallows its prey — slowly, with a long digestion.” As the late Libyan leader Mu’ammar Gadhafi boasted, multiplied millions are already in Europe, a certain sign that Allah will grant Islam victory — without swords, without guns, without conquest.
Put another way, a civilization that is becoming Islamic demographically will inevitably succumb to Islam politically as well. No need to fly airplanes into buildings when, with patience, those buildings will be under Islamic jurisdictions.
Consider the reality of a Muslim mayor in London. As well as a Muslim mayor of arguably the most significant city in the whole of Western civilization.
While all of this is but a microcosm of the Islamic juggernaut, what begs our attention are potential solutions.
Some suppose that the solution lies in the aggressive use of Western military power. This may be wholly necessary, but it is hardly sufficient.
And, as with military might, political activism plays a necessary yet insufficient role.
We do well to remember that the despotism of militant Islam is not the only enemy. The tyranny of militant egalitarianism, radical individualism, political correctness, and religious pluralism are not magically redeemed by political victories.
Even within the current MAGA revolution, illiberal liberalism continues to hold sway in the educational, entertainment, and environmental industries that create, manipulate, and disseminat ideological constructs that are driving Western civilization in a very dangerous direction.
The only real solution to a disintegrating West and a resurgent Islam is the power of the gospel. A Christian church awakened from a diabetic coma brought on by a steady diet of fast-food Christianity.
Yet it is not enough for Christians to be intellectually equipped to communicate the truth of the gospel via answers, biblical literacy, and countering such cults as Islam. We must also be internally equipped during this anything-but-Christian moment.
As underscored by the apostle Paul, those who are made perfect in Christ do not labor in their own energy — rather with all Christ’s energy, which so powerfully works in us (Colossians 1:29).
The disciples got a glimpse of this inexhaustible energy on the Mount of Transfiguration.
There Peter, James, and John witnessed a dazzling display of uncreated power. The face of Christ “shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light” (Matthew 17:2). Moses and Elijah — who themselves had experienced divine energy — appeared as “a bright cloud covered [the disciples]” (17:5).
They experienced the ultimate Lawgiver, the Archetypal prophet in “glorious splendor” (Luke 9:31), and were themselves enveloped in uncreated energy.
This is the energy that alone is sufficient to empower the body of Christ in the present clash of civilizations. It is the mysterious energy by which we may as yet reclaim the soul of the world against the forces of insistent secularization and Islamic jihad.
I am deeply grateful for those who continue to stand with me and the ministry of the Christian Research Institute, as we proclaim the glories of Christianity to a lost and searching world.
The supreme leader of Iran is now absent from the body but continues to exist for all eternity. The question is: where? The same will be true for each one of us. As such, we do well to heed the words of Christ.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where
thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust
do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there
your heart will be also.”(Matthew 6:19–21)
Your partnership helps us alert many to this eternal reality.
…because Life and Truth matter,
President
P.S. Because of your prayers and support, CRI continues to equip believers — at home and around the world — to stand firm in the truth and resist counterfeit worldviews that ruin lives for time and for eternity. Thank you, again, for standing with us in our vital outreaches.
P.P.S. For your faithfulness in standing shoulder to shoulder with me and the rest of the Christian Research Institute, I would like to send you a copy of my book MUSLIM: What You Need to Know About the World’s Fastest-Growing Religion in thanks. If you already have a copy, I encourage you to reread it at this critical time — and consider obtaining an extra copy or two to share with loved ones.