This past Thursday morning, since our school was closed due to the snow, leaving both the church and school offices vacant for most of the morning, I sat in my office and did a little reading. I found myself chewing on a few stories about professional athletes in various parts of the world who’ve refused to wear team-sponsored rainbow armbands, jerseys, and such before, during, or after competition. The articles mentioned situations going back to 2018. Some of the athletes named gave no particular reason for refusing. Others insisted that competition should be about the sport, not political ideologies. Several noted religious objections.

Interestingly, one hundred percent of the Christians who refused, no matter the country, were reprimanded by their teams and ultimately labeled as bigots by activist organizations. The Muslims who refused, however, experienced no such reaction. In particular, two relatively recent stories stood out.

Back in 2024, Sam Morsy, the captain of Ipswich Town, a professional soccer team in England, refused to wear a rainbow armband. He cited Islam’s prohibition. Team leadership supported his position. LGBTQ Inc. did not push back. In that same year, Noussair Mazraoui, a player for Manchester United, refused to wear a team jacket specifically designed to show support for the LGBTQ community. Like Morsy, he cited Islam’s prohibition. The club ultimately scrapped the jackets entirely, so no one on the team had to wear one. Again, the usual suspects were relatively quiet in reply.

I suppose the first thing I’m inclined to say to the athletes who refused to comply is, “Bravo.” I say this regardless of their reasons. What they did required courage, if only because they gambled their own futures based on principle. Still, the obvious remains. Why were the Muslims able to escape public shaming, and the Christians were not? How is it that the Muslim players suffered very little harm to their careers, while the Christian athletes took significant hits?

Interesting, isn’t it, because what unfolded in most cases seemed to be a selective application of moral pressure. If you were a Christian, you were attacked. If you were a Muslim, you were left alone.

I don’t know about you, but the disparity exposes something altogether troubling to me. What appears to be being enforced is not some sort of universal moral standard, but it’s more of a power calculus. Christian beliefs are manhandled. Muslim beliefs, by contrast, are probed with gentleness. I doubt it’s because of some newfound respect for religion. It’s because of something else entirely.

At a minimum, it’s the fear of being considered Islamophobic. At most, it’s risk management. It’s an unspoken acknowledgement of the potential for violent extremism. I can only imagine what would happen if a crowd of LGBTQ activists went screeching through one of the more balkanized Muslim neighborhoods in London, calling out the religious community as shameful and unloving. You can get away with such things in Christian communities. But that’s because Christians don’t have a history of driving trucks through gatherings or blowing themselves up in the middle of crowds. And so, to demonize Christian athletes for their religious apprehensions but not the Muslim athletes has an air of risk management.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that such selective outrage undermines the very claims of diversity and tolerance and acceptance and fairness and inclusion and all the other buzz words that LGBTQ Inc. claims it desires. And yet, if conscience is only respected when it belongs to some and not others, then the movement isn’t being honest about its real agenda.

What all of this suggests—uncomfortably, but plainly—is that Christianity itself is the real target. But why? Because, in the end, as my friend Charlie Kirk so often insisted, the issue is not necessarily cultural or political but spiritual. In principle, there’s no need for LGBTQ Inc. to attack Islam. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Seen through that lens, the pattern starts to make a little more sense.

In any war, effort is always concentrated where the real enemy exists. You don’t waste resources battering positions that want the same things you do. You certainly don’t provoke like-minded forces that are stronger than you for fear they might fire back. You focus instead on the fronts that can open into the lands you want to conquer. Christianity occupies that space.

That’s why Christian conviction draws the real fire. It really is the last major moral framework in the West that openly challenges the reigning cultural orthodoxy while refusing to play by its rules of power and intimidation. And perhaps what makes it so appetizing is that Christianity has no doctrine that encourages or glorifies violence, insisting that by killing others, the divine is pleased enough to reward the killer.

That said, violence is sometimes thrust upon Christians. When it is, we have every right to self-defense, which could lead to a persecutor’s messy end. Still, we do not seek it out. We do not believe God rewards us when we kill others. We live as Saint Paul insisted: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). Knowing this about us marks us as relatively low risk but potentially high reward. And so, from there, the assumption is that once the Christian front collapses, the rest of the cultural terrain will fall into line on its own. Beyond that, what replaces Christianity is almost beside the point. Who cares, so long as Christ and His followers are crushed. That’s a spiritual agenda, more so than anything else.

But here’s the thing. The Lord wondered rhetorically, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). And yet, even as the Church might not grow but shrink, Christ promised that the Gospel would never be conquered, and the gates of hell would never prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18). Christianity will stand to the End of Days. Those promises reframe everything. They remind us that the pressures being applied right now are by no means new, nor are they unexpected. The Bible has not hidden from believers that faithfulness would be costly, that allegiance to Christ would eventually put us at odds with whatever spirit happens to rule the present age. That said, what is new is the packaging. Right now, it seems the ruling spirit looks like activists jackbooting to the tune of tolerance and inclusion while finding every conceivable way to justify Christian exclusion and moral coercion.

Nevertheless, whatever the persecution—regardless of its form or the generation in which it’s being exacted—none of it changes the Christian trajectory. The Christian response is not panic or retreat. It’s certainly not bitterness or rage. It’s courage—quiet, steady, and unyielding courage—rooted in the confidence that Christ will have the last word, whether the persecuting crowd approves of that word or not.

Faithfulness has never meant safety. But it has always meant trust. Empowered by the Holy Spirit for such trust, we can go into any challenge with the otherworldly capability to confess Christ clearly and without hatred. What’s more, we can do this without fear because we know to whom we belong, and that He is worth the cost—or as the sign in front of our church here in Hartland reads at this very moment: “Christ is worth more than what you fear losing because of Him.”