I find it hard to share Doug Bandow’s enthusiasm for the minimal religious freedom allowed Christians in Kuwait (“Letter From Kuwait: Religious Freedom in the Gulf,” Correspondence, November 2002).

While Kuwait does allow Christian clergymen to minister to their flocks, it is those who have never heard the Gospel who primarily need the evangelist.  Is it right to celebrate when Christians are forbidden to carry out the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19,20) by an Islamic state?  Saint Paul’s concern applies here: “How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?  And how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14).

The best instruction conservatives can derive from Mr. Bandow’s letter involves how a country can prevent its predominant religion from being displaced.  While the U.S. government continues to allow almost every conceivable religious group to enter America to do all the proselytizing it wants, nearly all Muslim countries forbid such immigration.  This may be extremist and oppressive, but it does show the great contrast between the Muslim world—fiercely devoted to preserving its religious culture and heritage—and the post-Christian, secular West, whose governments not only allow but encourage mass Islamic immigration, which hastens the death of the Christendom that has undergirded European civilization for millennia.

        —Kenneth Reynolds
The Bronx, NY

Mr. Bandow Replies:

Obviously, no Christian can celebrate the strictures, formal or informal, against evangelism in Kuwait.  But the context is important: As I noted, “it is rare to find a Muslim country where Christians are not routinely discriminated against, oppressed, and even killed.”  Moreover, freely operating churches offer a public witness to Christianity; tens of thousands of Christians, working in various homes and businesses, act as informal ambassadors for Christ.  Thus, Kuwait is, as I reported, “a relative oasis of freedom” in the Muslim world.