Despite vicious attacks by Nation of Islam leaders on Christianity, the black church has barely responded. The result has been that the NOI has proved a bridge for African-Americans to move in large numbers toward Islam. Their number today approaches a million, and the director of Project Joseph, a rare Christian effort to fend off Islamic advances among black Americans, states that “If the conversion rate continues unchanged, Islam could become the dominant religion in Black urban areas by the year 2020.”1
In her self-published reply to Louis Farrakhan, Dodds does not mince words, calling the NOI leader “an antichrist and a false prophet steered by racist views ... . His spiritual father is Satan.” To show that he “teaches false doctrine,” she closely analyses in detail four of Farrakhan’s notable speeches in 1995-96, including his address at the Million Man March. She is particularly upset at the way he tries to “convince unstudied Christians that Muslims and Christians worship the same God and that the Bible and the Koran basically say the same thing.” Toward this end, she finds he again and again “takes biblical scripture and perverts it.” For example, he quotes the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want”) to refer to the Muslim deity. She also points to many inconsistencies in Farrakhan’s statements, his close ties to dictators like Mu`ammar al-Qadhdhafi,and the unspeakable blasphemy of his likening himself to God. Whether Dodds is a lonely voice in the wilderness or the cutting edge of major black Christian response is yet to be seen.
2 Mike Wilson, quoted in Andrés Tapia, “Churches Wary of Inner-city Islamic Inroads,” Christianity Today, Jan. 10, 1994.
