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I am trying to remember the last time a Christian movement tantalized the world.  What soulful act would the Christian community engage in to counter the Islamic world of self-righteous beheading of people?  I am looking for the goodness in both religions.  
But now I remember.  I spent 20 years researching the Milwaukee 14, a group of laymen and men of cloth who raided nine Milwaukee draft board offices and burned draft cards with homemade napalm.   I interviewed 9 of the 14 total.   They all spent a year in Wisconsin state prisons except for Michael Cullen, who spent time in a federal prison because he was an Irish immigrant.   Cullen and his wife, Nettie, started the Casa Maria Catholic Worker house with nothing but donations and faith after Cullen quit his insurance job.  He was a former seminarian who wanted to live a life of Jesus directly to the people.  They lived from their bootstraps, prayer, and unexpected bounty.  
I became lifelong friends with another draft card burner, Bob Graf, a Jesuit, who to this day fights for justice in Milwaukee.  He started a movement in Milwaukee a few years ago with a petition in which he requested that the $1.1 million gained by the Catholic Church in the sale of their three parishes in north-central Milwaukee (St. Nicholas, St. Albert, and Blessed Trinity/Holy Redeemer) be used to establish a fund to help the poor in the same neighborhood.  After at least three years of struggling, he won the fight, and vouchers for appliances were issued to the poor through the St. Vincent de Paul Society.  St. Vincent de Paul also has a program where they make home visits to check on those in poverty.  Before Bob started his campaign to help the poor, the St. Vincent de Paul Society was out of money for home visits.  

I also befriended Father Larry Rosebaugh, who served as a missionary in Central and South America for over 20 years before being killed in a carjacking.  He made the homeless of the street in Recife, Brazil, a joint meal of soup almost every day.  Different people from the community would gather up the ingredients, and then they cooked and ate it together.  Rosebaugh also scaled a nuclear power plant in Texas to protest the making of nuclear weapons.  
As I look around me, I understand that there is a vacancy in Christian ministry on a large scale.  There is no void in service, as the city of Duluth could not operate without Lutheran Social Services and Chum, which provide subsidies, shelter, counseling, advocacy for SSI programs, daily meals, health screenings, bill assistance, and debt consolidation.   There is just not a vocalized central message that arises from the conglomeration of the daily American struggle.  I am tired of looking at megachurch preacher Joel Osteen with his polished white teeth on TV preaching about prosperity and saying, “God will bless ya. He will multiply your blessings.”  Joel Osteen is no Father Groppi, who crossed the 16th Street viaduct in Milwaukee, which divided Blacks and whites, to protest fair housing practices by the city.  Joel Osteen never spent weeks in jail for storming the state capitol in Madison and holding it hostage to prevent welfare cuts like Father Groppi did.
On the other hand, the American media doesn’t really project content Islamic people who practice outreach and charity.   We only see head-slayers, most recently in an American convert who sliced the head off of a middle-aged woman in an Oklahoman grocery store.   My friend Rownak Anwar, a Muslim from Bangladesh, started her own aromatherapy store in downtown Los Angeles, prays five times a day, and attends the mosque weekly on Friday.   I went with her and her math genius friend Furida a few times.  The only annoying thing was that I had to cover my head with a scarf and pray in the back.  At this mosque in Los Angeles on Vermont Avenue, the men stand and pray in the front and the women in the back.  Everyone does their prayers in unison with the same eurythmic body motion.  I never felt any hostility or rejection in the mosque.  
However, I would never turn back on my Christian faith.  My friend married a Pakistani driving school instructor who needed his green card.  They never had sex because he had a real wife with three kids.  She did it to unite the world after 9/11/2001.  She thought a Muslim-Christian marriage might strengthen America.  My Tajikistani boyfriend-turned-actor tried to suppress his Islamic faith when we first started dating.  He then began praying on his knees three to five times a day.  He was modernized, or tried to be in his pre-washed jeans.  He even prayed after relations, but I don’t know if that was for repentance or mercy.  And yet he had a low tolerance for Israel that rubbed me the wrong way.
I wrote this article to answer a question posed to myself: If religious movements are so effective, why have Muslims killed over two million of their own in the last 15 years?  Iraq alone lost 75,000 soldiers in the eight-year war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, not even counting the wounded.  Fifty thousand Iraqis became prisons of war.  Saddam Hussein killed over 100,000 Kurds and wiped out over 4,000 northern Iraqi Kurdish villages after those Kurds sided with Iran during the eight-year war.  Over 300,000 Syrians have either died or become refugees in the last four-year-plus battle, not all of whom are Muslim.  
The Shias hate the Sunnis, the Sunnis hate the Shias.  In 1991, in a revolutionary uprising in Basra, Iraq, right after the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein sent four units of the Republican Guard to wipe out that city.  The tanks of the Republican Guard said “la shi’a ba’da al-yawm” (“No more Shia after today”).  Six hundred thousand Shias were killed by Hussein between 1991 and 2003.   Mass graves were found by the U.S. military.  I believe that not more than five percent of the American Christian community would die for their faith.

With over two million deaths of Muslims by Muslim killings and 250,000 civilians dying by the hands of the U.S. government in Iraq since 2003, why is Islam the fastest-growing religion?   Is it because Christianity no longer fights with the sword?  Or they can’t spread the message of faith and love without offending somebody?   As a Christian, would I march across a viaduct to help the poor, or would I be a modern Christian who dismisses the poor as lazy and unproductive?  Tea Party hijackers have completed half the face of modern-day Christianity, making anyone in need the enemy.   Corporate deceivers have prevented Christians in mainstream America from projecting any other merciful view but individual responsibility.  The only place to find true Christianity is at your local church and their city-wide missions program.  Gloria Dei Lutheran in Duluth houses homeless people right inside the church. They feed the poor and the welcome the disenfranchised.  
If anyone were to watch headline news, both religions would seem intolerable. Agnostic journalists sometimes characterize the U.S. Army as rogue Christians fighting Islamic battles.  No matter the religious labels, the only heroes are the ones who truly sacrifice and put others first.  It is only the silent giver whom you won’t find on the news but who is an asset to the community without anyone knowing who he or she is.