EPIC City is a planned 402-acre development proposed by the East Plano Islamic Center (shown above). It would be in unincorporated Collin and Hunt counties, roughly forty miles northeast of Dallas near the city of Josephine. It would include a new mosque, more than 1,000 single and multi-family homes, a community college and K-12 faith-based school, an outreach center, senior housing, sports facilities, and various commercial developments.
In this essay, I argue that Islam represents a unique existential threat to the pluralistic foundations of Western society, particularly the American Republic’s commitment to religious liberty and church-state separation.
To illuminate this position, I begin with the nineteenth-century German philosopher and Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, whose writings on “The Jewish Question” critique the demands by Jews for political emancipation in a Christian-dominated Prussia. Bauer’s insistence that true political freedom requires abandoning religion as a civic identity provides a historical lens for examining group-based claims in a secular state. While I reject Bauer’s blanket prescription for Judaism and Christianity—religions compatible with free conscience and voluntary association—I repurpose his logic in a selective way to explore Islam’s incompatibility with Western secularism and suggest how the West should manage the conflict.
In the case of Islam, particularly in the United States, demanding Muslims abandon their faith runs afoul of religious liberty. Given this limitation, I argue that Muslim immigration to the West should be sharply restricted and that authorities assess not only the suitability of Muslim noncitizens for naturalization, but also determine whether those naturalized individuals involved in subversive activities should retain citizenship status. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam’s totalitarian ambitions demand exceptional treatment. There is no right to immigrate to America or to become an American citizen, and the nation should be highly selective in determining who gets to come and live among us.
Bringing Bauer into the discussion not only deepens the reader’s understanding of the problem of religious exceptionalism in the West, but it also sets the stage for the dialectical method I deploy in this essay. Drawing on Hegel’s method and a revision of Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history, a revision that conceptually liberates culture from the strict base-superstructure model, I show why tolerating Islam leads not to synthesis, but to regression and self-annihilation.
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In his mid-nineteenth century essays “The Jewish Question” (published as a pamphlet) and “The Capacity of Present‑Day Jews and Christians to Become Free” (published in the Swiss journal Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz alongside essays by other Young Hegelians), German philosopher and theologian Bruno Bauer argues that Jews in German society, then the Prussian state, should not demand political emancipation while remaining attached to Judaism as a distinct political and religious identity, where they were treated and determined themselves—legally and socially—as members of a separate community, with distinctive laws and obligations. A free and modern state, Bauer held, must be secular and universal rather than appearing to privilege any particular religion, and therefore, Jews would ultimately have to abandon their faith as a political identity to become recognized as full citizens by the polity.
Bauer sought a solution to the problem of the ethnic and religious enclave, a problem that persists into the present day. By the mid-nineteenth century, the formal ghetto and legally-enforced segregation in Prussia were largely things of the past, especially with the 1812 Edict under King Frederick William III that granted Prussian Jews citizenship rights. However, Jewish life was still largely conducted within the confines of informal ethnic and religious enclaves, that is, districts or neighborhoods where Jews concentrated in higher densities due to a combination of cultural, economic, historical, and social factors. This historical situation parallels today’s phenomenon of the Muslim enclave, which we see in America and across many European nations. EPIC City is just one instance of a larger problem.
Because both Judaism and Christianity are, in Bauer’s view, particularistic religions, he argues that neither could claim political rights based on religious belonging. True emancipation requires the abolition of religion as a political category altogether, so that individuals would appear before the state only as citizens rather than as members of a religious community. Had there been a Muslim problem in Bauer’s day, his logic would encompass that group, as well.
I’m sympathetic to the spirit of Bauer’s argument, but there are problems with it. It is, moreover, given our focus here on the United States, crucial to distinguish Bauer’s views from those of America’s founding fathers concerning the promise of religious liberty. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, while the best possible solution to the problems of religious conflict and theocratic rule, limits the nation’s ability to deal with an exceptional ideology like Islam.
Apart from the demand that religion disappear altogether from public life, Bauer’s formulation might superficially appear to parallel the arrangement between church and state articulated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet there is an important distinction to be made: a demand for rights as a member of a particular group differs from the general freedoms of conscience and association granted equally to all individuals. The Founders of the American Republic— Jefferson, Madison, and Washington—embraced a model of religious liberty that protects rather than eliminates religious identity.
Bauer rejects the idea that Jews could claim political rights as Jews, because he believed the modern state should recognize only abstract citizens rather than religious communities. By contrast, the framework embodied in the First Amendment does not grant special political privileges to any religious group; rather, it protects the individual freedom to associate, believe, organize, and worship according to conscience. In the American system, Jews, Christians, or atheists and deists (which some of the founders were) do not receive rights because they belong to those groups, but instead enjoy rights as individuals; as individuals, they remain free to form such communities and practice their beliefs without coercion or state interference—even in the raising of their children—but they are entitled to no group privileges.
Whether those Muslims already present in the United States should become citizens depends on whether such a status benefits the nation. A nation must be able to control who enters the country and who should partake in the blessings of liberty. However, the matter cannot be determined solely on an individual basis; individuals come to America bearing their culture and religion. They are not blank slates easily assimilated into the body politic. Therefore, the question of whether Muslims as a group benefit or harm America must also be addressed. Crucially, the difference between Bauer’s view and that of the Founders is between an objection to group-based claims to political recognition and an appeal to universal liberties that allow individuals to form and maintain religious associations voluntarily without government recognition. This is the problem we must work out.
For Bauer, Jews sought citizenship but not the emancipation of Prussian society from Judaism; they desired rights without responsibilities, that is, inclusion in civic and political life while remaining an exclusive community. Jews were asking for political emancipation while still maintaining Judaism as a distinct communal identity, which Bauer interpreted as a request for a special exemption rather than genuine equality. What was sought was full citizenship rights, equal legal standing, and access to public office without the Prussian state first undergoing a broader transformation, i.e., becoming fully secular and abandoning its Christian character.
Bauer sees this demand as asking for inclusion on unequal terms: Jews want to enter the existing political order as Jews, while the state remains structured around Christian norms. Bauer accuses Jews of egoism, a term drawing from Young Hegelian ideas of particularism versus universality (religion inherently fosters the former): Jews demand rights and inclusion for themselves as a distinct group, but refuse the reciprocal responsibility of fully dissolving their particular religious identity into the universal, abstract citizenship the modern state requires.
All this may still feel like a distinction without a difference, especially in light of Thomas Jefferson’s assurances in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli that the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion. Weren’t the Founding Fathers also seeking a secular state in which no religious group enjoyed privileges on that basis?
Context matters: the existing Prussian state was officially Christian, and therefore, in Bauer’s view, Jews were effectively asking to be recognized as full citizens without renouncing their religious particularism. His contention was that Jews should be embracing the principle of universalism instead, indicated by the dissolution of religious allegiance. To his credit, Bauer is not singling out the Jews, but instead insisting that genuine political freedom requires both Jews and Christians to abandon religion as a political identity.
As for the Treaty of Tripoli, without getting into the matter of diplomatic language (Jefferson neither wrote nor negotiated the treaty), Jefferson himself, most notably in his 1802 reply to the Danbury Baptists, famously describes a wall of separation between church and state, aligning with disestablishment. His approach (as well as that of Madison and others) concerned preventing government coercion or favoritism toward religion, not eradicating religious influence from public life or requiring citizens to abandon faith for civic participation.
To put a finer point on the matter, Bauer would likely regard the church-state arrangement foundational to the American Republic as too accommodating to religion; it preserves religious identity within public life rather than dissolving it into purely secular citizenship. The American system, by contrast, does not demand the abolition of religious communities, but rather tolerates and protects their existence insofar as they are voluntary associations formed by individuals exercising their freedom of conscience.
In Bauer’s view, Jews and Christians could only achieve full equality if their faith no longer structured their civic or legal identity, and the Prussian state lost its Christian identity. In the United States, despite what the Tripoli treaty suggests, Christian ethics are foundational to the Republic, so the idea that Christians, who then comprised—and continue to comprise—a majority, could no longer structure their civic or legal identity by its lights was a nonstarter. Think of it this way: how could a just state allow secularists a seat at the table in law and policy-making, and judicial matters, but disallow Christians? One would have to assume all citizens are secular in orientation for this to work, and this situation is plainly untrue presently and so unlikely in the future as to be practically impossible.
My atheist self is sympathetic to the disappearance of religion—much more so in the way I thought about this matter in the past—but only as an emergent or organic development, not as a requirement for citizenship or as a restriction on the participation of Christians in civic and political life. Because in principle I advocate for the freedoms of association and conscience, which allow citizens to retain their religious identities and their practices (again, within reason), as well as participation in civic and political affairs, I cannot, as a general rule, follow Bauer here. At the same time, the arrangements fostered by the principle restrict the nation’s ability to confront threats to it presented by an exceptional religion.
Because the American Republic is clearly founded on Christian ethics (something I have come to appreciate of late), however much decoupled from theism (suggested by appeals to the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God in the Declaration of Independence), it is worth retaining the majority presence of Christians in the United States. I have an essay coming out soon on this matter, which will complete a trilogy of essays on the moral ontology necessarily accompanying Christian ethics, two of which I have already published: Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights; Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument.
Islam presents a unique threat not only to the future of Christian ethics and the moral ontology underpinning it (whether that ontology is divine command or natural history) but also to the foundation of a pluralistic society that generally tolerates free association and conscience. It is because of this special case that I have endeavored to square my advocacy of religious pluralism with my commitment to that principle as a universal proposition. (See Revisiting the Paradox of Tolerating Intolerance—The Occasion: The Election of Zohran Mamdani; Defensive Intolerance: Confronting the Existential Threat of Enlightenment’s Antithesis; Human Nature and the Limits of Tolerance: When Relativism Becomes Nihilism).
Thus, while rejecting Bauer’s position that Jews and Christians should abandon their faith, I cannot say the same for Islam—at least, as I will elaborate here, if they are to keep their faith, they should keep it some other place. This is a case where abstract principle confronts concrete survival. One might argue that the role Jews and Christians play in civic and political life is analogous to concerns about the increasing role of Muslims in those spheres. But unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam does not subscribe to the church-state arrangement foundational to the American Republic, and therefore must be regarded differently.
This balance of this essay explains why I have arrived at this position. But before proceeding, so there is no confusion, I want to note for the record that I have been highly critical of Christian nationalism (see The Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism). The reader should not think I am un homme naïf regarding the problems of religious extremism.
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This essay was prompted by a recent X post by Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles. Ogles has upset people by saying that Muslims are out of place in America. I think it is useful to emphasize that that’s not exactly like saying that Jews don’t belong in Palestine, since the Jews are indigenous to that patch of land. It is not even the reverse of that, since the Jew is not merely a subscriber to Judaism; the percentage of Jews who identify as secular or non‑religious is quite large (and promising). In Israel, surveys find that around 40–45 percent of Jews define themselves as secular, with many Jews identifying as “traditional‑non‑religious,” thus a majority of that proportion are not observant in a religious sense.
To be a Jew, like being an Arab or Hispanic, is an ethnic designation (this is another problem with Bauer’s essays). This is not true of the Muslim (or the Christian, for that matter). A Muslim may be of any ethnicity. A child is born Muslim only in the sense that he will be indoctrinated to be one by his family and community, and marked by circumcision (both of which are permitted in America’s church-state arrangement).
Using perhaps a provocative analogy, a Muslim is a man who subscribes to that ideology in the same way a fascist is a man who subscribes to fascism. In the latter, reducing the number of adherents to the ideology requires diminishing the fascist family and its community. But this applies as much to the former. It also applies to Christianity, except that Christianity is doctrinally similar to neither Islam nor fascism, however much left progressives would have us believe otherwise.
One suspects that many of those condemning Ogles find appealing, and some have even chanted the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Free Palestine of what? Jews. Not only Jews, but Christians, as well. This is not to suggest that all Muslims advocate genocide; rather, it is to say that Islamic ambition seeks to convert all Jews and Christians (and every other group on the planet) to Islam, effectively erasing their existence as such. It’s like Bauer’s solution, only not in a secular way, but rather in a theistic one.
This is the same goal sought by fascists, where, as Benito Mussolini famously declared, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” emphasizing the absolute supremacy of the state over the individual or social life. This is the future sought by Islam, which is, as I have noted in several essays, a species of clerical fascism.
Read my comments to Senator Chris Von Hollen’s post on criticizing Ogles (see above). This is the fatal flaw of the argument Van Hollen and those of his ilk commonly make. Like fascism, Islam is a uniquely pernicious ideology. It is incompatible with Western values (some might say even more than fascism, since fascism emerged in Europe). Put frankly, it does not belong here.
If Ogles had said that fascists don’t belong in America, would he have gotten the same attention? Most progressives would have responded with, “Duh” (even if they don’t actually oppose such totalitarian arrangements in practice). For progressives, the presence of Muslims is not merely tolerance for different religions (progressives are hardly tolerant people), but a political strategy.
Readers likely note that I have shifted Ogles’ points from the type of person bearing the ideology to the ideology itself. Maybe that’s not much of a shift, given that it is the person who bears the ideology that is the practical problem; ideology without adherents presents no special problem. However, unlike race or gender, a man is not stuck with his ideology. He doesn’t have to be a fascist or a Muslim. But since he is, society has to worry about his presence.
I say all this because patriots must insist on the truth that tackling the problem of Islam in America does not entail ethnic or racial discrimination. Blunting the attempt by those who defend the presence of Muslims in the West by wielding the language of racism against those who desire a nation relatively free of Islam is a necessary step in articulating a strategy for dealing with the problem.
At the same time, if we are to remain patriotic, we have to admit that the freedoms of association and conscience—principles of deontological liberalism—present an obstacle to achieving this end. We cannot allow those principles to be the death of us. Indeed, another principle, that of democracy, allows for that foundation to be altered, even abolished. Principles must therefore be considered in light of existential threats to the foundation that establishes them.
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Criticisms of my comment to Von Hollen’s post got me thinking again about what I wrote in the essays I referenced earlier concerning the paradox of tolerating the intolerable. The presence of Muslim enclaves in America, indeed the establishment of entire Islamic cities, is among the intolerable things I had in mind. These are the signs of colonization, and current thinking about the problem hinders Americans from confronting the intolerable.
As Lionel Shriver observed in a recent interview, which I share below, current thinking corrupts the natural human inclination to protect the cultural integrity of communities, local and national (an inclination found in animal species more broadly in their respective domains). The ideologies of multiculturalism and open borders, serving the interests of corporate and political party power, transform the protective instinct into expressions of bigotry. Accusations of bigotry (nativism, racism, etc.) are designed to suppress objections to threats to the country.
I think I can now put the problem in an even clearer light. To do this, I need to turn to the logic of the dialectic.
In Socrates’s hands, as many of you already know, the dialectic is a method of philosophical inquiry conducted through dialogue. Socrates questioned his interlocutors, exposing contradictions in their beliefs, to clarify concepts such as justice, virtue, and knowledge. Here, the Socratic method is a conversational process aimed at uncovering truth by testing assumptions. Socrates was concerned with worldviews—as should we all. The Socratic method is a rational approach to interrogating worldviews.
Also concerned with worldview was Georg Hegel, the German Idealist philosopher who rendered the dialectic at scale. This is one reason for beginning the essay with Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a Young Hegelian seeking to overcome religious particularism in the universalism of a secular state. In Hegel’s hands, the dialectic explains how culture, history, and thought progressively unfold through conflict and resolution toward greater rational freedom.
Hegel’s dialectic describes the dynamic development of ideas and institutions by sublimating or superseding (Aufhebung) the internal contradictions to raise the social order to a higher unity. In the broadest sense, the ultimate end of the dialectic is the realization of the Absolute (or Absolute Spirit/Geist), the point where reality fully comprehends itself as free, rational, and self-determined. This Absolute is the total, self-aware system of art, concepts, history, institutions, and philosophy where Spirit knows itself completely. Specifically, with the attainment of the perfected rational state (the subject of Hegel’s 1821 Philosophy of Right), the dialectic in history and politics culminates in the modern nation-state as the highest concrete embodiment of freedom and rationality.
Whatever one might think of Hegel’s idealism, his method is impeccable, so much so that Karl Marx stood the man on his head to extract from it the materialist conception of history, a model of the social world I have argued elsewhere should be the foundation of the social sciences (and, in many ways, already is).
Using the Hegelian approach, the modern liberal idea of religious liberty can be understood as emerging from a historical contradiction. The thesis in early modern Europe held that political order required religious unity under an officially enforced Christianity—often backed by state power and justified by the belief that truth and social stability demanded conformity. The antithesis intensified after the Protestant Reformation, which fractured Christendom and advanced the principle that individuals answer to conscience and scripture rather than coercive religious authority.
The prolonged conflicts that followed exposed the limits of both positions: enforced unity generated repression and war, while unstructured pluralism threatened political stability. The higher unity overcoming the contradiction developed in early liberal thought—articulated most notably by John Locke—as the doctrine of religious liberty: the state relinquishes authority over individual belief while maintaining civil peace through neutral laws. This is the essence of disestablishment. In this synthesis, political order and freedom of conscience are reconciled, transforming the earlier opposition between religious uniformity and individual faith into a framework where diverse beliefs coexist under a common civil authority.
In the United States, this synthesis was codified by the Fathers of the Republic as foundational law through the conscience protections embedded in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which begins the United States Bill of Rights. Here, the synthesis reaches its highest state of development. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause declare that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Together, these clauses institutionalize an arrangement in which the state cannot establish a national religion or privilege a religious system in law while also protecting individuals’ rights to practice their faith according to conscience. Over time, the United States Supreme Court interpreted the clauses—especially through incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment—as a foundational constitutional principle binding both federal and state governments, codifying the synthesis as the new thesis.
(Note: I am using the language of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” to simplify the analysis. Readers who study Hegel will point out that the man did not subscribe to the triad. The triad originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel’s immediate predecessor in German Idealism. Fichte employed the terms (thetisch, antithetisch, synthetisch) in his Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge. In the Preface to his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel explicitly criticized Fichte’s “lifeless” triadic schemas as artificial and boring. Hegel’s dialectical process is more fluid, immanent, and organic. It involves a concept or form developing through internal contradictions that are negated (in their one-sidedness), preserved (in their essential content), and elevated (sublated) into a higher, more concrete unity. Beneath the language I am deploying, Hegel’s logic remains.)
The presence of Islam in the United States, which, unlike Christianity, does not contain within it the principle of church-state separation, represents a new antithesis. And so a new contradiction has emerged, one that cannot be resolved by religious pluralism, since Islam self-evidently threatens to negate the foundation that permits pluralism to work. We can state the dialectic thusly: The prevailing thesis in the United States holds that religious liberty protects every individual’s freedom of conscience, allowing each person to believe, practice, or reject religion without coercion. A man can be a Christian, a Muslim, or a disbeliever—he may or may not bear an ideology at all. The antithesis—Islam—is the paradigm of a religious system that denies this premise and instead claims the God-given authority to impose its own conceptions of conscience and truth upon all people. Islam emerges in the Judeo-Christian space, but unlike in Judaism and Christianity, in Islam, one must be a Muslim.
I fully expect some readers will hasten to remind me that, in Islam, there is no requirement to be a Muslim. But this is a propagandistic line. The phrase often cited in representing Islamic tolerance comes from the Qur’an verse “There is no compulsion in religion.” The verse appears in a passage discussing guidance and belief, stating that truth has become distinct from error and that faith must be accepted knowingly rather than by coercion.
Some Muslim scholars interpret this passage as a general principle that genuine belief cannot be forced. Others have historically treated it as applying primarily to conversion to Islam rather than to all questions of religious practice within Islamic societies. Still others claim that later verses in the Qur’an take precedence over Surah 2:256. I come to that claim in a moment; it is the honest claim. However, whichever interpretation is accepted, in the end, other religious practices are subordinated to Islam in Muslim-majority societies.
Surah 9:29 instructs Muslims to fight certain groups among the “People of the Book” (a reference to the Qur’anic revisions of Judaism and Christianity in light of the revelations Muhammad received from the archangel Gabriel) until they pay the jizya—a tax historically levied on non-Muslims living under Muslim political authority. That tax became a feature of governance in many classical Islamic states, where Jews and Christians were—and are—granted protected status (dhimmi) in exchange for paying it and accepting Muslim political rule. But what happens when non-Muslims refuse to pay jizya? The same fate that befalls the shopkeeper who fails to pay tribute to the mafia extortionist: Islamic jurists understand, and will proclaim it if honest, the tax as a legal precedent for warfare against designated opponents of the Muslim community.
One of the passages most often referred to in discussions about “putting disbelievers to the sword” is Surah 9:5 in the Qur’an: “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, establish prayer, and give alms, then let them go their way. Indeed, God is Forgiving and Merciful.” Another frequently cited verse is Surah 9:29 that touches this: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
In Islam, later revelations take precedence over earlier ones through a doctrine known as abrogation (naskh). Put another way, within the study of the Qur’an, when two verses appear to conflict, the verse revealed later in the life of Muhammad supersedes or qualifies the earlier one. The claim that there is no compulsion in Islam is a lie. Remember, the literal meaning of Islam is “submission” and “surrender.” The entire text is to be understood in that regard.
Those who will object to the foregoing will no doubt note that there are differing interpretive traditions, and that debates continue about how these verses relate to broader questions of religious coercion, freedom, and the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic law and history. However, in practice, and what is plain in the text, Islam moves from the later revelations when the ideology becomes warlike. A society in which Islam is the hegemonic force will thus either reduce the Jew, Christian, or other religious adherent, and also the disbeliever, to a second-class citizen or make of him a headless corpse. History attests to this fact and to this eventuality: a future Islamic world will be a world of religious compulsion. Islam’s ambitions are totalitarian.
Thus, Islam’s growing presence raises a new contradiction in which a regime of unlimited religious liberty, that is, a society that allows all manner of ideological belief on equal footing, would seemingly have to tolerate even those doctrines that seek to abolish foundational liberty itself. This is a suicidal state of affairs in the face of a totalistic standpoint that rivals the beneficent one established by the founders of the American Republic. In a struggle between totalistic and radically differing worldviews, one must negate the other. They can neither coexist nor produce a viable synthesis. Either the presence of Islam is eliminated, or the West will be devoured by it, with the corpse of secularism lying alongside Christian bones.
This is why the synthesis suggested—the resolution of tension by transforming religious liberty into a reciprocal principle, where freedom of conscience is universally protected, but only within a framework that preserves the same freedom for others—will not do. It is merely the restatement of the present thesis, i.e., the synthesis worked out in Enlightenment thought already described: Individuals and communities may hold exclusive truth claims and seek to persuade others of them, yet they may not legitimately use coercive power to eliminate the freedom of conscience on which the system depends.
The problem is an old one. It is the problem of a totalistic worldview that rejects religious liberty. As implied a moment ago, the present thesis is indeed a totalistic one, one that preserves the liberal commitment to universal liberty while acknowledging the reality of religious commitments, grounding freedom in a mutually recognized right rather than in unilateral assertion. Islam posed a new dialectical challenge: one that threatens religious liberty sui generis. If Islam prevails, the unity obtained will not be a progressive one, but rather a regressive one. Indeed, there will be no synthesis, only a radically new thesis.
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Here is where we run into the problem that makes any rational unity impossible, and it rests on another principle central to the West—the aforementioned principle of democracy. We live in a liberal democratic society, where representatives of the antithesis can obtain power and wield this power not only to impose their conscience by law, but also to appoint judges who uphold the law, and even to change the Constitution itself.
There is no purely procedural solution to the contradiction. Any part of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be altered through judicial precedent or, if judges remain dedicated to the founding idea of America, by amending the Constitution itself, thereby taking the matter out of their hands. These avenues for change are vital to a living Constitution, to be sure; however, if a durable majority of citizens genuinely rejects freedom of conscience, even strong institutions may eventually reflect that shift. More threatening is the fact that it is possible for the Constitution itself to be abolished altogether and a new government put in its stead, the justification for which can be found in the Declaration of Independence (which sought to establish a secular society, not a religious one).
Liberal democracy, therefore, depends not only on rules but on a political culture that broadly accepts certain limits. Without cultural and national integrity, there is no protection from majoritarianism or the ambitions of a religious elite assuming the reins of state power.
Readers are perhaps familiar with the phrase “culture is upstream from politics.” The phrase captures a common observation in political commentary and social theory that cultural narratives, norms, social attitudes, and values shape the political landscape: what people believe, what they find acceptable, and what they debate culturally influence laws, policies, and political outcomes.
However, the relationship between culture and politics is not one-way. Politics can also shape culture through education (or indoctrination), laws, institutional arrangements, and media framing—all of which may be commanded by majorities, powerful elites, or ruthless minorities. Historical examples include civil rights legislation and judicial decisions influencing social attitudes (generally a positive thing, depending on what counts as civil rights) or authoritarian regimes enforcing ideological conformity (always a negative thing). So, while culture frequently sets the upstream conditions for political change, politics and culture are interdependent, with influence flowing in both directions rather than exclusively from culture to politics.
Since, as with culture and religion, concrete individuals bear politics, we have to be concerned with the presence of certain groups in society. And the time to be concerned with their presence is before a destructive alien politics weaves itself into the national fabric. Readers must recognize this: Islam is not only a religion; it is politics.
Since the prevailing thesis cannot be sustained by structure alone, for power can alter the structure, preserving present arrangements thus requires a third element beyond thesis and antithesis: a shared civic commitment to the legitimacy of pluralism. Without that cultural foundation, institutional safeguards—including courts—can be repurposed by the very forces they were meant to restrain.
The only way to preserve the civic commitment necessary to the legitimacy of pluralism is to preserve the cultural foundation—and the only way to do that, since people come bearing culture, is to restrict entry to the nation to those whose religious views reject the thesis. The time to do this is before the negation of the thesis, already portentous, becomes an inevitability. We must also consider the presence of those already here who are on the path to citizenship.
We don’t need to imagine the fate of an America that tolerates Islam’s presence. As I have shown on this platform, the consequences of Islam’s ambitions are historical fact (see 2025: The Year in Review and Notes on the West’s Islamic Problem; The Red-Green Ruse: Clerical Fascism in Post-Colonial Garb). Tolerating Islam in Europe already appears as a fait accompli. In the United Kingdom, Muslims are assuming political office in several major cities. And what of America? Here, a Muslim has ascended to the highest office in the city of New York.
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Some readers will object to my choice of title for this essay. They will recognize it as alluding to the problem identified in Karl Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” a response to Bruno Bauer published in 1844 in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, that has been widely misunderstood as antisemitic. With this assumption in mind, I stand convicted of Islamophobia. The allusion is intentional, but I problematize and repurpose Marx’s critique to elaborate a distinction between the situation of Jews in Germany in Bauer and Marx’s day and the present situation. My goal is to avoid Marx’s reduction of struggle to the material conditions while retaining the value of his base-superstructure, which is, in the main, predictive.
For Marx, culture is a superstructural element in any historical system. But, as I have explained, culture is often its own force, which gives rise to and perpetuates the prevailing mode of production. Here, Max Weber’s thesis concerning the Protestant Ethic, in his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, allows us to moderate Marx’s reductionist standpoint. (See Marx’s Misstep: Human Nature and the Limits of Class Reductionism.)
In his essay, Marx critiques both the political emancipation of Jews and the broader nature of modern society. He begins by examining the status of Jews in Europe and the limits of granting them legal equality while leaving intact not exclusive political and religious culture, as Bauer formulates the problem, but economic and social structures.
However, for Marx, the economic and social structures imply a cultural framework, and this is where he anticipates Weber (see Anticipating Weber: Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”). We see this when Marx contrasts what he calls “practical Judaism”—the worldly, economic, and self-interested orientation he attributes to Jewish life in commerce and civil society—with “theoretical Christianity,” which he sees as a moralistic religion that purports to transcend material concerns.
Marx argues that political emancipation—accepting Jews as citizens—does not alone remove the social forms of inequality embedded in bourgeois society; as long as private property and economic self-interest dominate, the traits he associates with practical Judaism, what the Protestant Reformation made acceptable to all Europeans (the crux of Weber’s argument), will persist in all citizens, not just Jews.
In this sense, Judaism, understood as an economic and social expression of private interest, will disappear only when society as a whole overcomes the economic and material conditions that give rise to it, implying a radical transformation of social life rather than a literal eradication of Jewish people or faith. Judaism goes away, not as a requirement by the state for granting them their citizenship, but with the proletariat demanding the end of the capitalist mode of production.
The problem with both Bauer’s and Marx’s respective analyses is that they seek universal conditions that are of no use to us—for Bauer, the abolition of religion; for Marx, the abolition of capitalism and religion along with it. Neither solution addresses the problem of doctrines that seek the abolition of human freedom. Bauer’s secular state is impossible under Islam. And communism—in the end, a classless, stateless society—provides humanity with no immunity from a rival totalistic worldview that would extinguish the species-being it seeks to liberate from its present alienation in socially-segmented social arrangements. Indeed, the communist movement presents a very real problem for the national unity necessary for confronting Islam. As we see with the Red-Green Alliance, Islam can conscript wide-eyed youth and their professors to its cause.
My atheistic druthers notwithstanding, only Christian culture and those prepared to defend it stand as a bulwark against the theistic totalitarianism Islam represents. Muslim colonization portends the imposition of a political-economic system rooted in doctrine; once the antithesis prevails, the very foundation Marx supposes gives rise to culture, what it was and what he hoped it would become, is eliminated, and a new consciousness arises, one that will erase human freedom.
This is the same problem fascism represents, which is why violence was necessary to destroy its presence in Europe. I am not saying violence is desirable, only that it becomes inevitable when civilization fails to contain the threats to it. After all, fascism is organized violence. Islam is no different. The reputation of Enoch Powell was destroyed to silence this observation (see Indigenous English Rise Against Modern-Day Colonialism).
Marx’s analysis of Judaism as a social expression of self-interest illuminates a broader principle relevant to religious liberty: social forms and structures condition behavior and belief, shaping what appears as a universal conscience. His tendency towards reductionism does not invalidate his thesis. Just as practical Judaism persists until the material conditions of society change (one may disagree about whether this is a good thing), religious systems that claim absolute authority over conscience—such as Islam at the present moment—cannot be neutralized by abstract legal guarantees alone.
To overthrow the prevailing mode of production, Marx advocated revolution; he understood that bourgeois property relations were historical and therefore subject to radical revision. The liberal synthesis codified in the First Amendment assumes that individuals will respect the freedom of conscience of others. The American system also requires respect for property, including capital.
Without accepting Marx’s solution, the West may take from Marx’s insight that cultural, economic, and social habits subvert formal equality if left unchecked. To be sure, his call to the world proletariat to break their chains was a call to promulgate a new cultural attitude that pressed beyond formal equality. He believed substantive equality—or positive freedom—elevated formal equality by finally realizing it in the material conditions. But we need not take up the charge of establishing substantive equality. We need not be revolutionaries. In fact, it is Islam that is revolutionary in that it seeks to abolish the present conditions.
Thus, we need only to preserve formal equality by eliminating threats to it. The end result of the Islamic revolution will not be a society of equals, formal or substantive. The progressive left would do well to recognize that it is their necks that will be among the first to meet the sword.
Marx’s response to Bauer is effective in exposing the limits of political emancipation without also transforming underlying social structures. However, whereas Marx saw Judaism as a symptom of bourgeois self-interest that would dissolve with capitalism’s end, Islam is not a mere superstructure but an autonomous, regressive force that transforms material conditions to its theocratic ends.
Unlike Judaism or Christianity, which can coexist with secular pluralism, Islam’s abrogation doctrine and ambitions for submission render it a revolutionary antithesis that cannot be resolved through legal tolerance alone. In light of Marx reminding us that ideologies persist and shape history, preserving Western liberty demands preemptively negating Islam’s presence. We cannot depend on a proletarian uprising that would itself be devoured by clerical fascism—even if a proletarian uprising was desirable.
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I want to conclude by critiquing another Marxist to head off the desire expressed by many critical theories to tolerate contradiction. “Why can’t we just live with Islam in our midsts?” That’s like asking us to ignore a killer in our house. Living with Islam is not an option.
In his 1966 book Negative Dialectic, Theodor Adorno posited a “negative dialectic,” wherein, unlike Hegel’s optimism, which saw contradictions as ultimately resolved in higher unities, reality and thought are instead full of tensions that cannot be finally reconciled. Attempts to impose conceptual closure on historical and social phenomena risk erasing complexity and particularity. The negative dialectic is “negative” because it refuses to resolve contradiction prematurely (or at all), keeping the friction between concepts and the concrete world visible, and thereby maintaining the critical edge necessary for ethical and social reflection.
Here, one sees Adorno anticipating postmodernism’s attitude towards truth. I don’t want to indict the man on those grounds—he was no Herbert Marcuse—but, while there may be value to keeping open to reflection on some of the contradictions that present themselves to humanity, the contradiction between religious liberty and religious compulsion is not one of them. There are some dialectics we must shepherd to their resolutions.
Not all cultures or religions are created equal, and treating them as such invites peril. We cannot be so committed to principle that we negate the very principle to which we have dedicated the Republic. It is precisely when legal and social forms promise resolution—here, the reconciliation of liberty and pluralism—that underlying material or ideological forces can render such resolutions fragile or illusory, or worse: self-annihilating. If both liberty and pluralism are to remain in force (in contrast to Bauer, I regard this as a tolerable negative dialectic), the antithesis of Islam must be negated.
For there is no higher unity possible in the face of the regressive force Islam presents to and in the West. Such a unity would not be unity at all but a fatal compromise. It would be like attempting to resolve the contradiction between liberal democracy and corporate statism—another contradiction complicating liberty and pluralism—by tolerating fascists as anything but a small number of people clinging to an atavistic worldview.
But are the representatives of fascism really such a small number? Can fascism anymore be reckoned in terms of those who wear the old costumes and fly the old flags? As I have argued on the platform, it cannot. Fascism has discarded its old clothes and dressed itself instead in the colorful garb of woke progressivism, with corporate state power still determining fashion.
Indeed, the contradiction between liberal democracy and corporate statism is not additional, but profoundly related to the contradiction between the West and Islam. The nascent new iteration of fascism has joined forces with Islam to bring about liberal democracy’s demise. The struggle against Islam is thus a front in the greater struggle against those forces that seek to establish global neo-feudalism and throw the world into a New Dark Ages.
freedom and reason 