Today, I turn my attention to the ascent of Muslims to political office in the West. The occasion is the victory of Muslim and socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race. Mamdani’s win echoes the 2016 election of Sadiq Khan—former chair of the Fabian Society—as mayor of London. Khan’s election occurred the same year a majority of Britons voted to detach from the pan-European superstate that had long shaped their political destiny (and really still does). Mamdani’s rise comes in a year when the populist forces that fueled Brexit and Donald Trump’s first term have once again propelled Trump into the presidency, this time with a clearer mandate. The gulf between cosmopolitan and working-class sensibilities could not be starker—on both sides of the Atlantic.
While self-described democratic socialists are busy on social media trying to rationalize socialism (“Socialism is the fire department saving your house”), many among them are leaning into the new ecumenism that, on the occasion of Trump’s 2017 executive order restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries, found them staging large-scale protests at airports and in public squares across the United States. Demonstrators held signs denouncing the ban and expressing solidarity with Muslims, invoking religious unity, quoting the Statue of Liberty (Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” penned in 1883 to help raise funds for the statue’s pedestal, affixed to the inside of the pedestal in 1903), or declaring “I Am Muslim Too.” (Perhaps in time, the Islamophiles will get their wish.)
The practice of ecumenism (or ecumenicalism) was originally founded on the idea of cooperation, dialogue, and unity among Christian denominations. The aim was to heal divisions among Christians so that the faithful could better witness to their shared faith and work together in the world. Over time, ecumenism came to represent a shared commitment to interfaith cooperation and social justice, leading many Christians to adopt the doctrine of inclusivity. Ecumenical types welcomed non-Christian faiths, including Islam and Judaism, into the dialogue, which, according to the inclusivity doctrine, with respect to Islam, meant tolerating the intolerable.
The modern ecumenical movement thus professes a commitment to the liberal values of pluralism and tolerance, albeit warped by a progressive twist, one that Canadian psychologist Gad Saad identifies as parasitic, namely cultural relativism, that is, the suspension of moral and political judgment in the thought and actions of those from other places. What follows from relativism is the expectation that reasonable people adopt a neutral gaze and see all religions as compatible and equal, and therefore at least tolerated—better yet, admired. One must adopt this view if one wishes not to be seen as a bigot or a chauvinist. You know, an Islamophobe.
Assuming compatibility and equality of religious belief obscures the reality that religions can be, and in fact are, antithetical to the universal interests of humankind—the rights to autonomy, conscience, publishing, and so forth. I do not here mean mere incompatibility, but antithetical in a way that makes peaceful coexistence or synthesis impossible, with one faith demanding the submission of all others based on a doctrine of offensive intolerance. In this situation, either the antithesis is allowed to negate the thesis by subverting pluralism or tolerance to attain positions of commanding power, or the thesis precludes its annihilation by restricting the power and presence of the antithesis. This is defensive intolerance: the thesis requires the latter to preserve the arrangements that make religious liberty possible. This stance depends on an awareness that the threat is existential; to do anything else is a perversion of tolerance, what Saad describes as suicidal empathy.
Let’s work through this apparent paradox dialectically. Suppose a religion that supports the separation of church and state and promotes the idea of individualism—that is, the secular ethic of religious liberty—and support for this arrangement and idea exists at the doctrinal level. This is the religious thesis. In the West, the thesis is Christianity, which, in its historical development, is simultaneously the thesis of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the Enlightenment is the result of a long struggle within Christianity to become a rational faith, which required the fracturing of Catholic hegemony, brought about by the emergence of Protestantism. So impactful was Protestantism and the idea of individualism, already present in the womb of Christian doctrine, that it moderated the collectivist orientation of Catholicism. Here, ecumenism served a purpose by bringing Christians together around the rational premise embedded in scripture. The Founders of the American Republic were ecumenical in this way. They established the United States as the nationalist exemplar of secularism, putting the rights of man beyond any particular religious doctrine by locating it in human nature.
Suppose now the antithesis of this establishment. Rather than supporting religion-state separation and the ethnic of individualism, the antithesis advances a collectivist doctrine, one that seeks total control over a population by converting, marginalizing, or eradicating those of other faiths by acquiring—including through democratic means—the political power necessary to assert its dominance over a society. Today’s religious antithesis is Islam, a term that literally means “submission” and “surrender,” and its advance everywhere terminates in the eventual elimination of secularism and individual liberty. The oppression and killing of apostates, heretics, and infidels, as well as the subordination of women, follow. The faith is not a civil and rational one, but violent and irrational, incapable of liberalism because it is intrinsically illiberal. As such, it is a species of clerical fascism. As such, alongside the secular totalitarianism of China and the rise of transnational corporate statism, Islam is the greatest threat to human freedom in the world.
In such a situation, the religious tolerance exhibited by Christian ecumenism, born of the Enlightenment sensibilities that the struggle for rational Christianity gave rise to, endangers the very arrangement that makes ecumenism possible. Put another way, progressive ecumenism brings people to tolerate a religion that rejects the foundation of religious liberty and the secular regime of tolerance. The empathy here invites the destruction of the empathetic. It is not only in this case that the religious antithesis opposes the religious thesis; more broadly, the greater thesis that includes both rational Christianity and the secular foundation it founded—upon which it depends to keep free its faith—is under the threat of extinction by the presence of the antithesis.
I want to emphasize the point that what allowed the Christian thesis to thrive was its own gradual development of religious pluralism over centuries, a process only possible because there was a doctrinal basis for individualism. There is no such ethic in Islam. Islam seeks to replace Christian doctrine with its diametric opposite. Therefore, no coexistence or synthesis is possible because both the thesis and its antithesis rest on entirely antithetical standpoints. Imposing one requires enslaving the other; saving one requires excluding the other. And since Christianity rests on a rational foundation conducive to human freedom, the choice is clear. This is no small problem to be worked out in dialogue. This is a civilizational matter.
I can hear the antisemite: “What about Judaism?” A man accused of antisemitism, Karl Marx, in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question”—one of his earliest major writings, following his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (both published in 1843)—, makes a provocative argument about what he calls “practical Judaism,” by which he means the social logic of egoistic individual rights, exchange, money, and political emancipation as it functions in modern bourgeois society. He contrasts this with “rational” or “theoretical” Christianity, i.e., Protestantism, which he argues the Reformation transformed by stripping away its otherworldly (and I would add collectivist) orientation and aligning it with economic rationalization, self-interest, and worldly pursuits.
In Marx’s view, the Reformation completed the secularization of Christian Europe by bringing Christian moral life into line with the practical, this-worldly ethos he associates with bourgeois society. Thus, Marx suggests that the Protestant Reformation dissolved religious obstacles to capitalism by reorienting Christian life toward the rational, disciplined, individual-centered, materially engaged conduct that already characterized Jewish practical life. The result is that modern Christian society becomes market-driven, secular, and structured by the logic of capital—not that Judaism triumphs theologically (Judaism is not a proselytizing religion anyway), but that capitalism imposes its own universal epistemic.
Comparing Judaism with Islam betrays a profound ignorance of the respective faiths. Christians and Jews are indeed People of the Book. Over against them, the Islamization of a society cancels that epistemic and substitutes for it its own doctrine of submission and surrender. Existing law—in the West, founded on rational and secular principles, however corrupted these are in places and at times by ideology—is replaced by Sharia, rooted in the belief that all law derives from Allah’s will, and that interpretations of that design are properly delegated to a religious clerisy who instructs those charged with securing the order of things, an order conveyed to Allah’s messenger Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel, who he claims to have encountered alone in a cave. It would be one thing if Muhammad’s revelations affirmed the ethics of Christianity and Judaism. It doesn’t. It negates them.
Muhammad does not envision the world that Christianity supposes. Rational Christian doctrine is rooted in the idea that each person stands in a direct, personal relationship with God and is personally accountable for accepting or rejecting salvation. On this view, the separation of church and state is not merely a political arrangement but the natural outgrowth of a faith that emphasizes voluntary belief—since genuine conversion, according to Christian teaching, must be freely chosen rather than coerced. Indeed, periods of forced conversion or state-imposed orthodoxy are historical aberrations rather than logical consequences of Christian principles. Christian individualism and a secular political order complement one another by ensuring that the decision to follow Christ remains an act of personal conviction rather than compulsion.
Muhammad’s god envisions the opposite: a world in which every person either converts to the Muslim faith or is subordinated to it, a situation that leads to a progressive purging of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and so forth, either by formal, i.e., legal and state action, or informal methods, including harassment, intimidation, and extralegal violence. There is no earthly consequence for leaving the Christian faith; one need only accept Jesus into one’s life to avoid hellfire. Islam punishes apostasy by execution. The overall message of Christianity is one of forgiveness, grace, and repentance that extends to all people, regardless of the specific sins with which they struggle. In Islam, gay men are put to death.
Despite the desire to be tolerant of other religions, one cannot be so tolerant that one robs oneself of one’s dignity and freedom and, possibly, one’s life (yet we see progressive women trying on the veil). Indeed, self-defense is a foundational human right for a reason—survival—and that right extends to communities and nations: there is a moral obligation to protect the innocent and vulnerable from danger and harm. Islam’s offensive intolerance must therefore be met with defensive intolerance, since failing to do so imperils the very foundation of Western civilization. Its presence makes us all unsafe.
Those who appeal to childish religious tolerance (although it is not often actually naïve but strategic) ought to be asked to consider whether their tolerance of fascism should extend any further than allowing individuals to hold such beliefs. To be sure, we cannot (or at least should not) police opinion, but we can address and take action. Assuming that the attribution of fascism is an accurate and not an ideologically or politically convenient one (such as the false attribution of fascism to populists and nationalists by globalists), should fascists be allowed to ascend to political office in America? Should fascists from other parts of the world be allowed to migrate to America and deepen fascism here? Would we not wonder why secular leaders and a rank and file are welcoming to America the bearers of fascism?
If the answers to these questions are “no,” “no,” and “yes” respectively, then it is only a matter of knowing what the thing itself is and applying the same standard.
freedom and reason 