The Revolutionary and the Devotee

The Danny Burmawi & PragerU on Islam, Israel, and the West

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 12 September 2026

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

Occasion. On July 7, 2026, PragerU published Episode 39 of The Jeremy Boreing Show, a long conversation between Boreing and Danny Burmawi titled “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam.” Burmawi was born in Jordan, lived his first nineteen years as a Muslim, spent a year as a zealous defender of the faith, left it after reading its own sources, became a Christian, lived fifteen years in Lebanon, and now leads the Ideological Defense Institute and has written Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis. The 2-hour interview was worth my time. It is a compact, well-structured case that Islam is not a religion among religions but a civilizational order that contains a religion—and he makes that case from the inside, as a man who paid for his knowledge by living the life and learning from it. You can watch it at https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39.

This essay is long because I address each major idea in the recording. The interview features Burmawi and PragerU, and I will paraphrase rather than reproduce it, quoting him once. I agree with most of the ideas and programs Burmawi proposes. I would be more aggressive in transforming American culture and the Western church. I think transforming the accepted assumptions about what Islam is, realizing that it is a religion intertwined with a political system that is incompatible with our Constitutional Republic, is the foundation. The examination touches current events and public controversy — Tucker Carlson, Zohran Mamdani, Canadian Islamophobia legislation, and Israel. We examine doctrine — grace, sanctification, the sanctification of Muhammad, the nature of the Islamic Jesus, dispensationalism and its critics. We confront practical, theological, ontological, and relational implications.

The order of the ideas confronted below is mine, not the interview’s.

I. Triage: What the Interview Asserts and What We May Assert After It

Burmawi spoke for almost 2 hours without notes, and he made a few factual errors. I shall point those out first. Proverbs 18:17 tells us what to do about it: He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. The following are points that may be contested in Burmawi’s story.

Tier one — public and verifiable. The Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries took the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain from a Christian world; Aramaic, the language of Jesus, gave way to Arabic across the region over the following centuries; Jerash, Burmawi’s home city, was a city of the Decapolis and is today a ruin visited by tourists. The Ottoman devşirme — the levy of Christian boys for conversion and service — is documented history. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a church for nine centuries, a mosque for five, a museum for eighty-six years, and has been a mosque again since 2020, with its Christian mosaics curtained during prayers. Jordanian shari’a courts have, in documented cases, treated conversion from Islam as apostasy with civil consequences: marriage annulled, custody lost, inheritance forfeited. The statue of Christ in Fuheis, Jordan’s Christian-majority town, was erected by the local youth club in January 2023 and removed by the municipality the next day after a social-media outcry, and relocated to a Christian cemetery; the Jordanian King visited the town weeks later to affirm coexistence. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York; his father Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). John Calvin approved Servetus’s execution in 1553. The Aisha tradition Burmawi cites is in Sahih al-Bukhari, and it says what he says it says: she remarked that his Lord seemed to hasten to fulfill his wishes. The hadith about expelling Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula is in Sahih Muslim. The account of Jesus asking a companion to be substituted for him at the crucifixion appears in classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157—al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir—not in the Qur’an itself, which says only that “it was made to appear so to them.” Increase Mather’s The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669) argued for a future national conversion of the Jews, two centuries before Darby.

Tier two — informed interpretation. The reading of Qur’an 9:29 as an unbounded command, the three-stage pattern of Islamic expansion, the claim that Islamic soteriology is structurally fear-based, the argument that Islam is a total order rather than a religion, the analysis of the red-green alliance, the characterization of Mamdani’s commitments, the assessment that the West’s post-9/11 accommodation accelerated Islamic growth. These are arguments, and I will argue them.

Tier three — held loosely. Four items need correction or caution.

First, Burmawi paraphrases Qur’an 9:29 as a command to kill unbelievers until they pay the jizya. The verb in 9:29 is qātilū — fight — not uqtulū — kill; the verse reads, in the standard translations, fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, and do not hold as forbidden what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not acknowledge the religion of truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. The verse that says kill is Qur’an 9:5, and it is addressed to the polytheists, not the People of the Book. A command to make war on Christians and Jews until they submit to a humiliating tax is the more accurate reading, and it is the reading that has governed Islamic jurisprudence on the dhimma for thirteen centuries.

Second, the cat-and-dog example is garbled. The traditions in Bukhari say that a woman was punished for confining a cat until it starved, and that a prostitute was forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog; a separate tradition says that keeping a dog other than for hunting or guarding diminishes one’s reward daily. Burmawi reverses the animals and inflates the penalties. More important, the actual traditions do not support his point that Islamic merit is random and chaotic — they read as ordinary moral teaching about cruelty and mercy toward animals. His broader argument that the only clear trajectory to assurance is martyrdom rests on other ground. This example should be retired.

Third, the casualty figures — eighty-six million dead in India, a possible total of three hundred eighty million across the history of Islamic conquest — are from a contested literature (K. S. Lal’s demographic estimates for India; Bill Warner’s aggregate). They are not fabrications; they are upper-bound reconstructions. The conquest was vast and murderous by any accounting.

Fourth, the Qatar-owned fatwa website story — a Muslim asking whether he may submit to sodomy to accommodate a bomb — is widely circulated. I could not verify this story. I could not confirm reports that Tucker Carlson bought a home in Qatar. He did say he was going to buy a home in December 2025, but I could not verify whether he completed the purchase. Nothing in this essay depends on either.

Two additional items to qualify: Burmawi says there have been sixty-five thousand Islamic terror attacks in recent decades; the database (through Dr. Gad Saad) counted about forty-nine thousand since September 2001. The exact number isn’t significant, since they’re the same order of magnitude. And the anecdote in which Pascal, asked by the king for evidence of God, answers that the Jews are the evidence: the anecdote is apocryphal in that form (it circulates attached to several names), but the substance is authentically Pascal — the Pensées devote extended sections to the survival of the Jewish people as a standing proof of Providence. The IDI essay Burmawi commends should be read as a meditation on Pascal’s actual argument, not as a transcript of a conversation.

Having given my opinion of what I believe were errors, let us examine Burmawi’s ideas.

II. Fourteen Centuries and the Curtained Mosaics

Burmawi opens with history because Tucker Carlson and his guests have, he says, treated the phrase Islamic jihad as a manufactured narrative — something invented by people with an agenda — and he answers with fourteen centuries. Two-thirds of the ancient Christian world occupied. Languages replaced. Civilizations reduced to ruins that only tourists visit. The dhimma. The devşirme. Churches turned into mosques, of which Hagia Sophia is the last great one, where he stood under the ceiling and saw the Virgin and the apostles curtained off because one cannot pray in a mosque with Christian icons visible, yet they cannot be destroyed because the world’s heritage authorities forbid it — so the past is there, erased, under curtains, and the present is Islam praying beneath it.

The mosaics are under curtains, not chiseled off. That is the West’s exact condition today. Our Christian past is not destroyed; it is covered. The law, the universities, the hospitals, the imago Dei that Burmawi correctly names as the foundation of the human-rights declarations that even non-Christian nations sign — all of it is still on the ceiling. We simply do not look up. And a different worship has moved into the room beneath it.

A scripture belongs here. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 were in what is now Turkey. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — every one of them is today in a Muslim-majority nation, and the Lord’s word to the first of them was: Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Revelation 2:5). The candlesticks of Asia Minor were removed. Not by Islam’s strength alone; Islam was the instrument. They were removed because the churches did not do the first works. Burmawi’s history lesson is true, and the Christian reading of it is harder than the civilizational one: conquest does not happen to a church that is on fire. It happens to a church that has become a museum of its own past — mosaics on the ceiling, curtains beneath.

III. The Revelation of Convenience

Burmawi’s testimony centers on text. He became devout in 2006 to defend Muhammad against the Danish cartoons. He describes the propaganda he was raised on — that an astronaut heard the call to prayer on the moon, that a Palestinian invented the computer and the Americans killed him for it — and the sermon by a Kuwaiti imam that moved him to tears, recounting how the Companions tore a poetess in half between two camels for mocking the Prophet. He read the Qur’an, the Sira, and the Hadith not to test Islam but to master it. And what he found was that whenever Muhammad needed something, Gabriel arrived with a revelation to provide it — a settlement of a quarrel with a wife, permission to marry his adopted son’s former wife by the expedient of abolishing adoption. And he found that Aisha had noticed it first, and said so, and that her remark is preserved in the most authoritative collection Islam possesses.

The Torah gives a test for prophets: When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him (Deuteronomy 18:22). That is the falsification test, that it is Popper in the Pentateuch. But the biblical record supplies a second, subtler test, never stated as a rule and everywhere present as a pattern: genuine revelation of God rebukes the man who receives it. Nathan walks into David’s court and says Thou art the man (2 Samuel 12:7), and the king, who could have had him killed, writes Psalm 51 instead. Peter, the rock, denies the Lord three times, and the Gospels, his own church’s preserved record, record every denial. Paul writes that when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed (Galatians 2:11), and the church canonized the letter. Moses is barred from the land. Jonah sulks. The prophets are, almost without exception, men whom the Word crushes before it uses. A revelation that arrives only to gratify its recipient, that never once tells him he is wrong, that adjusts the moral law of the universe to resolve his domestic difficulties — that is not the signature of the God of Israel. It is the signature of a man.

Burmawi’s friend saw it, and Burmawi saw it, and Aisha saw it fourteen centuries ago. The test does not require hostility to Islam. It requires only reading Islam’s own books with the question the Torah taught the world to ask.

IV. The Judge, the Shahada, and What a Religious Test Is

Burmawi tells of his Jordanian friend who converted, was sued by his father for apostasy, was jailed, lost his wife and children and civil standing, and was offered a way out by a humane judge: recite the shahada, say the words, and everything is restored; the state does not care about your heart. The friend, broken, said the words. Years later his whole household became Christian. Burmawi’s verdict on the judge is exact: a decent man in spite of Islam, not because of it.

That courtroom was a religious test—the thing Article VI, Clause 3 of our Constitution forbids—enacted as the ordinary operation of law. In my April 18 essay on the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men (https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/), I distinguished the religious test the Founders prohibited — a legal requirement that you profess something to hold office or civil standing — from testimony, the voluntary declaration of allegiance that the free-exercise clause protects and that Christ commands. The Jordanian court is the religious test in its purest form: say the creed or lose your wife. And the whole Western tradition of liberty of conscience, which the secular world imagines it invented, is in fact the Christian recognition that a creed recited to keep one’s children is not faith and cannot be, that choose you this day whom ye will serve (Joshua 24:15) presupposes the liberty to choose otherwise.

I add a pastoral word. Did the friend deny Christ? Christ said, whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven (Matthew 10:33). But the first to hear those words was Peter, and Peter denied Him, and was restored on a beach at breakfast. Matthew 10 is a summons to courage, not a sentence on the coerced. The Jordanian convert did not deny Christ; he was robbed, and the robber’s demand was a sentence in Arabic. The friend’s household is Christian today. I am not the one who will tell him he failed.

V. Islam is not Just a Religion

The points in this section are the center of Burmawi’s thesis. Burmawi’s solution to the problem of Islamic immigration is for the State Department to examine Islam’s theology on the grounds that Islam is a subverrsive Ideology which is antithetical to the existence of the Constitutional Republic. Boreing raises the obvious objection to Burmawi’s demand for a State Department program to examine Islamic theology because America has a freedom of religion and the State does not critique theologies. Burmawi answers this objection with a reframing of what Islam is: “Islam is not a religion, Islam has a religion.” His point is that Islam should not be considered to be only a religion because its beliefs, practices, and doctrines extend beyond a man’s personal relationship with God and into the domain of the State.

His analogy is that Islam is a house, and in one of its rooms is a sofa. The room with the sofa he likens to the religion that Islam has, and the political, the state-forming doctrine of Isalm is a completely different room in the house. Just as liberal democracy and communism are political Ideologies separated from Christianity and atheism, Islam has a political ideology that is separate from religious Islam. His claim is that the two aspects of Islam have been combined and the entire program, sacred/theogical/religous have  been combined with its political ideology, and by doing so have evaded scrutiny by the State Department as a subversive group that should be monitored. Burmawi makes the distinction that Islam contains an aspect of its practice/belief that is clearly religous,  including prescriptions for worship, prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, creed, etc. But he notes that another aspect of Islam contains aspects which are clearly prescriptions for establishing a political, legal, military, and civilizational program whose stated end is the rule of Allah’s law over all mankind. All of islam is called a religion, but inside that definition has been smugged a program of societal-governmental overthrow to replace our Constitutional Republic with its form of governmental order.

Such a move requires us to do an etymological pause to examine the validity of making this distinction: Religio — Cicero’s derivation is relegere, to read again, to be scrupulous; Lactantius’s is religare, to bind fast. Either way, the word “religion” names a relation between the soul and the divine and the practices that express that relation. Our First Amendment protects the free exercise of that relation. It does not protect a program to replace the Constitution, even if that program of state-change gives itself the label of being a “religion.”

It could be argued that our relationship with God is not confined to prayer, fasting, and other rituals, beliefs, and doctrines about our relationship with God. And this criticism is fair, especially given my thesis that God’s relationship with man is total – there is nothing, no action, no thought, no experience, no substance, no transcation with is separated from the very essence of God. With such a universal perspective, it could be considered that every act of life should be considered sacred and under the prescription of one’s religion. And again, I heartily agree with this analysis. This means that Christianity, Islam, Judiasm, Buddhism, and Hindiuism are likewise combinations of the sacred and secular, and that the distinction between the two is functional rather than intrinsic. The implication of this universal sacred-secular unity is that every religion should be examined by the State to evaluate the level of threat that the docrine and practices of each religion are compatible with the continued existence and order of the State. If a religion has as part of its central doctrines a set of beliefs and doctrines which are intrinsically different than the established political order, and establishment of that political order is advocated within the practice of a religion, then that program should be under the scrutiny of the State. Monitoring of the political activities of  such groups is clearly a function of the State. Any group, that holds such beliefs should be monitored, and the aspect of those religions which seeks such fundamental transformation should be considered within the purview of the State’s supervisory authority.

Burmawi argued that Islam’s program to replace the Constitution is not religous activity as it is not a relation between a soul and God, and that Islam is instead a political organization and therefore should be monitored by the state. I disagree with his argument only to the extent that I believe every thought, word, and deed is intrinsically sacred. Everything we do is unavoidably a relation between soul and God. We must make the division between religious and political on other grounds. There are some thoughts, words, and deeds which are between the soul and state, and they are likewise included in the

Burmawi used the example of communism to illustrate his point: if the Party declared Marx a prophet and the Manifesto holy writ, no serious person would grant Marxism-Leninism free-exercise protection to practice the precepts of its religion, which was seizing power. He argues that Islam has within its sacred texts, and within its various sects varying degrees of state-organizing doctrine. Islam is heterogeneous in this regard, from the Sufis to the Twelvers, each which has its own political philosophy. As such, each group should be monitored by the State in its activities, even if lawful. There is not right for the state to interfere with the lawful lobbying, promotion, rallying, educating, and organizing for peaceful demonstration and campaign, but such efforts should be monitored, and the nation should be aware of the agendas and programs of the various factions and their proposed changes. The Founders wrote the Free Exercise clause into the First Amendment to prevent the state from imposing a form of worship on people. This is entirely proper given that each man is responsible for forming his soul into God’s image. It is the role of the State to judge the violations of the relationship between man and man, not between God and man. The form of worship, doctrine, and belief about the proper way to shape the soul in God’s perfect image is the responsiblity of every man, and the State should never interfere with or direct that relationship. But the state, being God’s representative to guide and direct us in our relationship with each other, ,

We must recognize that both “religion” and “Islamophobia” are being used to shield Islam from the supervision of the political portion of its program.

Religion: Free exercise of religion means the state may not forbid a man to pray, fast, teach his children his creed, build a mosque with his own money, wear what his faith prescribes, change his religion, or peacefully persuade others to change theirs.

• It does not mean that a legal system in which apostates lose their children is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that an organized effort to substitute the their concept of the law of a god, even by non-violent means is beyond the he land is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that demanding punishment for criticism of a prophet is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that the state must not monitor a religion’s activities, study its texts, and know the goals, methods, and ends of a movement with regard to the state. It must not interefere with non-violent and lawful activities, but it is not required to maintain ignorance of them as a protected/forbidden domain of state security. Of course, such activity can lead to abuse, and it is against overreach that this analysis is essay is written. This intersects with issues of privacy and State control. Monitoring of activity of lawful subversive activity is in the interest of the State, but the State is restricted to countering only unlawful subversive activity. Free speech is what is at issue.

Islamophobia is a word whose form, as Burmawi notes, was chosen to attach the ideology to the persons, so that criticism of Islam becomes equated with hatred of the person. To disentangle this, we must tell the truth about Islam while using the Christian standard of love. Contempt for Muslims is a violation of the Great Commandment to love neighbor as self. But, as Christians, we are under no compulsion to love an ideology or political philosophy, and we are commanded to hate evil. “Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” (Romans 12:9) The Islamic goal is to overthrow the worship of the God of the Bible and replace that with the worship of Allah, who is another god. The program of Islam is a violation of the First Commandment. Thus, in its most benign form, criticism of Islam is the criticism of a system of ideas. Such expression is the ordinary exercise of the mind God gave us, and it is also, in this country, protected speech.

The remedy, and the objection to it. The remedy Burmawi raises is one that I have considered, and is perhaps the most contentious of his solutions. He asks the State Department to judge Islamic theology as subversive, revolutionary, and anti-constitutional. Of course, a government that judges the merits of religious principles and practices is judging a religion. The problem is that government’s judgments reflect the sentiments and biases of the bureaucrats and officials charged with State security, and as staffing changes the officials may use that policy and authority against Christianity. The religion need not be judged to be good or bad. Burmawi’s point is the Islam is an organization seeks to overthrow our Constitutional Republic and replace it with Sharia. To do so would fundamentally change the nature of the Republic, as Christianity is the foundation of the Constitutional Republic we have inherited from our Founders. Incorporating Islam into American jurisprudence, politics, and culture would be a radical departure from the Founding principles. If we allow Islam to grow within our borders by fertility, immigration, conversion, and political competition, we could see the same population and cultural shift as Europe has experienced over the last decades.***

We know that Godly cultures can change and reject God over generations and with a change in leadership. No culture is immune. Even the Israelites, who saw God’s miracles firsthand, forsook His worship and sacrificed offerings to golden calves during a few weeks of their leader’s absence (Exodus 32:1-6). With a change of administration, we risk changing from a Biblically based society to an Islamic one by bureaucratic mandate. Giving government the power to grade doctrine by executive/bureaucratic order assumes the graders will stay righteous.

Implementing the program I propose requires a mature and Godly people—a people committed to the person and principles of the God of the Bible as the foundation of the Republic. My proposal goes deeper than establishing an administrative rule or enacting legislation. I ask only that the state be willing to declare the obvious and risk being called politically incorrect for doing so. I ask the government to enforce against this revolutionary ideology the same restrictions on immigration and citizenship that would be applied to any other. I do not ask the state to judge a theology. I ask it to judge allegiance. The fact that Islam wears the clothing of a religion—prayer, prophet, book, spirit—does not mean it should be given the full protection of a religion. Islam has as much right to practice the rituals of its religion as Christians, given that we desire a nation that honors freedom of thought and conviction. But given the expansionist, nation-conquering, and people-submitting nature of Islam, and its integration of this political program with its religious beliefs, the spread of this ideology and the conversion of its people to Christianity must be of the highest priority. Within our borders, we have an ideology held by a people who give the ideology motive force. Islam has within it a conquering ideology; we must restrict the efforts of Islam, but the only safe way of doing it is by individual effort, by personal witness, by cultural acknowledgment that Islam seeks to overpower us, and that we must fill the vacuum of ideological passion with a commitment to live as Godly Christian men and women and incorporate that fiber into our daily relationships and our cultural fiber.  What Islam offers is an integrated system of lifestyle, governance, and worship. That is the kind of integration that we in Christendom must incorporate into our lives. The fact that Westerners are choosing to embrace Islam means that there is a hunger for such discipline and holistic embrace of God into our lives.

The clause, read whole. On its surface, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment appears to give every religion the right to practice, and full immunity from government interference and scrutiny. (The Establishment Clause is the other half of that sentence — it forbids a state church — and it is the free-exercise half that is invoked for the immunity.) But that interpretation is the equivalent of prooftexting: reading one verse and applying it to every situation in life. “Turn the other cheek,” applied universally and taken literally, implies that the man who rapes your wife and kills your child should be shown where the other children sleep. The Free Exercise Clause was not meant to protect the practice of a religion whose primary project is the overthrow of the Constitution and Bill of Rights and their replacement with Sharia. The First Amendment was not written to forbid the government from examining the political program and implications of a religion’s precepts.

The courts have never read it as such an immunity either, and this is where the religion-and-civilization-conquest doctrine distinction stops being my metaphor and becomes American law. In Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Supreme Court held that religious belief is absolutely protected and religious conduct is not — a man may believe what he will about plural marriage, and the law may still prosecute him for practicing it, since otherwise every citizen becomes a law unto himself. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that a neutral law of general applicability binds everyone, regardless of religious motive. Belief is untouchable. Conduct is governed by one law that applies to all.

The principle applies to both Christianity and Islam. The Muslim follows a religion with harmless (but time-consuming) practices, such as washing extensively and praying five times per day. That is a religious practice which offends no one; it must not be a crime, and the Christian who wants it restricted has forgotten what liberty of conscience cost and why his own forefathers wanted it. But if a behavior is a crime — a violation which I would not want to experience — it should be prosecuted regardless of its religious wrapping: the honor killing, the forced marriage of a daughter, the corporal punishment of the apostate, the cleric-authorized mutilation for criminal offense. If it is a valid religious practice (rituals, beliefs, doctrines about spiritual reality), it should not be a crime. The concept of religious exemption has become a staple of cultural bypass around which objectors can hide themselves. Thus, the nation must decide what is right, and if it is not right for one, then it is not right for all. This is the camel’s nose under the tent that has allowed Islam to practice corporal punishment on the apostate among us. One law under which every other law is tested is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). If an act violates that law, it is wrong for everyone, and the exemption is a fraud; if it does not, it should not have been prohibited for anyone. A foundational principle of jurisprudence is that the state should protect the apostate from the corporal punishments prescribed by religion, because American law classifies those punishments as crimes. It is the purview/juridiction of the State to prosecute crime; delegation of that right to groups leads to vigilantism, tribalism, and ultimately a divided nation. One law for all counters this, and the remedy for unjust law is legislative and jury nullification (which I addressed in another essay).

The instrument already exists. I am not asking for a new law. I am asking that an existing one be applied without an exemption.

A naturalized citizen must already take the following oath, swearing allegiance to and support of the Constitution:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

A naturalized citizen swears to:

• Renounce allegiance to prior sovereigns or states.
• Support and defend the U.S. Constitution and laws.
• Bear true faith and allegiance to the United States.
• Perform military or national service when required by law, subject to applicable exemptions and modifications.
• Take the obligation freely and sincerely.

And federal law already bars naturalization to certain applicants — this is 8 U.S.C. § 1424. Read the section’s own heading: Prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law, or who favor totalitarian forms of government. Subsection (a)(1) reaches the man who advocates opposition to all organized government. Subsection (a)(2) reaches membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, foreign or domestic. Subsection (a)(4) reaches advocacy of overthrow by force or violence or other unconstitutional means. And subsection (a)(3) — the one that matters most for this argument — bars naturalizing anyone who advocates the doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship. That clause contains no force-or-violence element. Congress barred the favoring of a form of government, by any means, peaceful means included. No criminal conviction is required; the advocacy alone disqualifies; the application asks the question directly; and a false answer is grounds for denial then or revocation later. A companion provision, § 1427(a), adds the affirmative requirement: the applicant must be attached to the principles of the Constitution and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

Someone will object that the First Amendment protects the peaceful advocacy of constitutional change, and he is right — about citizens. He is wrong about the man at the gate asking for naturalization. In Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Supreme Court held that an unadmitted, nonresident alien has no constitutional right of entry to this country, and that when the government declines for a facially legitimate and bona fide reason to waive a statutory exclusion, the courts will not look behind that decision or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of the Americans who wanted to hear the man. The man excluded in that case was a Belgian Marxist theoretician, barred under the predecessor of the language quoted above; American scholars asserted their own right to hear him speak, and lost. The Court grounded the holding where it has always been grounded, in the Chinese Exclusion Case: the power to exclude is inherent in sovereignty itself.

Naturalization runs on the same principle. Congress holds the power under Article I; the applicant, not the government, must prove eligibility; and attachment to the Constitution’s principles is an affirmative qualification he must establish, not a suspicion the government must overcome. A requirement that would be plainly unconstitutional applied to me is entirely lawful applied to a man asking to become me. The honest counter-case is Schneiderman v. United States (1943), where the Court refused to hold that Communist Party membership by itself proved a lack of attachment. But Schneiderman was a denaturalization case: the government attempting to strip a citizenship already granted, under a standard demanding clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence. That burden runs the other direction on a first application. The distinction is the distance between stripping a citizen and admitting an applicant.

So what I am asking of the political class, the legislators, and the judiciary is not a new power. It is an admission—that the precepts of Islam include a program for establishing a form of government that these statutes already describe, and that the word religion on the outside of that program does not exempt it from a statute aimed precisely at that. To properly defend our nation against overthrow, it must first be admitted by the legislators and the judiciary, and given full legal acknowledgment, that the precepts of Islam are antithetical to the continued existence of the Constitutional Republic.

The misnomer. We would like to separate the test of the religion from the test of loyalty to the State, but this analysis has shown that to be impossible. A system that inextricably joins religion — the transformation of heart and soul — to state — the transformation of the foundational principles of government — requires greater granularity and context in considering what it means to separate church and state, or to prohibit the state from judging a religion. We must look at the religion’s entire program. The name “religion,” laid over a practice of soul transformation inextricably tied to a program of governmental transformation, has to be put in a different category; in terms of classification, that category is subversive political movements. The constitutional argument appears clear-cut: anything that calls itself a religion—Islam being the second-largest “religion” in the world—appears to qualify as one. But that categorization, as we have seen, is a misnomer and a disguise, and it allows subversives free entry into the nation to work their plan toward the establishment of the governmental system they believe heartily will bring peace, happiness, and prosperity to all, and is thus desirable above all other systems of group organization.

The boundaries. In Section IV we heard Burmawi’s story of standing in a Jordanian courtroom with a man who was told to recite a creed, without belief, and upon doing so could get his wife and children back. That was a religious test carried out as ordinary law. If I now propose that America refuse citizenship to anyone who says they are Muslim, that is the same type of test. The man can deny it for a moment, and thereby pass through the gate. Yes, he can be prosecuted for perjury should he be arrested for violence against the system; yes, he has put himself at risk for denaturalization if he violates the bar of peaceful internal belief with sufficient violence, but he has gained entrance, and he can justify his lying about his program and allegiance by scripture that authorizes lying to advance the cause of Islam.

We have already established that all who call themselves Muslims, by their mere membership/allegiance/belief system/holding the Qur’an as their organizational document, are participating in a religion (giving numbers) which is revolutionary to the established Constitutional Republic under which we stand. That simply describes the system. It does not describe every man inside the system, but it does describe the de facto alliance which he is within. One way of framing the admission of Muslims is not what do you believe, but what do you renounce. The applicant is not asked whether he prays toward Mecca; he is asked whether he renounces allegiance to any program, however sanctified. Rather, he is asked to swear under oath that he renounces replacing the Constitution of the United States with another body of law. The penalty for violation is perjury and denaturalization. The Muslim who reads the conquest verses as seventh-century history and wants nothing but to raise his children and run his business can swear that oath honestly, and I will welcome him as a fellow citizen. But this is a weak fence, as it is possible that such a man could swear that he has no such intention, and as in the case that Burmawi related, do so merely to get into the country and be naturalized, proceed to reproduce maximally, train his children to be Muslims and follow the Qur’an, attend the Mosque and mix with other Muslims who arrived without the renunciation, and be swept into the program of Islam. The chances that they will renounce Islam’s entire program of world conquest and fulfillment of its eschatology are, in my estimation, negligible. The motivation for deception is high: the desire to gain entrance to a land of freedom and prosperity. Some will truly renounce and oppose the program of Islamic expansion and cultural replacement, but the pull of 1400 years of tradition, and the extreme cultural mandate and pressure to conform and indoctrinate the youth of each generation make their program as durable as the Jewish allegiance to the Torah, Shabat, and the Law over millennia.

A blanket ban on self-identified Muslims would be simply ineffective, as would a ban on entry by those who did not renounce the program of installing Sharia throughout the world. The problem is that the filter is a word. Words are free to speak; only conscience prevents lies. True, it would exclude the honest, but the covert, the ones whose intent is subversion, will not admit their intention, as is true of every criminal, spy, and revolutionary. Install yourself into the heart of the targeted victim/government/society and proceed with the work in secret, executing the cabal, organizing the insurgents, encouraging the faithful of the work and the hope of eventual victory in “destroying the great Satan.” Admission is obtained; the first barrier to entering the heart of the “enemy” is complete, and it costs nothing more than declining to tell the truth when asked.  A sworn renunciation may create a record of a commitment and a legal record of perjury, but it will be an ineffective gate.

Once inside, extracting the insurgent is even harder. He claims hardship, being brutally ripped from those he loves; discrimination and Islamophobia are then used as weapons against the fair-minded, forgiving Westerner/Christian, and the Islamist looks at the host, who has just allowed him in to pursue conquest, with contempt. The state may condition entry and naturalization on sworn allegiance, because admission to citizenship is a privilege the sovereign grants and may condition, but using that barrier as a tool to actually keep us free from the invader who wishes to enter and purposefully foment revolution of the Islamic kind will not be barred. The problem is the tradition and rules of American jurisprudence; once that initial barrier is breached, the legal system may impose nothing on the creed of a man who is already a citizen. The American who converts to Islam tomorrow morning keeps every right he had last night — his vote, his property, his children, his standing in court — and if any official moves against him for the conversion itself, the court will defend him with the same vigor as the Christian’s right to convert to Christianity. This is the foundation of American jurisprudence; it allows freedom of conscience, belief, and speech.  Thus the court will be of no help whatsoever in defending us against Islam at the immigration office or against the relentless indoctrination, fertility wars, and political campaigns whose stated aim from the Qur’an is domination, replacement, complete occupation of the world. That remedy will be unavailable. The battle must be done in the hearts and minds and spirit of the citizens who wish to maintain the

The strongest objection, and the answer. An opponent of the asymmetrical judgment of Christianity and Islam as candidates for immigration will now say: by your own logic, refuse the Christian too. He also holds an allegiance above the state — he says so at every baptism, and the martyrs proved it. If a higher loyalty disqualifies, the serious Christian is disqualified first.

If that were the reason for prohibition to naturalization, it would be a fair objection – but it is not. Every man holds some allegiance above the state; the atheist holds one too, even if he calls it conscience. The question is never whether a higher loyalty exists. The question is what the higher loyalty commands him to do about the civil order. Christ told His followers to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s (Matthew 22:21). The Apostle, writing under Nero, told them to be subject to the governing authorities and to pay their taxes (Romans 13:1-7). Jeremiah told the exiles to seek the peace of the city where they were carried captive. And when a crowd came to make Jesus a political king by force, He withdrew to a mountain alone (John 6:15), and He told Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Kingdom that advances by the transformation of hearts in its allegiance to the Bible, one soul at a time, and by mass influence through media and education in the principles of Christianity cannot threaten the Constitution. Our republic is based on the principles of the Bible.  The principles of Christianity are the principles of the nation’s laws, culture, manners, and ethics; the loyalty of the Islamic culture is to a completely different moral/cultural/governmental system,

Islam’s higher allegiance commands loyalty to a completely different Scripture and an associated political/group/governmental structure. Islam requires replacing the civil order with a body of law based on the Qur’an, and subjecting everyone to it. The difference is not the degree of loyalty the subject owes to its scripture; it is what the loyalty is toward: the God of the Bible, or the god of the Qur’an. They are not interchangeable; their programs produce markedly different societal/economic/moral/cultural outcomes. The State has been colorblind in its perception of loyalty, and the question of whether one declares belief in the Qur’an, the Prophet, and/or Islam has not been asked – it is considered out of bounds; the assessment of the individual’s cultural loyalty has not been made out of fear of religious discrimination/Islamophobia and the Politically Correct doctrine of honoring diversity. The fact is that, regardless of the degree of one’s political aspirations for the imposition of Sharia and submission to Allah by an individual Muslim, his mere affiliation/idenfication/allegiance with Islam gives strength, by the mechanism of colony support, to the Islamic community. Activism by the Muslim is not required to strengthen the crowd. The mob/colony/group gains vitality through participation, even if only through uninterested presence. The fact of the threat and agenda of Islam is what is required. The state should be aware of it; the state should support all who oppose Islam in any expression. And in opposition, the State should give it vocal and unequivocal support to the Christian agenda and program. This has not been the case for decades, since we were told “We are not just a Christian nation” may have been the inflection point from secular indifference to our spiritual roots and the active embrace of Islam as a protected minority we now see today. While the State is an ineffective gatekeeper, an impenetrable wall against the entrance and advance of the Islamic insurgency, it must be an ally in the struggle to maintain our Christian culture, and for certain not a prosecutor of those who resist the Islamic attempt to replace our government. Article VI prohibits religious tests, but it does require declaring allegiance to the Constitution. This is where the question of loyalty should be confronted directly, since they are members of a group dedicated to overthrowing the Constitution. I care little about hurting people’s feelings on this matter. I care about loyalty to maintaining our de facto Christian Culture. We should have no qualms about rigorous challenge of those who are Islamic and hold public office.

The shield. Why haven’t people, whose job it is, said it out loud? Because a protective shield has been thrown up, and we have seen the same shield before. It was thrown up around Communism by the declaration that accusations of Communists in the State Department were the product of Joseph McCarthy’s ego and ambition, and the truth of the claim was lost inside the slander of the man — his drinking, his boisterous behavior, the controversy about a list and how many were on it. The substance was real: the Venona decrypts, published in the 1990s, confirmed extensive Soviet penetration of the wartime government. Whether or not one defends McCarthy, the mechanism is worth recognizing, because the same protective mechanism has now been applied to Islam. There is an all-purpose shield: simply call all opposition to Islam Islamophobia. The slander is meant to intimidate, to give sufficient bluster to rebut criticism so that the critic will retreat and conclude that he must be mistaken — that the practices of Islam are religious practices which should be accepted as readily as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or the laying on of hands. But a category error is being committed. The commitment of Islam to spread throughout the entire world, overtake all societies, and place them under Sharia is not in the same category as the Hajj, facing Mecca, and the Lord’s Supper.

What has to change, and in whom? Simply passing a law or an administrative rule that those who are loyal to Islam should not be admitted as citizens is something, in that it acknowledges the non-benign nature of Islam. It speaks from the top, from leadership, that Islam is not the same as Christianity, that Sharia is not the Constitution. It gives moral courage to those who would confront the Islamic agenda; it gives courage to those who would criticize Islam that they will be defended with the full force of the government against the terrorist tactics meant to intimidate. If the name of Islam is diminished by every terror attack, that helps. By identifying the perpetrators as Islamists instead of hiding the identity of the perpetrators, that helps. The State — its administrators, its judges, its legislators — must be educated to understand that Islam has a religious aspect which cannot be separated from the political aspirations and commitments of Islam. But not only the state: the citizenry must also be educated to understand that the precepts of Islam are incompatible with the existence of the Republic, because no statute survives a people who will not enforce it. And the church has its own responsibility to teach the truth about Islam, equip believers, and welcome converts. Islam needs to be confronted with the history of the Prophet; the truth needs to be spoken boldly, as that is the language and demeanor that is given credence by the Islamic culture. Reason is important, but bold criticism of the precepts of Islam, strong and emotional defense of the gospel, and loud declarations of the difference between Jesus and Mohammed. If the truth is spoken, the Muslim will come out and renounce their faith and become Christians. They need somewhere to land. The state’s job is to strongly support those standing against Islam; test those who apply for admission to the nation as a citizen with an oath of loyalty and renunciation of their project to install Sharia; demand absolute loyalty to the Constitution; and remove from office those who violate that oath to protect and defend the Constitution by their professions of supporting the Islamic project.

This will also require a shift in Christianity’s outward face. We must admit that we are, as Christians, acting out the pattern of the Kingdom of God, and we must stop pretending that the gods are interchangeable. The God of the Bible is not a God; He is the only God, and a nation that abandons the God who grounded its liberties will not keep the liberties. We must admit to the truth of this claim, and be the instrument of this advocacy from the pulpit, the printed page, and the neighbor’s table. But it can never be forgotten at the immigration counter and in the federal job review. If a man belongs to a religion whose historical motivation is to replace and overcome Christian civilizations, the consideration of this man’s actual allegiance to the Constitution must be challenged more deeply than a yes/no or multiple-choice test. This is an essay question; this is an interview; this requires triangulation/coroberation. This is serious. To pretend that simply saying “I support the Constitution” is sufficient proof when the man professes a religion with a proven political agenda is willful ignorance, an allegiance to a Politically Correct agenda, worshipping diversity as a way of feeling virtuous. The system must have enforcement power: human eyes looking, mouths questioning, and brains evaluating whether the man is truthful. This challenges the man’s heart, mind, and commitment, because that is what is being asked of him when he declares that he has renounced allegiance to groups committed to overthrowing or replacing the Constitution. This is the time when the Constitution allows such examinations; if not, then when? At some point, it is necessary to evaluate the truthfulness of the man’s testimony. Given that this is a judicial-bureaucratic court, evidence should be gathered: testimony from coworkers, pastors/Imams, etc., that the man is reformed; he is a moderate Muslim. This is not a test of religion; this is a test of the man’s allegiance to the Constitution. He belongs to a subversive group that has a religion. The question is whether he holds to the group’s tenets of revolutionary conquest/control of new territory for his group’s rule. His group identification /memership/allegiance testifies against him. He can be asked about his membership in Islam because it is within the purview of the State Department to query if he professes to be a member of Islam. By defining Islam as a revolutionary group that has a religion attached to it, we can ask, knowing that it has a known subversive/revolutionary agenda; he can be asked, without fear of administering a religious test, whether he has renounced the group’s revolutionary agenda. As such, the man’s allegiance to Islam’s revolutionary tenets may be interrogated and evaluated. The test is not which God this man worships; rather, it is a question of his allegiance to the Constitution, not his creed or his relationship with his Creator. If the man is a member of the communist party, he should likewise be interrogated and rejected if he cannot provide sufficiently convincing testimony that he has renounced those expansionist/revolutionary commitments of communism. The question is not relevant for the Hindu, the Buddhist, the secular humanist, and the Jew, as these organizations are not subversives by any standard I have offered here.

And the disposition. There must be a change in sentiment toward Muslims. It is the same as the right attitude toward the homosexual: you love the sinner and hate the sin. You love the Muslim and hate Islam. This is a radical proposition only because we have been overtaken by an ethics virus of Political Correctness. We are called bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and haters because we decline to embrace, promote, and give special privilege and accommodation to a particular brand of diversity. But there is only one primary law — loving God, neighbor, and self — and every additional program, whether of government or of ritual, is tested by it. When we as a people have recognized that the same law, the Great Commandment, is applicable in every costume, then we will have no problem screening immigrants for allegiance to the Constitution, and specifically requiring that those who are Islamic renounce their allegiance to the Islamic program of replacement of the Constitutional Republic.

What the gate cannot do. Now I have to say the thing that undoes half of what I have just built, because a man who states his own case and conceals its limit has not made an argument; he has made a sales pitch.

The gate is the easy part. Everything I have described stops at the moment of admission, and almost nothing that is actually happening in the West requires anyone to pass through that gate dishonestly. Children are lawful. Persuasion is lawful. Preaching is lawful. Buying property, funding schools, running candidates, organizing voters — all lawful. Petitioning under Article V to amend the Constitution is lawful; it is the Constitution’s own instruction for changing it. A people may talk itself out of its constitutional order across three generations without one crime being committed anywhere in the process, and no statute now on the books or imaginable hereafter can stop it.

We must retain the right to petition peacefully to change the Constitution of the Republic. We must retain the right to petition peacefully to change the Constitution of the Republic, as the social order must adapt to new environmental circumstances. Wrongs must be identified and codified. But a proposal to entirely overthrow, eliminate, and replace the Constitutional order with another system must be seen, known, and openly evaluated. Neither the unconscious forces of inertia nor the urgency of revolution should be the context for abandoning an old order or adopting a new one. That is, the body politic should make a conscious/deliberate and purposeful choice to radically modify the foundational societal principles. Reason and evaluation of benefit must drive a break with the past.

In the case of Islam, a sub-community attempting to change the Constitutional order must be understood, and their desired changes clearly and overtly evaluated; their motives and methods considered. If their reasons and desired ends radically change the social order to a new and undesired end, then their project should be openly opposed. We see their program of total societal transformation being initiated and the pressures of their methods applied. Elements of the same 1400-year history of overtaking nations and replacement with Sharia are already operating in America. In effect, we see a mindless golem instituting its pattern of social overthrow by a combination of occupation, breeding, and intimidation by terror. Retention of converts is enforced by shunning, beating, or executing those who leave. All who oppose their agenda are neutralized by various forms of psychological and physical violence.

The government must expose all tactics of the revolutionary agenda and openly publish the agenda and proposed solutions of revolutionary groups. This is the sunlight I referred to in the Jury Nullification essay. When people protest, their grievances should be known, and the government should facilitate, or at least completely allow, the exposure. People should know why they are protesting. There should be a “Christos Revolutionary Watch” in addition to the “Christos Conspiracy Watch”.  Many groups advocate changing the constitution, such as the abolitionists, who said the founding compact was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. The Anabaptists, who would not swear the oath. And the apostles — because Rome was not mistaken about them. A movement announcing another King, gathering converts out of every class, declining the loyalty offering, and teaching men that the empire’s entire structure of allegiance was penultimate, is subversive by any honest imperial reckoning. These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also (Acts 17:6) was an accurate charge, not a slander. The loyalty test on which the persecutions turned is precisely the instrument I would be forging. Rome’s remedy for a peaceful movement it could not answer is not available to me, because I am the spiritual descendant of the people it was used against.

In summary, my position is: The state should control who is naturalized and who is hired for Federal positions. The statutes to do it are already written and already survive First Amendment challenge. We must be willing as a nation to stand for our tradition as a Christian nation. This does not violate the Establishment Clause; we are not prescribing a national religion; we are choosing the moral standard to which we adhere. The question of the moral standard cannot be avoided even in a secular society; standards will have a body of authors and documents that generated them. The argument that the moral standard comes from the Bible cannot be used to prohibit its use as a moral standard because it is simply a body of moral philosophy with authors. Using the moral standard associated with that religion as a societal moral standard does not equate to establishing religious membership, practice, or a profession of belief in the precepts of the relationship between God and man.

But making this profession (of the national ethic being the Biblical standard) openly and society-wide requires recalibrating our national commitment to explicitly acknowledging the source of our moral standard. Are we willing, as a nation, to profess that our moral standard is based on Biblical principles? In this regard, we have two sworn opponents: the LGBT and Secular lobbies. The LGBT community is committed to prohibiting the use of the Bible as a source of national morality, because of its explicit condemnation of non-heterosexual, uncommitted sexual relations. And the second opponent is the Politically Correct/Secular/non-Christian community, which values diversity and honoring all traditions equally/establishing no hierarchy of values of one group’s moral standard over another. Equality and equivalence of moral standards have been equated with virtue for those with the Politically Correct standard of moral hierarchy. It is with this group that accusations of Islamophobia are weaponized, hoping to neutralize opposition to their agenda by using social stigma against opponents and appealing to the sensitivity of those who are PC adherents. Thus, the statement that we are a Christian nation, that our Judeo-Christian heritage is the foundation of the national morality, while being true, is denied by some and invisible to most. We must lift this fog of unconscious awareness of our heritage and bring the nation to a fully conscious embrace of our origin. We must recognize that our survival, as a nation, depends on the culture all nations want to come to, not on our commitment to including groups committed to overthrowing our system of government. I fear that if we cannot make the proper choice, to embrace the Judeo-Christian polarity, we will find Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address rendered in the negative: a nation so constituted will not long endure.

So: the state may not test your religion, but it may test your allegiance to the Constitution. A man whose religion tells him the Constitution is a man-made law to be replaced by his religion must be opposed.

And the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact — but neither is it a suit of armor. It documents the principles which we believe are inherent to the rights of men. The Constitution was written to restrain the government, not to defend a people against themselves. It will hold exactly as long as the people looking into it are still the kind of people who wrote it. Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1798 that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. The document was never the defense against the strategies of evil. The character of the people is the defense, and the document is the arrangement that a people of that character once made for themselves.

The issue of character is central to my proposal. The Kingdom of God advances by the transformation of hearts, not by coercion. If it is true of the Kingdom. Islam has gained a foothold in the West by immigration. Its program is one of rigid adherence to a moral code, and the West’s lack of a moral code is the vacuum that Islam is filling. The promises of Islam are a life of . seduction. persuasion, because persuasion is how allegiance actually moves, and no immigration statute was ever going to reach that. The church has not been losing a legal battle these fifty years. It has been losing a persuasive one, while assuming that the law was holding the line on its behalf. That is Hagia Sophia again. The mosaics never came down. We stopped looking up, and something else moved in underneath. A lock on the door is worth having; it is not worth much on a house where no one is living.

VI. Moderates, Reformers, and the Source

Boreing puts the decent man’s objection well: it was not our Muslim neighbors who flew the planes; it is uniquely Christian not to blame the group for an individual’s misbehavior. Burmawi says: absolutely, do not blame the Muslim for the terrorist — but understand that ideas have consequences, and if you deny that (as Marxism did, teaching that conditions make ideas rather than ideas making outcomes), you will misdiagnose the problem and react wrongly. Muslims are not the problem; Islam is. And the moderate who condemns terrorism while forbidding you to examine the text that produced the terrorist is not a neutral party. The Muslim defending Islam, or prohibiting its criticism, whatever his intentions, is shielding the source of the terrorism. The reformer who says peaceful Islam is the true Islam is telling the West that the problem is a few individuals, and so the West spends its trillions killing individuals while the source goes on producing them.

Boreing’s principle is biblical: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:20). Collective guilt is pagan. But Ezekiel speaks of guilt for a sin, not diagnosis of the reason for the sin. Burmawi’s distinction holds both: the neighbor is innocent of the bomb, and the book is not.

Let me steelman the moderate Muslim. He says: You are asking me to denounce my own scripture in public in order to earn my place in your country. You do not ask that of the Catholic whose church ran the Inquisition. I do not read 9:29 as a standing command; I read it in its seventh-century context, as most of the Muslims I know do. Why is my reading not Islam?

The answer is the one this fellowship reached in the essay on the Oxford debate (the Daniel Johnson engagement): if the followers lead, the leaders will follow. The mass of Muslims determines which Islam prevails in any place and time, and in that sense the moderate’s reading is an Islam. But it is an Islam the texts do not support, and the tradition does not recognize, and the reformer’s honesty requires him to say so. As Burmawi’s friend Zuhdi Jasser says, he is reforming Islam rather than recovering it. Burmawi’s request to the moderate is perfectly fair, and it is the request I would make: if you read it in context, you are not the problem; then step aside and let me deal with the reading that is the problem. The moderate who answers that request by crying Islamophobe has told you that he is not standing on the side of reform.

And now to the distinction that Burmawi rightly calls the most dangerous thing in Islam: the sanctification of the actions of Muhammad and their transfer into every century. Burmawi, a Presbyterian, says of Calvin’s approval of Servetus’s burning: he did it, I will not justify it, I will explain the age, and I stand against killing men for their beliefs. He can say that because Calvin is not the standard. In Islam, Muhammad is the standard — al-insān al-kāmil, the perfect man, the pattern for all conduct — and so the caravan raids, the assassinations of poets, the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, the marriage to a child, cannot be wrong, and so must be justified, or contextualized, or blamed on Jewish forgers of the hadith. This is the distinction called standard versus execution. Christianity’s standard is Christ, who conquered nothing, killed no one, and told Peter to put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52). Christianity’s execution — the Crusades, the Inquisition, Servetus, the wars of religion — can be condemned by Christians from inside Christianity, by the standard, without a single verse being abandoned. Islam’s standard is its execution. There is no higher court. That structural fact, not the body count, is why Burmawi is right that the two systems are two religions based upon the same foundation. This is why every Muslim who is a good man is a good man by a standard his own tradition did not give him. Goodness comes from the same law written on the heart that Paul says the Gentiles have by nature (Romans 2:14-15). 

VII. Sola Jihad: What Each System Does with the Debt

Boreing asks whether Islam allows for grace. Burmawi says no, and that it is by design a system in which you cannot keep the commandments — ten thousand of them, with hellfire threatened on every page (he issues a challenge: open the Qur’an at random) — so that the one thing that can save you directly is the one thing the text names: die fighting in the way of Allah. He calls it sola jihad, by deliberate analogy to sola fide. Everything else is weighed; martyrdom alone is assured. And the result, he says, is not mainly terrorism, which can be policed, but a people who live under a crushing theological guilt, terrified in prayer, incapable of the confidence that builds. He remembers weeping over the Qur’an and being afraid.

Here the fellowship’s method requires the Level 3 move: compare systems by structure, by what each does with the moral debt. Islam hopes the scale tips and offers one certain thumb on the scale: death in battle. Judaism is a covenant in which the law follows the rescue: God brought Israel out of Egypt and then gave the commandments; obedience is the response of the redeemed, not the price of redemption. Christianity is the same architecture brought to its end: God pays the debt in full, at His own cost, and the life that follows is response, not payment. Burmawi’s phrase for this is that the gospel is news, and one’s reaction to news does not change the news. That is why he refuses to tell his conversion story in churches: a dramatic testimony teaches people that the gospel is the transformation, and then a man whose transformation is undramatic thinks he has no gospel. The gospel is what God did. Our story is the ripple, not the stone.

Burmawi tells the parable of the man who swore to sell his runaway camel for two dinars if he found the camel, which he did, and regretted the vow. His wife told him to tie the camel to a cat and sell the cat for two hundred and the camel for two, but not sell one without the other; he compares the cat of progressive sanctification tied to the camel of free grace. Progressive sanctification can be a back door through which performance re-enters, and privileges are lost for failing to perform. This is like the preacher who tells the sinner not to come to the table until he has fixed himself. This is a good story, but I do not think sanctification is the cat. Paul says in one breath that we are saved by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast, and in the next breath that we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:8-10). The works are not tied to the grace as a price; they grow from it as fruit grows from a tree. This fellowship’s whole theology of the Kingdom is that God’s method is transformation — the heart changed, and the changed heart producing a changed life and a changed culture — as against Islam’s method of coercion. If sanctification were a cat tied to a camel, the Kingdom would have no way to arrive. It arrives because grace is not inert. The man at the table is unworthy, and Paul’s instruction is still let a man examine himself, and so let him eat (1 Corinthians 11:28) — not to earn the bread, but because a man who will not look at himself cannot receive it. Examination is not performance. It is honesty, and honesty is the beginning of the transformation.

Now the ontological floor, Burmawi says the relationship with God in Islam is a horror show. The Apostle John says: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love (1 John 4:18). Why should we believe John rather than the Qur’an? Not because we prefer him. Because the nature of reality is at stake. If reality itself is constituted by God’s consciousness, and God is love, then a system whose central emotion toward God is terror is misaligned with the substance of existence. Its fruits will show the misalignment, and Burmawi describes the fruits: guilt that crushes, conformity that forbids uniqueness, a people who cannot scale or build. A system aligned with the nature of things produces what he also describes: the high-trust society, the confidence that comes from knowing one’s standing is settled, the freedom to fail and stand again. He notes that some attribute the West’s high trust to the Catholic ban on cousin marriage and the nuclear family it produced, and says he believes it is rather the spirit of the gospel. It is both, and the second explains the first: a church that believed each soul stood alone before God, unrepresented by clan, dismantled the clan. Structure follows theology. Theology, if it is true, follows reality.

VIII. The Red-Green Alliance and the Mayor of New York

Boreing asks how a movement of secular, postmodern, sexually revolutionary progressives makes common cause with a religion that executes homosexuals. Burmawi’s answer is a compact history of the left: Marxism promised the poor a revolution; in America the poor became comfortable and declined to revolt; the neo-Marxists substituted identity for class — race, sex, orientation as the new proletariat — and Islam, being non-Western, non-white, once colonized, and anti-Western by nature, checks every box. The two agree on nothing but the enemy, and they have agreed to take down the system first and settle who gets the ruins later. Boreing’s analogy is Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt against Hitler.

We have used the dual-track rule in cases where conspiracy appears. It says every pattern of aligned action should be examined as possibly an intentional conspiracy and possibly a de facto one—aligned interests producing convergent behavior without anyone coordinating—and that it often does not matter which track is operative, because the Kingdom’s response is the same. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy in exactly this sense. No one needs to have signed anything. Two movements that both require the dethroning of the biblical God will find themselves marching in the same direction, and Paul has already told us who is at the head of the column: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). The alliance is not strange once you see that both partners serve the same principal, and that the principal does not care which of his servants inherits the wreckage.

On Mamdani, Burmawi reasons that if the mayor were a communist who merely identifies as Muslim for votes, Burmawi argues, he would push the Marxist agenda and neglect the Islamic one; but his defense of Hamas, his hostility to Israel, and his appointments say otherwise, and his daily bones thrown to the progressive coalition are the price of their letting him fight his own fight. If the mayor’s public conduct is as described — and the public record on Hamas and Israel is not in dispute — then it is reasonable to read him as sincerely both a real Muslim and a real socialist, and the more important reading is the one Burmawi implies rather than states: the sincerity does not matter to the outcome. A de facto alliance does not need sincere members. It needs them to be pointed the same way. The Kingdom response is the same on either reading: pray for the man by name, and oppose the program by name.

IX. Islamophobia Is Not Antisemitism, and Ideology Is Not Identity

Boreing raises the objection from the dissident right: there are special protections for Jews — antisemitism is singled out — so why not the same for Muslims? Burmawi’s answer has three parts, and each is correct. First, Islam is not a race, and the attempt to make it one is the door through which blasphemy law walks in. Second, no one has ever called it antisemitic to criticize the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Old Testament, or the Talmud; you may say what you like about the ideas. Antisemitism is proven by its fruits — the pogroms, the expulsions, the Holocaust — and it is hatred of a people, not of a doctrine. Third, therefore, the two words are inverted: antisemitism is hatred of Jews, not criticism of Judaism; Islamophobia, as its advocates deploy it, is criticism of Islam, not hatred of Muslims. Boreing states the inversion crisply, and Burmawi adds the George Carlin observation, which I paraphrase: when your ideology is your identity, every criticism of the idea is an assault on the self. That, he says, is precisely the condition of the Muslim, whose ontology is Islam, so that Islamophobia is, from inside, honestly experienced as an attack on the person.

I want to descend beneath this, because it is where the gospel answers the whole problem. The Christian’s identity is not his ideology. It is Christ — I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20). Because the Christian’s standing is settled by a Person and not by a program, he can hear his church’s history criticized, his Reformers’ crimes named, his own denomination’s errors exposed, and lose nothing. He does not need us to defend Him like a big brother; He has overcome the world. That is the exact difference. A man whose worth is secured by grace can afford to be criticized. A man whose worth is secured by adherence cannot. The fury of the blasphemy laws is the fury of a system in which the self has nothing under it but the creed. And the way out is not to demand that Muslims toughen up. It is to offer them the ground the Christian stands on — the adoption, the Abba, Father — so that criticism of an idea is once again only criticism of an idea.

Two judgments follow. Islamophobia laws — Burmawi cites a Canadian demand for forty million dollars and curriculum mandates, which I have not verified but which fit a documented pattern — are blasphemy laws by another door, and the church must oppose every one of them, in Canada, in Britain, in the American states, on First Amendment grounds and on the deeper ground that a faith which cannot bear examination has confessed something about itself. And the Christian who says that Jews are protected and Muslims are not has confused a protection of persons, earned in the ashes of the twentieth century, with a demand for the protection of a program.

X. The Dissident Right, the Weaponized Christ, and the Islamic Jesus

Boreing describes the dissident right’s new line: Christians and Muslims share a common enemy in the Jews and in Israel; Muslims at least honor Jesus as a prophet, which Jews do not; the Gulf states are kinder to Christians than Israel is; and Christ is King has become the banner of the argument. Burmawi answers each.

On influence. Burmawi asks: what is the difference between Jews seeking influence in America and Muslims seeking it? Jewish influence — he names AIPAC and says its aim is stated on its website: keep Congress pro-Israel — is above the table, and the worst outcome anyone can name is more aid to Israel, which Netanyahu has lately said Israel means to wean itself from. Islamic influence, by its own thousands of recorded statements, aims to replace the Constitution with the rule of Allah. Boreing adds what Christians often miss: Judaism does not want you; it is not an evangelistic religion and makes conversion difficult; there is no vision of a Jewish America. Christianity is evangelistic — we want you to know Christ. Islam is conquering — it wants you to convert or submit. Three religions, three postures toward the neighbor’s soul, and only one of them is a threat to the neighbor’s country.

On the Islamic Jesus. This is the argument I most want the fellowship to be able to make, because it is the one the Christ is King crowd cannot answer. The claim is that Muslims honor Jesus and Jews do not, so Muslims are nearer to us. Burmawi’s answer: the Jesus of Islam is a different person. He is not divine; that Christians and Jews already disagree about, and Burmawi (rightly, in this context) sets it aside as a matter for the next life. What he will not set aside is that the Islamic Jesus is a coward — in the classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157, Jesus, warned that the soldiers are coming, asks his companions which of them will take on his likeness and die in his place, and promises the volunteer Paradise. Burmawi notes the currency: Muhammad bought loyalty with the same promise — kill this man, and you will have rivers in Paradise. That is not the Jesus who set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem (Isaiah 50:7; Luke 9:51) and said no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself (John 10:18). It is a Jesus recast as a Muhammad — and that is the whole method of Islam toward the Bible: Abraham was a Muslim who built the Kaaba, Moses was a Muslim, Jesus was a Muslim, every prophet is conscripted to testify for the last one. Meanwhile the Jew, as Burmawi says with real generosity, is at least not a hypocrite: he says plainly that he does not believe Jesus is the Messiah, because the Messiah he awaits will restore Israel and rebuild the Temple — which is to say, the Jew is waiting for the Second Coming and does not know it. Islam praises a Jesus who does not exist in order to deny the One who does. The Qur’an’s respect is not a bridge. It is a substitution — the same substitution it makes on the cross.

On spitting. Burmawi handles the viral videos of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian missionaries in Jerusalem with the only thing that can handle them, which is proportion. According to the report he cites, there were about sixty incidents of harassment in 2025. He has been spat on in Times Square for preaching the gospel. Those same Jews spit on secular Jews. And the comparison being drawn is between sixty spittings in the one Middle Eastern country where a Christian may preach at the Western Wall and go home safe, and fourteen centuries of dhimma, enslavement, and slaughter, continuing this week in Nigeria and Syria. He says that he wishes the Muslims of Jordan would spit on him, if only they would let him come home to visit his family. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing. Christians across the Islamic world would move there if they could. I have said elsewhere that hyperbole is lying by proportion. The spitting narrative is the textbook case: a true thing, sixty incidents, told at a scale that makes it a lie. And Burmawi’s account of why Middle Eastern Christians themselves so often speak for their regimes and against Israel is as compassionate as it is damning: they were Islamized by culture, they live in a bubble, they do not know what freedom is, they do not know they are persecuted, and the ones who found out are the reason no one else tries.

On Jordan. Burmawi loves the King of his country. He describes a man whose mother is Christian, who protects Christians as far as he is able. And then he says what the King cannot say: the tyranny of public opinion sets the limits, and the King can protect Christians only as long as they behave. The Fuheis statue is the proof, and my triage above sharpened it: erected by the youth club, removed by the municipality the next day after a social-media outcry, exiled to a cemetery, and then the King visited to affirm coexistence. That is the whole condition of the dhimmi in the kindest Muslim state on earth: tolerated, protected by a decent ruler against his own people, still required to keep a statue of their Lord in the graveyard where He cannot offend the Muslim psyche. The King is a good man despite Islam.

On the weaponized King. Burmawi says that the crowd shouting Christ is King at the Jews reminds him of the crowd in John 6 that tried to seize Jesus and make Him a king — not because they loved Him but because they wanted a king against Rome — and Jesus departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15). In the April essay I argued that the Kingdom of God differs from every theocracy not in content but in structure — that my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Christ conscripted as the banner of a faction against the Jews is a Christ made a king by force, for political reasons, by men who do not love Him. He will do what He did in Galilee. He will not be there. The slogan will be shouted over an empty throne, and the people shouting it will find they have enlisted under the same principle as the red-green alliance, whose signature is precisely that it does not care which servant carries the flag.

Burmawi’s dismissal of the Jews killed Jesus needs one verse: For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together (Acts 4:27). Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, Israel — that is everyone. The cross was a joint venture of the whole human race, and if I want to know who killed Jesus, I need a mirror, not a map. Burmawi’s own line is that after two thousand years of Jews being persecuted on account of Jesus, he will not crucify them for a few sentences in the Talmud. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34) — that was said over the whole assembly of Acts 4:27, and it was not a suggestion to the rest of us.

XI. Darby, Scofield, Replacement, and the Olive Tree

The interview closes on the eschatological front of the same war.

The dissident-right narrative Burmawi describes runs: Christianity never believed in the restoration of Israel; John Nelson Darby invented dispensationalism in the 1830s, perhaps at Jewish instigation; the Scofield Reference Bible, funded by Jews, globalized it; and American Christian Zionism is therefore a Jewish plant. Burmawi answers with history: Puritan divines wrote of the future salvation of the Jews in the seventeenth century; Increase Mather’s book is a matter of record; Pascal’s Pensées treat the survival of the Jews as evidence for God; annotated Bibles do not shape imaginations as much as the theory requires; and the cabal-that-runs-the-world theory fails the simplest test of human nature — married couples cannot keep secrets through a divorce, and we are asked to believe a cabal has kept one for centuries without a single defector or deathbed manuscript. A conspiracy claim must be graded by its evidence, and a two-thousand-year secret with no leak sits at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, the precision. In the May essay on eschatology and the Christian underground (Endurance, Not Escape), I laid out at length why I reject the Darby system — the two-phase Second Coming, the pre-tribulation rapture, the Church as a parenthesis, and Israel and the Church as two separate peoples with two separate destinies. No Church Father taught it; no Reformer taught it; it is a nineteenth-century innovation, and I hold with the historic premillennial reading that Christ returns once, visibly, after the tribulation, and that the Church is the olive tree of Romans 11 into which Jew and Gentile alike are grafted by faith. I also said there that American Christian Zionism built on the two-peoples doctrine is theologically muddled.

But Burmawi is not defending Darby. He says he was once a dispensationalist and is no longer, that he holds no settled eschatology at all because the apocalyptic books are too easy to speculate from, and that he will know the sequence when it happens. What he does say is that he is not a replacement theologian — that he will not explain away God’s promises to Israel as shadows. I agree, and the reason is in the same chapter that gives me the olive tree. I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid (Romans 11:1). Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18). For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29). One can reject Darby’s two peoples and still refuse to say that God is finished with the people from whom the Messiah came; indeed Romans 11 forbids the second more sternly than it permits the first. The historic Church, for all its supersessionist theologians, kept reading Romans 11 and kept expecting the Jews’ return to their Messiah; the Puritans’ restorationism grew from the olive tree, not from Darby’s chart. And the fellowship’s support for Israel — expressed most fully in the July essay on Amir Tsarfati’s June update and the Sons of Issachar standard — rests not on a dispensational timetable but on two things that need no chart: the justice of a people’s right to exist and defend itself, and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee (Genesis 12:3), which was said to Abraham before there was a Jew or a Christian to argue about it. That is not uncritical. Israel is a state and states err, and the same essay that defended her deliberated her government’s conduct on the merits. Support is not worship. But contempt is not analysis either, and the man who has decided that God’s ancient people are simply a nation like any other — the position Burmawi attributes to one of Carlson’s guests — has decided to read Romans 11 with the pages glued.

Boreing’s closing line on prophecy deserves to be set in Scripture, because it is Scripture: God does not give prophecy so that we may know the future, but so that when the future arrives we may know that He is God. That is Isaiah — I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:9-10) — and it is Jesus in the upper room: And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe (John 14:29). The people who understood the prophets best crucified the One they prophesied. Falling in love with one’s chart of the future is the surest way to miss it when it comes. Burmawi’s agnosticism and my historic premillennialism agree on this, and it is the only part of eschatology on which I would stake a great deal.

XII. The War of Stories, and the Floor Under It

Burmawi’s frame for all of it is that the West was built on a story — covenant, human depravity, a system designed to help selfish men rise again after failure — and that another story has come to replace it, and that the danger is not the bomb but the replacement of the story, which alters everything downstream. He says Islam is leaving the Middle East, where atheism is spreading, and that Europe is the new center of jihad; he says the West apologized to the thief while holding the stolen goods, and the thief, condemned if he did not, doubled down; he says Islam won the lottery in the West after 9/11 because the accommodation that followed the accusation was worth more than a century of migration. And he says at the end that Israel is under attack not for what it does but for what it is, that the war against Israel is the vehicle for smuggling jihad into the West rebranded as liberation and resistance, that fifty years of postmodernism and relativism emptied the throne of the biblical God, and that foreign gods are now competing for the seat.

I accept the frame, and I want to give it the floor it lacks, because war of stories is where a Level 3 argument ends and where a Christian one must go further. If it is only a war of stories, then the relativist’s checkmate stands: your story, their story, who is to say? And the Islamist’s reply stands too: I prefer the story of submission; you prefer the story of grace; your preference is not law. The answer this fellowship gives is Level 4, and I will not retreat from it into comparative sociology: reality has a nature. The world is not a neutral stage on which stories compete; it is the sustained thought of a God who is love, and every story is either aligned with the nature of the One who holds the world in being, or misaligned with it. The Conscious Point Physics is our attempt to say this in the language of physics — that the substance of existence is conscious, that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description and not metaphor — and its moral consequence is that alignment with God’s nature is not a preference; it is what good means, the way alignment with the grain is what a straight cut means. A story of submission to a master whose every page threatens is a story misaligned with the ground of being, and the misalignment shows in the fruits Burmawi catalogued from the inside: fear, guilt, conformity, stagnation, the poetess between the camels. A story of adoption by a Father who paid the debt Himself is aligned with the ground of being, and its fruits are the high-trust society, the confidence to build, the freedom of the neighbor, the imago Dei that even the unbelieving nations sign. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16) is not a rule of thumb; it is what the alignment of a story with reality looks like from the outside. The West will not win a war of stories by telling its story louder. It will win by remembering that its story is true — and by living as if it were.

And that is why the empty throne is the right image and the wrong conclusion. The throne of the biblical God is not empty. The West vacated its acknowledgment of Him, and the gods now competing for the seat are competing for a chair that was never theirs. The remedy is not to elect a better god. It is repentance — remember therefore from whence thou art fallen — and the first works.

XIII. The Sons of Issachar: Judgments and Levers

The fellowship’s rule is that an essay which ends at understanding is not finished. Here are the judgments, stated provisionally and stated anyway, and the levers.

Judgments.

1. Islam is a comprehensive civilizational order that contains a religion. The First Amendment protects the religion — the prayer, the fast, the creed, the mosque, the conversion in either direction. It does not protect the program, and a republic that cannot tell the sofa from the room will lose the room. On this I judge Burmawi correct without reservation.
2. The instrument is not the State Department. Government theology is a sword that turns. The state’s proper work is to distinguish exercise from sedition, to refuse blasphemy law in every costume including the costume of Islamophobia, to screen immigration for allegiance to the program, and to shelter the apostate. The church’s work is everything Burmawi asked the state to do: to read the texts, tell the truth, and equip believers. On this I judge him half right and correct the half.
3. Muslims are neighbors and captives to rescue, not enemies to defeat; Islam is a system to be opposed and named as false. The moderate’s context-reading is welcome and his shielding of the source is not. Love the man; do not accept the shield.
4. The dissident right’s turn — Muslims as allies, Jews as the common enemy, Christ as the banner — is a lie by proportion in its facts and a seizure of Christ by force in its theology, and He will not be found under that banner. I judge it not merely mistaken but spiritually dangerous, and I say so to brothers whom I would rather not offend.
5. On Israel, the fellowship’s ground is Romans 11 and Genesis 12:3, not Darby’s chart. Reject the two-peoples system and reject replacement theology in the same breath; support Israel’s right to exist and defend herself on grounds of justice and covenant; retain the liberty to criticize her government as we criticize our own.
6. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy that needs no coordination because its members serve one principal. The response is spiritual before it is political: name the principal, and refuse to be recruited by either of his servants — including the one wearing a cross.

Levers.

Prayer, named and specific. For Danny Burmawi, who cannot go home, and for the Ideological Defense Institute. For the Jordanian convert whose household is now Christian, and for every secret believer in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and the Gulf whose faith is a capital offense in the court of public opinion if not of law. For the Christians of Nigeria and Syria being killed this week. For the Muslim families in our own towns, that they may meet the Jesus who did not run. For Zohran Mamdani, by name, that the man be saved and the program fail. For Tucker Carlson and the young men who trust him, that a captured audience be freed from the story that is capturing it — they are not our enemies; they are ours to win back. For the King of Jordan, that a good man in spite of Islam might become a good man because of Christ.

Speech where speech reaches power. Through the Christos Voting Network, three asks: that our representatives oppose any federal or state measure that would define criticism of Islam as a hate offense; that they support asylum for apostates from Islam as a named category of religious persecution; and that the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and Syria be treated in foreign policy as the emergency it is. Small levers, named truthfully — for who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10) — outrank large levers imagined.

Formation. Burmawi issued a challenge: open the Qur’an at random and read. I convert it into an assignment for the fellowship. Read it — the Qur’an, and a Sira, and the Bukhari collection — not to master it as Burmawi once did, but as Bereans, who searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so (Acts 17:11). A Christian who has never read what Islam says about itself is defenseless against both the imam and the Tucker Carlson guest who tells him what it says. And apply the second test of Section III as you read: does this revelation ever rebuke its recipient? You will not need my essay after that. You will have Aisha’s.

Hospitality. The Grammar’s counsel on engaging Muslims stands: relationship first, questions before arguments, Jesus before Muhammad, patience, and no lone rangers. The man at the mosque down the road is not an ideology. He is a neighbor who has been told all his life that Christians know Islam is true and refuse it out of rebellion. He has never met one who loves him and can also tell him, gently, what his own book says about the substitution on the cross. Be that one.

The watcher’s soul. Luke 21:28 and 21:34 held together: look up, and do not let the heart be overcharged. A fellowship inflamed cannot sit on the council of Issachar. We are not afraid of Islam. We are afraid of a church that has become a museum of itself, and that fear is the beginning of the first works.

XIV. The Bet I Am Making

Burmawi said he did not convert because Christianity was the natural alternative once Islam failed, but because it was magnificent — the solution to everything — and that the gospel is everywhere, because everything must die so that the new may be born. He said it as a man who knows the price of the alternative in his own body: years of exile, a country he cannot enter, a family he cannot visit, because he left Islam and then did the thing that in Jordan is the worse crime: he defended Israel. He said the relationship with God in Islam is terror. He wept over the Qur’an and was afraid.

I believe him, and I believe the reason, and I stake myself on it. The God who holds the world in being is not a master who threatens on every page; He is a Father who paid what we owed and calls us sons. That is not my preference against the Islamist’s. It is the nature of things, and every civilization that has forgotten it has ended up under curtains. The candlesticks of Asia can be lit again. The mosaics are still on the ceiling. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1) — not the bondage of Sharia, and not the bondage of the fear that makes a church too polite to say that Sharia is bondage.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

— Thomas

Sources

• Jeremy Boreing with Danny Burmawi, “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam,” The Jeremy Boreing Show, Ep. 39, PragerU, 7 July 2026. https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39
• Danny Burmawi, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis (Ideological Defense Institute).
• Qur’an 4:157; 9:5; 9:29. Sahih al-Bukhari (Aisha’s remark on revelation; the traditions on the cat and the dog). Sahih Muslim (expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula). Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, commentaries on Qur’an 4:157 (the substitution narrative).
• Increase Mather, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669). Blaise Pascal, Pensées, sections on the Jewish people as evidence of Providence.
• Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004).
• Fanack, “Jordan’s Christians: Small in Number, Big in Faith” (2023); Roya News, “Removal of religious statue in Fuheis sparks controversy” (8 January 2023); International Christian Concern, “Jordan’s Monarchy Seeks to Protect a Legacy of Religious Co-Existence” (17 February 2023).
• Renaissance Ministries, “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men” (18 April 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/
• Renaissance Ministries, “Endurance, Not Escape: Eschatology and the Christian Underground” (12 May 2026), and “The Alignment and the Watchman: Amir Tsarfati’s June 30 Update, the Ezekiel Horizon, and the Sons of Issachar Standard” (3 July 2026), both in the RM repository, https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM.
• Christos AI Theological Grammar v1.3, Parts VI and VII (Engaging Islam; the Absolute Standard; Conspiracy Epistemology; Testimony and Declaration; Kingdom Culture vs. Theocracy). https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

I. Principles of Islam – Why People Choose Islam:

People convert to Islam for many different reasons, but at its core Islam offers a worldview, a relationship with God, a moral framework, and promises about life after death. Some of the central promises and teachings of Islam include:

There is no single Muslim view on politics, law, and society.

What is Sharia?

“Sharia” literally means “the path” or “the way.” In Islamic thought, it refers to the ideal moral and legal guidance derived from the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Many people hear “Sharia” and think only of criminal laws, but traditionally it covers much more:

• Worship and prayer
• Charity
• Marriage and family life
• Business ethics
• Contracts and inheritance
• Rules of war and peace
• Personal morality

So for many Muslims, Sharia is a comprehensive ethical framework, not just a legal code.

Is Islam just a personal religion?

Compared with some modern Western understandings of religion, Islam has historically been more comprehensive. Traditional Islam does not draw as sharp a line between: personal faith, ethics, law, and public life. As a result, many classical Muslim scholars saw Islam as providing guidance for both individuals and societies.

Do Muslims believe society should adopt Sharia?

There is a wide range of views.

Some Muslims say yes: Some Muslims believe that since God’s guidance is best for humanity, society should gradually align its laws with Islamic principles. Among those who hold this view, there are major differences:

• Some support democratic processes.
• Some support constitutional systems with Islamic influence.
• Some want only certain areas, such as family law, to reflect Sharia.
• A small minority advocate much stricter or authoritarian models.

Other Muslims say no: Many Muslims believe Islam should guide personal and community life but that the state should be neutral or largely secular.They may argue that:

• Faith should be chosen freely.
• Religious virtue cannot be forced.
• Modern pluralistic societies require equal citizenship regardless of religion.
• What creates pressure to adopt Sharia?

This depends on the society.

In some Muslim-majority countries, support comes from people who believe:

• Divine law is superior to human-made law.
• Religious values strengthen society.
• Islamic governance would reduce corruption or moral decline.

In other places, there is little public desire for extensive Sharia legislation, or the population prefers a mixture of civil law and religious principles.

It’s important to distinguish between:

1. Personal Sharia: How a Muslim lives their own life.
2. Community Sharia: Religious courts or guidance used voluntarily for matters such as marriage and inheritance.
3. State-enforced Sharia: National laws based partly or largely on Islamic jurisprudence.

A deeper tension

One of the biggest debates, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, is this: If God’s law is perfect, should society be organized around it? Muslims who answer “yes” often see public implementation as a logical consequence of belief. Muslims who answer “not necessarily” may argue that religious freedom, democracy, pluralism, and individual conscience require limits on state enforcement.

Why is this controversial in the West?

Many Western political traditions are built on ideas such as:

• separation of church and state,
• individual liberty,
• freedom of religion,
• laws based on democratic consent rather than divine revelation.

So when people hear that a religion has legal and political teachings, they naturally ask how those teachings relate to these principles. That debate is not unique to Islam. Similar questions have arisen in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and other societies whenever religious beliefs influence public law. A useful distinction is that most Muslims around the world are simply trying to practice their faith personally, while debates about how much a state should be influenced by Sharia are political and theological questions on which Muslims themselves often disagree.

IV. Sharia and Islam:

VII. Christianity vs. Islam and Liberal Democracy: