Reconciling Islam with the First Amendment is logically impossible.  Islam demands that there be no separation between religion and the political state. 

It is precisely efforts to bring Muslims into accommodation with Western social standards that have brought the raging reaction of the Al Qaeda jihad.  And with their amoral mania for hedonistic sensual gratification, liberals are adding fuel to the fire.

The Constitution’s First Amendment, ratified in 1791, states:

Under Islam, the Koran is the source of all law, and it prohibits the exercise of any religion or law other than the Koran.  If Muslim numbers in the United States reach sufficient proportions to influence the outcome of elections, politicians will be forced to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Koran.  As Bernard Lewis wrote in What Went Wrong?:

A Washington Times report of July 19, 2005, gives an example:

This inherent conflict between sharia and the Constitution is compounded with resentment against the porosity of our borders that both floods us with illegal immigrants who impose huge welfare-state burdens upon tax-paying citizens, and provides undetected entrance for terrorists. 

Liberal-socialists cling to what amounts to a suicide pact.  They assert the illogicality of multi-cultural education, that the cultures of Muslims and other immigrants, are as good as, or probably better than, our 1776 Judeo-Christian traditions.  Without those 1776 traditions, however, the Constitution is mere words without meaning.

Liberals focus upon tolerance, meaning the absence of standards of right or wrong, which leads them to believe that Muslim jihadists hate us simply because we have hurt their feelings and failed to share our wealth equally with them.

But it is in regard to the first Amendment’s prohibition against establishment of a national religion that an irreconcilable contradiction towers up like the Himalayas.

First, let it be noted that, while liberal organizations like the ACLU demand “separation of church and state,” which appears nowhere in the Constitution, their atheistic secularism is not a neutral stance.  Atheistic secularity is every bit as much a religion as Christianity or Judaism.  And, like Islam, liberal-socialism demands exclusivity.  Liberals have by now succeeded in requiring that the religion of atheistic, secular socialism be taught to all children at public expense in our schools. In that regard, see this earlier posting.

Second, as we have seen elsewhere in the world, wherever Islam gains the upper hand politically, all other religions, including socialism, are forced to knuckle under.  As Muslims flood into the United States, their numbers rapidly augmented by a much higher birth rate than that of non-Muslim citizens, politicians will begin to enact laws to please Muslims and get their votes.  The effect, both biological and political, will accelerate so long as there is open immigration. 

Ironically, liberal-socialists would probably suffer more, and more quickly, under Islam than Christians, since Muslims recognize Jesus Christ as one of their great prophets.  Within a couple of generations, liberal-socialists will reap the bitter fruit they have sown.

We can observe the process of ghettoization of Muslim communities, in France and Germany, for example, that effectively create small nations within the greater nation.  Muslims refuse to assimilate.  Muslim communities in Continental European nations demand to be recognized as legal entities subject only to their own ulemas and seek to outlaw practices in the greater communities that conflict with the religious and legal dictates of sharia.  Kerry-style “sensitivity” has only emboldened the Muslim communities.

Both the unremitting drive of liberal-socialists to enforce their atheistic secularism as the sole state religion, and the similar thrust of Islam stand in distinct contrast to the Christian history of Western Europe after the final demise of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.  During that long period, a workable balance was devised between temporal political rule and spiritual religious rule.  The political state endeavored to make the good citizen, and the church endeavored to shape the loving, moral person.

When the last of the Western Roman emperors was executed by barbarians from northern Europe, the only organization available and capable of preserving Roman civilization was the Christian Catholic Church.  Long before that stage in history, the Roman Pontiffs had struggled continuously against the Eastern Roman Emperors, beginning with Constantine, to claim and enforce the sole right to determine Christian doctrine and dogma.  That struggle continued through much of the Middle Ages, and accounts for the enmity between the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church and Roman Catholicism.

The Roman Popes took over the Roman Codex, incorporating it within the canon law, and, in the fashion of the earlier Empire, sustained uniform law and order throughout Western Europe.  This, it should be noted, was not a matter of subjugating the European barbarians.  Rather, the barbarian tribal leaders and kings actively sought the support of the Catholic Church, as Christianity had proved to be the most effective way to civilize their peoples and to promote relative peace and harmony among kingdoms.  It was easier to call upon the Pope to referee disputes between temporal rulers than always to resort to war.

Initially the Church asserted a claim to ultimate authority in all matters, religious and political.  The papal theorists based that upon Matthew 16:18-19, in which Jesus said to the Apostle Peter:

The Apostle Peter became the Bishop of Rome and effectively the first Pope.  Thus, until 1273, when St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica, the Church insisted that no king could claim legitimacy of rule without the official blessing of the Church and, moreover, that those rulers’ political decisions could be overruled by the Pope.

Needless to say, this was the source of continual friction between Rome and the various kings of Europe, who resisted Church meddling in their local political affairs.  After Aristotle’s works became available to Church scholars in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotle’s distinction between the earthly and spiritual spheres into Church doctrine in the Summa Theologica. This, in effect, turned the Church back to Jesus’s skillful deflection of the Pharisees’ question when they sought to entrap Him into advocating defiance either of Jewish law or of Roman law, as recorded in Matthew 22:15-22:

Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Europe enjoyed relative internal tranquility.  The slave system of the old Roman villas was transformed by the Church’s influence to the relatively benign feudal system, under which the vast numbers of former slaves became serfs who held hereditary rights to occupy and to farm specific lands.  Local rulers were obligated to protect them, in return for their specific duties to the rulers.  Local rulers, in turn, were obligated to defend the Papacy and the Catholic Church.

Frequently, however, armed defense, sometimes organized by the Popes, was necessary to withstand the continual military assaults by the forces of Islam.

The United States differs from Continental European political states in that we never had a feudal system.  Most people came here to the English colonies because they had the right to acquire ownership of land in fee simple, the most secure form of possession.  Beyond obeying duly enacted statute law, their only obligation to government was paying taxes levied by properly authorized and elected legislative bodies.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States many different, relatively self-contained, religious and cultural communities have existed.  But none of these ever denied the supremacy of the Constitution in political affairs, as do the Muslims.

Today, however, we are being pushed by liberal-socialists’ “tolerance” for hedonism toward a lawless abyss that, with the power of modern weaponry, will make the turmoil of Muslim militancy in the Middle Ages seem like the Garden of Eden.

The thrust of both liberal-socialism and Islam is to institute a form of feudal collectivism in which citizens become a modern version of serfs, whose every economic and social action is subject to unlimited regulation by government.  Citizens, since the New Deal socialism of the 1930s, have gradually surrendered the Constitution’s protections of individual property and other rights against arbitrary government, in return for the nanny state in which government decides what people are entitled to receive.  In short, the Servile State anticipated by Hilaire Belloc.

As has happened with so many provisions of the Constitution since 1937, those in political ascendance, either liberals or Muslims, will interpret the First Amendment to mean whatever is convenient for their desires, or simply abolish the Constitution.

Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.

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