Meeting Muslims and Islam: On Love and Discernment

Eboo Patel is the author of  Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America and founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core.  He recently penned an opinion piece for CNN entitled “How Evangelicals Can Learn to Love Muslims.”  Caught my eye.  Patel marvels at the evangelical political embrace of conservative Roman Catholics, a group that just 60 years ago would have faced the same kind of suspicion and scrutiny that Mormon presidential candidates deal with.  In the piece, Patel describes Islam as “the new Catholicism.”  To make his point, Patel quotes no less an “evangelical” authority than Norman Vincent Peale:

“Our freedom, our religious freedom, is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Norman Vincent Peale told a conference of evangelical leaders in September 1960.

Materials handed out at the Peale conference claimed ‘Universal Roman Catholicism’ was both a religion and a political force whose doctrines were ultimately incompatible with the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy.

Then Patel makes his analogy:

Replace “Roman Catholic” with “Muslim” and “Church hierarchy” with “caliphate” in those pronouncements and today we are witnessing a similar energy directed against a different faith community using largely the same categories.

In today’s parlance, Kennedy was part of a stealth jihad meant to replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia law and practicing taqqiyya to mask this dawa offensive.  Continue at Thabiti Anyabwile

See also: Christ & Islam