On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. Six days had passed since the 9/11 attacks, and in that time, reports of harassment and violence against Muslim Americans had surged. In Salt Lake City, a man attempted to burn down a Pakistani American restaurant. Near Phoenix, a gunman murdered a Sikh man he thought was Muslim. Community leaders at the center told Bush their stories that morning. The president listened. Then, in front of the mosque’s intricate tiles and graceful arches, the country’s most prominent Christian politician spoke.
He addressed the terrorist attacks: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.” Citing a passage from the Quran, Bush described Islam as a religion in which “billions of people find comfort and solace and peace.” He then discussed Muslims’ being targeted, stressing that people “who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America—they represent the worst of humankind.”
Bush’s message at the Islamic Center, which he echoed numerous times in post-9/11 remarks, now feels like a remnant from a bygone era. As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently argued, antagonistic, vicious rhetoric about Islam has become more and more widespread on the right. Donald Trump said in the Oval Office last month, in reference to the upcoming midterm elections, that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.” Also last month, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina wrote on social media that “every single Muslim holding public office in America” is “a threat to both national security and our republic.” When asked about her comment, Mace replied, “I don’t want to hear the call to prayer five times a day in an American city. I think it’s wrong; it’s not our values.”
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Many Republican elected officials have cast their vilification of Islam as a defense of Christianity. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted on social media in March; the next day, he decried the “importation of Islam” because “Christianity is the answer. Always.” In a June statement, Representative Keith Self of Texas said that “Christian values form the foundation of our nation” and described Sharia—a set of religious guidelines for Muslims—as “wholly incompatible with the rule of law in the United States.”
Some people on the right have made Bush himself an object of scorn for the way he spoke about Islam after 9/11. The social-media account End Wokeness—which frequently complains that contemporary America is inhospitable to Christians—recently attacked him for delivering his remarks at the Islamic Center while “they were still digging bodies.” Last fall, the far-right provocateur Laura Loomer said on her Rumble show that Bush’s rhetoric “set our country up for the last 24 years of Islamic infiltration.” Her guest, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, nodded in agreement and bemoaned “the wussification” of his fellow Republicans, who he said had come to share a “false” belief that America isn’t a Christian nation. “We let that take root. People believed it, promoted it, and pushed it, so that everybody, like, got in the corner and, like, ‘Oh, we can’t talk about religion.’”
An implication of Roy and Loomer’s exchange, and of much of the alarmist rhetoric on the right, is that tolerance of Islam must stem from a watered-down understanding of Christianity. Being a Christian, in this view, demands boldly doing away with the niceties of pluralism. That may be a more popular view on the right than it was when Bush spoke at the Islamic Center 25 years ago, but it is spiritually vapid. Christianity does not require antagonism toward Muslims—in fact, many theologians argue that Christians are called to treat Islam with respect.
The anti-Islam, ostensibly pro-Christianity rhetoric on the right today gets a fundamental tenet of the faith wrong, according to theologians I spoke with. “As Christians, we believe that all human beings are image-bearers of God,” Matthew Kaemingk, a professor at Theological University Utrecht who studies Christian-Muslim relations, and is an evangelical Christian, told me. “And so Muslims are beloved by God, regardless of theological beliefs that they have that I deeply disagree with.” When he surveys scripture—the Book of Isaiah’s description of kin and foreigner worshipping God, for example, or the New Testament account of Jesus’s apostles speaking in many Near Eastern tongues during Pentecost—Kaemingk sees a God who doesn’t recoil from cultural difference but rejoices in it. In this light, he said, scapegoating and demonization of Muslims is both unjust and “blasphemous.”
Kaemingk is not a theological liberal—he holds this view of Islam while also having a traditional understanding of the Christian faith. Islam and Christianity aren’t interchangeable to him; not all religions are the same. As is the case with many evangelical Christians, he believes that accepting Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation. Nevertheless, he has written that Christians can “defend the rights, dignity, and humanity of their Muslim neighbors without downplaying their exclusive commitment to Christian orthodoxy.”
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Some strains of Christianity see God at work in Islam. In two documents from the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church clarified its stance that God’s “plan of salvation” includes Muslims, “who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God,” and declared that it holds Islam “with esteem.” Jordan Denari Duffner, a Catholic theologian and scholar in residence for the interfaith Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, told me that the Catholic disposition toward Islam “is not even one of neutrality, but is one of positivity.” In her 2017 book on Catholicism and Islam, Duffner points out similarities between the two faiths: their shared devotion to Jesus’s mother, Mary, for example, and prayers that seem to echo each other. In the 13th century, Saint Francis of Assisi visited the Muslim sultan Malik al-Kamil in Egypt. Soon after, Francis composed “The Praises of God,” a prayer that resembles the Muslim litany of divine invocations called the dhikr.
Hostility toward Islam from Christians on the American right isn’t new. After 9/11, figures such as the televangelist Pat Robertson urged Bush to characterize Islam as inherently militaristic. The president didn’t listen, but over time, Robertson’s view became more prominent. The 2016 Republican presidential primary was a turning point: Some candidates decried “radical Islamic terrorism,” or some variant of the phrase, which linked Islam to violence but did not go so far as to say that the religion as a whole was a threat. “Politicians could say, We’re not talking about all Muslims here; we are just talking about, you know, the dangerous ones,” Duffner told me. But Donald Trump targeted Muslims as a group—and was elected president nonetheless. One of the very first things he did upon taking office in 2017 was issue his “Muslim ban” executive order, limiting travel and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has only gotten broader and more overt in the years since. As Religion News Service recently reported, Andy Ogles and Nancy Mace reflect a growing tendency on the right to treat Islam writ large as “a civilizational threat.”
In an interview last week reflecting on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Bush was asked why he’d decided to visit the Islamic Center. He said that he’d been concerned about stories of women in head coverings “being harassed at shopping centers” and that he believed “one of the most important parts of our ideology” is “the freedom to worship.” He didn’t explicitly invoke—let alone champion—Christianity. But his words reflected a far more authentically Christian posture toward Islam than the one spouted by many of today’s supposed defenders of the faith.
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