Religious Pluralism, Sharia Supremacy, and the Constitution

In November 2023, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was censured by the House of Representatives in a vote of 234 in favor to 188 against. Rep. Tlaib repeatedly used the phrase “from the river to the sea” in the context of the opening of an all-out war against Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The resolution to censure Rep. Tlaib faulted her of “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel,” even though she claimed that her use of “from the river to the sea” was meant to be as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”^[1] Rep. Tlaib could make that claim with a straight face because the Hamas Covenant of 1988, which called for the destruction of Israel under the law of Sharia, also called for peace and harmony between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—under the supremacy of Islam.^[2] While the 1988 Hamas Covenant was updated with softened rhetoric in 2017, the ideology is the same and so is Hamas’ commitment to destroy Israel.^[3]

Rashida Tlaib is a Member of Congress, and yet, she clearly holds to a position that can most charitably be described as consistent with the Hamas Covenants of 1988 and 2017. Her position that “from the river to the sea, all Palestine must be free” posits that Israel is occupying Palestinian territory and must be retaken. Hard-line Muslims—many of them taking their cues from the writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomenei, father of the 1979 Islamist revolution—consider Palestine to be Waqf, or sovereign Muslim territory. The Hamas Covenant places this position under the rubric of Sharia law. Moreover, the 1988 Hamas Covenant declares in Article 8: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”^[4] While the 2017 document is not as brash as the 1988 document, the October 7, 2023 attacks bear witness that softened rhetoric is often a transparent mask for wicked ideology.

How Did America Get So Far From a Protestant Ethic?

How did America get to the place where a prominent member of Congress could hold such views so unapologetically—and not be the only one to do so? The story of the breakdown of the Protestant consensus in the United States is a long one.^[5] The short version is that, if America was ever a Christian nation, it was during the period from the enactment of the Constitution in 1789 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. But in the wake of the unprecedented levels of destruction brought on by the Civil War, the confidence that Americans generally held about the beneficent providence of God began to wane. Five percent of the population of Northern military-age men died in the Civil War; thirteen percent of Southern military-age men were killed.^[6] No other war in American history has been so destructive to human life.

Immigration from eastern and southern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also a factor. These immigrants were often Catholic, Jewish, and secular. They were much more foreign to an America that had been historically more Protestant, Britannic, and Western European by heritage, culture, and faith. African Americans left white churches and formed their own churches after the war, and these churches formed the core of their culture during the years of Jim Crow. The effect was to further isolate African Americans from white Protestant culture. The disillusionment that came with the failure of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations following World War I undermined mainline Protestant faith in America as the messianic nation. The success of theological liberals against fundamentalists during the 1920s further fractured American Protestants, and by the 1930s, the historic Protestant consensus was at a crisis point.

An awakening of civil religion, informed by Protestant ideas, swept over American culture with the close of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. But the year 1965 witnessed an event that would ensure the end of the historic American Protestant consensus: the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, championed by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The new law abolished quotas of non-white, non-Christian immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America that had been in effect since 1924. Since 1965, America has become a pluralistic society on a scale far exceeding that of any prior period.

Religious pluralism has always been a tradition in the United States. During the colonial period, the First Great Awakening spurred the first wave of religious pluralism by undermining the parish system and encouraging religious choice, due to the evangelistic efforts of Awakeners like George Whitefield, Samuel Davies, and John Wesley. The Second Great Awakening led to greater pluralism, with the dramatic growth of Methodists and Baptists, but also groups like the Campbellites, Millerites, Mormons, and many other sects. Added to this, the Second Awakening had a reform impulse that was not as prominent in the First Awakening. Second Awakening reform addressed the major issues of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. It also led to later reform movements associated with the social gospel movement of Walter Rauschenbusch and twentieth-century liberals.

All this to say, religious pluralism per se is nothing new to America. Immigration, social reform, disestablishment, and westward expansion have all contributed mightily to religious pluralism over the generations. But there are at least two new features of American culture that exacerbate tension between religious pluralism and the American way of life, new features that never existed in the past.

Two Features that Strain against the American Ethos

First, immigration to the United States has been broadly liberal, but it has also always been carefully regulated until 1965. For example, immigrants came in waves in the years after the Civil War. But with the 1924 Immigration Act, the government instituted a pause in liberal immigration law and pursued a more restrictive policy. This policy was meant to allow newcomers to assimilate into American ways of life. Once assimilation had been given time to develop, the pause would end and immigration policies would be less restrictive. So, the 1965 law abolished quotas that had been on the books for forty-one years.

Since 1965—a period of fifty-one years—there has been no pause, no time for the millions of immigrants to properly assimilate into American culture. Rather, immigrants have continued to pour into the United States and have not abandoned their own cultures to conform to their host country. In fact, American culture has assimilated itself to foreign cultures by allowing immigrants to retain their languages and traditions, even when many of those traditions are foreign to Americans.

This gets to the second novelty in American culture—assimilation of immigrants into American culture is now considered racist and hegemonic. Historically, immigrants were expected to shed their old national identities and ways of life to adopt American identity, citizenship, and values. Today, any candidate for office who advocates for assimilation would be well advised to find another line of work in a faraway place where the chances of being doxxed are at a minimum.

Sharia law is an example of a religious tradition that is, in many ways, incompatible with American ways of life. While not every aspect of Sharia law strikes against American culture, civilization, and law—personal devotional practices like prayer, dietary codes, etc.—not all interpretations of Sharia law allow for Muslims to assimilate themselves to Western culture and values as understood through a historic Christian basis. Rep. Tlaib is an example of this. She is willing to embrace human rights, freedom, and peace between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but only if these values are given meaning under a radical Islamist rubric, as the Hamas Covenant demands.

The Way Forward

So, what is the path forward? Do we embrace a postliberal vision, and thereby repudiate classical liberalism, the American constitutional order, and the First Amendment? Must we adopt a Christian nationalist order along the lines Stephen Wolfe defines?^[7] Or do we follow the counsel of James Baird and repudiate the Constitution’s rendering of the role of civil government as securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity by establishing a Pan-Protestant vision of the state?^[8] No, postliberalism is not the answer.

What is needed is a retrieval project of American constitutionalism, federalism, a proper understanding of checks and balances, and a restoration of a pre-Everson vs. Board of Education (1947) understanding of the relationship between church and state.^[9] We need to restore sanity to immigration laws by instituting a restrictive pause in our immigration laws, along with policies that encourage assimilation into American ways of life. And we need to hold the line on the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, found in Article VI: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

9. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

It is a postliberal impulse to wince at the mention of the Supremacy Clause—and even conservatives might retort: is not the Bible supreme over the Constitution? It’s a silly objection. Of course, the Bible outranks the Constitution. But the church is responsible for the preaching and propagation of the word of God, not the state. The state’s role is to set the conditions by which citizens may pursue happiness, that is, human flourishing and the enjoyment of rights under just law. The Constitution does not stand in opposition to the Bible. The Constitution sets the conditions for citizens to submit to the Bible better than any legal document or tradition in the history of Western civilization.

Furthermore, if postliberals don’t like the Supremacy Clause, how will they combat the claims of Islamic Sharia supremacists who would claim that the Quran is the only constitution that holds any authority? The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution renders any absolutist interpretation of Sharia law as null and void in the United States. Postliberals who quail at the Supremacy Clause should recognize that championing the Constitution is the best way to confront Sharia supremacy nonsense, the kind of which Rashida Tlaib represents.

Conclusion

The Constitution has failed only once in American history. During the Civil War, eleven states seceded from the Union of the Constitution. Over a million casualties resulted from the four year war that followed. The Southern economy, wrecked during the war, did not recover from the catastrophe until after World War II. If we allow the Constitution to fail in the midst of threats from without and within due to ignorance of what it says and means, or by explicit skepticism or hostility, will we suffer a catastrophe similar in scope to what came to pass in the 1860s?

America’s 250 anniversary is not just a time for fireworks, burgers, and memes. It is a time to come to grips with, as many postliberals like to say, “what time it is.” It is time to get serious about defending our constitutional order before a new tyrannical order replaces it.