But if it sounds like this reformed version of Islam is something wholly different than what most Muslims imagine their religion to be, we shouldn’t be too comforted by it. As Ross Douthat noted in a recent column, forcing Islam to accept secular pluralism would guarantee its irrelevance: “Instead of a life-changing, obedience-demanding revelation of the Absolute… modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch—one more sigil in the COEXIST bumper sticker, one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition.”

Douthat suggests that the best model for Islam’s transition is American evangelicalism, “like Islam a missionary faith, like Islam decentralized and intensely scripture-oriented, and like Islam a tradition that often assumes an organic link between the theological and political.” He deserves credit for his optimism, but there’s something uncomfortable about the comparison.

American evangelicalism identifies most closely with the founding myths of Christianity—the “Early Church,” in evangelical parlance. Young evangelical missionaries see themselves as the legitimate heirs of Christ’s apostles, their faith an expression of Christianity uncorrupted by the Catholic Church’s past mingling of politics and faith. In their eyes, the practice of their faith is closest to that of “first-century” Christians. They situate themselves in a long tradition of messengers of peace. Many of them would welcome the chance to be persecuted for their faith, perhaps even martyred, by a hostile political power just as Christ and his disciples were.

It isn’t hard to see how a similar approach to Islam might produce something very different, maybe even something like the Islamic State.