Hey Tucker: Christianity and Islam Have a Long and Very Bitter History

Tucker Carlson, the onetime cable news darling of the Right, lost his mind around the time he was fired by Fox News on April 24, 2023. He has evinced this in countless ways — including his now-infamous fight with a demon, which he seems to have lost. But perhaps the most obvious symptom of Carlson’s brain rot is his yearslong soft jihad, now waged with increased fervency, to inject and normalize Islam within the cultural and political bloodstream of the overwhelmingly Christian American Right.

Recently, Carlson has repeatedly taken to praising sharia law and suggesting Islam and its totalitarian legal code offer an inspiring moral clarity in contrast with today’s Western decadence. He has visited virtually seemingly every country in the Arab world, produced propaganda films for a few of them, and even announced his intention to buy a house in Qatar. He has called Hamas not a jihadist but a political organization, said he’d apologize to the family of Osama bin Laden, and has severely downplayed the Americans who have been killed in recent decades by Islamism. And earlier this week, the eponymous Tucker Carlson Network, in a seemingly earnest post better suited for a satirical Babylon Bee headline, offered this cherry on top: “Muslims love Jesus.”

In short, Carlson is now leading a conscientious effort to aggressively promote Islam on the American Right. Reasonable minds can disagree as to why he is doing so. Perhaps he secretly converted. Perhaps Carlson’s undeniable hatred of the Jews is really that acute and debilitating. Perhaps he is cashing out and even defying the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Maybe it’s a combination of these causes. And frankly, to no small extent, who cares?

Because regardless: This is flaming garbage. And it must be rejected as such. Fundamentally, Islam and sharia are wildly incompatible with Western civilization, which is the offshoot of the ecumenical biblical inheritance. The history of Christian-Islamic relations tells a long and often bitter record of conflict, competition, and occasional outright persecution. From the early centuries of Islamic expansionism all the way through modern times, the relationship between Christendom and the Islamic world has rarely been tranquil.