I recently saw an American, Christian white woman exclaim on social media how its not unreasonable to be afraid or suspicious of muslims due to their supposedly violent nature. In particular, she went so far as to claim that islamophobia isn’t real, and is simply a made-up, dismissive term to ignore real concerns and kill any actual discussion about the actions of muslims within western nations like the United States.

Obviously, this woman was largely just fearmongering, but her mentality represents a greater problem within western or historically christian nations: fear hypocrisy. My point is this: we don’t understand things that are not integrated into our society and we fear things we don’t understand, and this sense of fear is self-supporting by events that are caused either in part or in whole by this fear or hate. Things, such as events or people, that support such conclusions are taken in full and things that do not are quickly ignored, all because the image of the status quo in the minds of the masses must be maintained at all costs.

To begin with this discussion, I have to put forward an idea for understanding how people in the world act. We must first begin with the axiom that every person in the world lives with the goal of being happy, and that we each act in whatever way we believe will eventually lead us to achieving what we believe as happiness in our lives. What is important to understand, therefore, is that different people have vastly different ideas of happiness in their minds, and psychologically, it’s most reasonable to believe that the ideal world people envision in which they can be most happy is heavily related to the world in which they grew up. Many people fight outwardly to the world (such as in politics) with the hope of somehow realizing a world they once knew, a world from a time when they felt as though they were happy.

For example, let’s think of social archetypes like NIMBYism. Many people are quick to support the adoption of new ideas so-long as they have no immediate effect on their way of life in any way. Change, inherently, is something terrifying to people, and even long after change has taken effect, people desire to return back to idealized versions of the past that they once knew.

Two things must be taken into consideration from this: understanding what this past often looks like and the problem that naturally arises from that. Firstly, this ideal past is often highly cultural. People can be very adverse to things such as integration because they simply have no desire to enter themselves into the embarrassing comfort of having to come to find a common ground with another group of people. This much is natural, think about the anxiety of meeting new people in the first place. At the very least, on a societal scale, many people who are used to a certain set of demographics (racial, cultural, gender, etc.) within their communities are going to be considerably more open to meeting new people, at the very least, if these people are still at least part of the demographics that they are already well-acquainted-with, and this becomes even worse the more ethnically/culturally homogeneous the community originally was. To put it in plain words, the more white and christian or brown and muslim or etc. a community is, the less the residents would want to integrate any other groups of people. (Again, note that this is not a problem of white people or christians or whatever, this essay is simply dealing with the hypocrisy arising from the integration of muslims into christian, white American/British/Canadian society.)

Secondly, the problem that arises is a cognitive dissonance when coping with change in the forms of integration of new peoples, that being forgetting the nature of one’s own culture in relation to another by way of various excuses to push a final conclusion. For example, some of the major concerns raised about the integration of muslims into American society are the belief that islam is an inherently violent religion, muslims have a history of extreme violence or terrorism within or against the west, and that the values of Islam (such as polygamy) are entirely incompatible with western (again, notably Christian) values. The issue is that each of these concerns lacks an understanding of the present state of Christianity in relation to the present state of Islam, that being, they are very much in parallel.

To begin, we can break down the belief that Islam is an inherently violent religion, especially given the main support to this point, the idea of Jihad (the holy war all muslims are ordered to undertake against all non-believers of Islam). What many christians do not fully comprehend is how the adoption/support of Jihad ideology is a very radical ideology within the muslim community, and most importantly, that Christianity has many of the same things. Nearly every religion has devout, radicalized sects or movements that support ideals of a so-called “Holy War” against non-believers in the modern day.

If we continue further onward to the supposed historical backing of Islam as a violent religion from terrorist attacks or Jihadist wars (such 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror, the London Bombings, the taliban etc.), these events, groups, and wars seem sufficient to paint Islam, at the very least, as a breeding ground for violence until you consider the same historical context for Christians (the crusades, transatlantic slavery and the land grab, the many wars over protestantism, etc.). We can then return back to the original question, whether violence is inherent to Islam, by considering another angle: “How is violence and brutality viewed as a tool for holy dominance in Abrahamic religions?” The answer to this question, I believe, gives us the key to understanding the nature of the cognitive dissonacne I mentioned previously. Obviously, Islam serves as a breeding ground for violence, but so does Christianity, if not historically moreso. Another amazing example is Judaism, as the first testament of the Bible is obviously interpreted by Christians to be overly violent due to the lack of the love and influence of Jesus Christ. Violence, unequivocally, is viewed as a tool for asserting religious dominance over non-believers across religions.

The key to understanding the difference between religions, however, is understanding how each group changes roles over time between being the outward supporter of barbarism and being the supposedly peaceful group. Christianity spent thousands of years as the bloodthirsty hegemon hungry for further control of all society, with the Jews largely split across nations and stateless. Christians position as the hegemon lasted for so long that the requirement for drawing blood in the name of god constantly no longer became necessary, and then it was admissible for these states to claim a push for peace and the use of violence only for protection. In other words, these nations claimed that they were now simply civilized in their matters, and ironically this opinion of themselves as being “civilized” was then used as a justification to promote further violence against cultures they deemed “uncivilized.” It was something of a positive feedback loop: Christians had fought themselves and others so much that extreme, outspoken violence no longer became necessary, so they declared themselves as civilized over nations ruled by Muslims, Hindus, native tribes of foreign lands, etc., but in doing so, they then believed that they ought to continue spreading their culture outward to aid other peoples by civilizing them.

Christians merely swapped roles, they were no longer the barbarians simply winning against other barbarians by brutally murdering them to spread their culture. Now, they were civilized peoples civilizing barbarians by brutally murdering them to spread their culture. And thus, Christian society finds itself at a cognitive dissonance today from the fear of the violence of Islam by not recognizing how violent it has been in spreading its own culture (and how this sentiment is, by no means, gone–it just changes forms).

Lastly, we can examine the claim that the beliefs of Islam and Christianity are incompatible. I’ll concede that, as with any two religions, the devout, fundamentalist sects are likely entirely incompatible (because the more sternly fundamentalist the groups are, even a slight disagreement will make the two groups incompatible), but if we rephrase the question into whether or not eastern, predominantly islamic culture (as we see it in countries such as Egypt or Syria or Iran) is compatible with western, predominantly Christian culture (as we see it in countries such as the US, Canada, or the UK), we generally don’t find it being incompatible whatsoever. Going back to the example of polygamy, polygamy has existed in the US for hundreds of years (however, as a controversial and contested practice), primarily through Christian-adjacent groups such as the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). More importantly, it’s also key to consider two things: polyamory is presently making a revival in the west due to a greater culture of sexual freedom (which is largely because of the plain fact that it entirely does not and should not matter to the government what consenting adults choose to do sexually or romantically between each other) and islam is not monolitihic on the topic of polygamy: many islamic people are personally monogamous (and, in another consideration, it is important to remember that just like Christians, not all of the religious scripture in the Quran is directly and literally followed).

Now, to end out this post, I’d like to notice that some people reading this may be especially curious as to why I singled out white christians over other races in a post primarily dealing with religion. This is because this post deals with the issue of religious prejudice but all of the topics within it are heavily related to racial prejudice. Christianity was historically used as a justification of racial injustices of all kind: from justifying the scramble for Africa/America and the transatlantic slave trade to upholding systems such as segregation long after the international abolition of slavery. Therefore, to summarize my beliefs, I see anti-integrationist, islamophobic western attitudes as ironic and hypocritical.