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Notes -
Isn’t that all technically applicable to (post-Constantine) Christianity, too?
It’s a universalizing religion with specific prescriptions. A big part of its canon is pacifist rather than martial, but clearly that didn’t stop the internal or external bloodbaths. A Christian state with a well-maintained standing army was much more competitive than a gathering of monks. Pragmatism has always trumped ideological purity.
But this goes both ways. We’ve manage to suborn most, if not all, of the violent bits. The same Protestantism which butchered Catholics would go on to tolerate one as President. If universalist liberalism could tame Christianity, why can’t it manage the same for Islam?
There are plenty of local areas in the US that are more or less completely controlled by fundamentalist Christianity. Granted that they don't have as free a reign as the leadership in Gaza, you'll notice these areas are not exactly persecuting nonbelievers, although it is difficult to get permits for a strip club there.
You're free to go visit St. Mary's Kansas; by all accounts it is a fairly pleasant town and the non-tradcath population is shrinking at about the average rate for rural Kansas. Likewise the town in Footloose was not completely a figment of Hollywood's imagination, and yet we don't hear about cases of religious persecution in the US from mainstream Christianity even in areas where the people who would likely be doing it could easily get away with it.
Right. Give Muslims 100 years of controlled immigration, and I really do believe it will dilute the extremism for them, too.
I understand this hasn’t panned out for Western Europe yet, but I remain optimistic.
It hasn't panned out for Western Europe, because they're a bunch of weirdos who think being French or German is determined by whether your ancestors were peasants dying for some Lord who wasn't even from that area 1,000 years ago. Throw in bad housing policy, and you have a situation where even fairly well-meaning multi-generation Turks in Germany don't feel German, let alone other Muslims with more touchy backgrounds with the West.
OTOH, if you come to America, have some kids, start a business, learn English (even if it's broken), and don't wall yourself in some ethnic enclave after your first or second generation, even many Trump voters will be happy to have you as neighbors. It is funny how so many people who despise birthright citizenship don't realize the moderating influence it has.
Yes, yes, yes, I know 3rd or 4th generation college educated immigrants are all SJW's who complain about America all the time. Well...what's more American than that?
France does have birthright citizenship (with some minor, practically pointless limitations), along with a host of cultural habits such as not asking anyone about their race or insisting that everyone with their passport really is a Frenchman. Their outcomes aren't much better than anywhere else in Europe, arguably even worse, given that something like a plurality of race riots in post-1945 European history happened there.
You seem to imply some sort of seamless assimilation here. That's simply not the case. Persistent differences in voting patterns and political attitudes between post-Hart-Celler immigrants and the legacy population are pretty well known, but even within the ostensibly fully assimilated white group there are significant differences. A US without e.g. Italians or Irish would be much hostile to the welfare state or restrictions on free speech.
Uh, did you adjust for region? New York is a lot bluer than the deep south- where statistically people have been there longer.
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Is a nation nothing but an economic zone?
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The main characters in the two religions really are quite different. Jesus simply wasn't going around celebrating the destruction of his enemies. Perhaps it's true that the actual characters don't matter and that the level of violence from a given religion has more to do with local culture and conflict than it does with the tenets, I really couldn't say for sure, but I'm comfortable saying that I don't want my locale to be the test ground for whether we can eventually liberalize Islam.
The Old Testament does include plenty of tribal and national strife. Even though Jesus supersedes the Covenant, I think the inclusion of those stories gives Christians a decent dose of martial pride. The martyr mythology doesn’t hurt.
As for the test ground—I think America is our best chance for liberalizing Islam. Islamic controls on Western cultural exports are much harder to maintain on our home turf. If we can manage to keep it together, we can win this cultural battle. I do understand that it hasn’t played out so well in Western Europe, but I suppose I remain optimistic. After all, we’ve got our own martial tradition.
Christian martyrdom is different from Islamic martyrdom. Christian martyrs die without fighting back.
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