In recent months, there has been an unexpected trend among far-right, MAGA influencers. These often self-described Christian nationalists, some of whom have spent years railing against Muslims, are suddenly showing a strange level of interest in Islam. Writing for the Washington Post, religion editor Matthew Schmitz suggests that it’s because, to a large degree, these fundamentalist Christians have begun to recognize ideological parallels between themselves and their Islamic counterparts.
“In the freewheeling world of antiestablishment podcasts,” writes Schmitz, “something new is happening. Recent months have seen Candace Owens reading from the Quran, Nick Fuentes decrying anti-Muslim sentiment and Tucker Carlson praising sharia law. What was once regarded as a threat is increasingly considered an ally.” Others, such as manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and right-wing streamer Sneako, have gone as far as conversion, having “recited the words of the shahada and thus taken up a faith they see as an antidote to Western decadence.”
These far-right voices, says Schmitz, “look to Islam as a model of what Christians might achieve if they cast off the yoke of liberalism. Say goodbye to Judeo-Christian civilization — and hello to the Islamo-Christian right.”
As Schmitz notes, Americans have long held up the concept of “Judeo-Christianity” as the foundation of a pluralist society “in which the contributions of Catholics and Jews could matter as much as those of Protestants,” and where freedom and democracy would reign and be spread around the world.
“The Islamo-Christian right, by contrast, is skeptical of pluralism and critical of U.S. foreign policy,” notes Schmitz. “It’s scornful of liberal attempts to promote interreligious understanding and therefore happy to criticize Islam on certain points even as it praises the faith on others.”
He points to Tucker Carlson as a prime example of this. On one hand, “he says the West is undergoing an epidemic of ‘white suicide’ as a lack of civilizational confidence leads to disorder and declining birth rates,” but on the other, he praises how the Muslim-majority Gulf region still “believes in its religion and culture.”
At the same time, many “America First” MAGA influencers see in Islam views that complement their own anti-globalist, anti-foreign entanglement worldview.
“Aleksandr Dugin, the anti-liberal Russian thinker, has declared that ‘shariah has to overcome the capitalism,’” Schmitz offers as an example. “He hopes that Muslims will join a worldwide battle against the ‘globalist elite.’ Fuentes has likewise called on Muslim countries to resist American foreign policy. ‘America is the seat of the liberal empire that controls the world, and we are enemies of that liberal order,’ he says. That echoes and inverts the words of the head of MI6, the British intelligence agency, who in 2022 urged people to ‘remember the values and hard-won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights.’ Not everyone views this contrast as favorable to the West.”
Perhaps where MAGA most finds its corollary in Islam is in, as one author called it, a desire for a “return to patriarchy.”
“Others on the Islamo-Christian right celebrate sex relations in Muslim societies,” explains Schmitz. “Young men who have been told that ‘the future is female’ see patriarchy as an appealing alternative. Some of them want, in Fuentes’s words, ‘to be Muslim and take multiple wives.’ Even if that isn’t likely, young men encounter Muslim influencers such as Tate who preach a constant message of male empowerment. ‘You’re not getting that from Christians at all,’ Fuentes says.”
Schmitz asserts that these MAGAist claims don’t hold up under scrutiny. He notes, for example, that “Muslims in the United States tend to be more liberal than evangelicals on abortion, transgenderism and homosexuality.” He also points out that, despite anti-globalist claims that Muslim-majority countries stand as a bulwark against the liberalized West, the leadership of many such countries has strongly embraced Western governments and values, while opposing the decidedly anti-West, firmly theocratic Iran.
But as Schmitz explains, “Whether the Islamo-Christian right’s vision of Islam is actually accurate is, for its adherents, beside the point. They are not engaging in a careful study of comparative religion; they’re imagining an alternative to liberal modernity.”
