The Hypocrisy of Particularism: Why the Progressive Left Shields Islam While Attacking Christianity
As a journalist, Don Lemon can walk into a Christian church during a worship service and disrupt it, but he’d never do the same thing at a mosque. Everyone knows this, including Lemon. Imagine a reporter barging into a mosque mid-prayer, flanked by activists, escorting a political protest into a sacred space. No editor would green-light it, no network would defend it, and no journalist with a career to protect would attempt it. Yet when the faith in question is Christianity, the rules change.
That asymmetry was on display on January 18, 2026, when Lemon entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, as activists disrupted a service because a pastor there also served as an ICE official. Lemon’s activist companions—whom he assisted as they organized—had every opportunity to protest outside the church, but chose instead to intrude on a worship service, indifferent to the fact that families were inside praying. Lemon later claimed the mantle of journalism, but his behavior looked more like ideological theater—handing out coffee to his fellow activists while embedding with them, and treating a house of worship as fair game for political intrusion.
When congregants objected, he dismissed them as “entitled white supremacists” (there's a reason why CNN fired him), revealing not just contempt for Christians, but a deeper moral hierarchy at work. Some religions are protected. Others are permissible targets.
At first glance, the imbalance is baffling: a political and media culture that rushes to defend Islam from scrutiny while freely indulging in open contempt for Christianity. There’s a word—”Islamophobia”—to shut down criticism of one faith, but no equivalent term protecting the other. This is often explained as the Left’s familiar “soft bigotry of low expectations,” in which favored groups are graded on a curve. There’s truth in that, but it doesn’t explain the depth or consistency of the double standard.
A good place to start to understand it is the January interview Piers Morgan did with Roger Waters, during which the musician said that his political views all spring from his “moral compass.” The founding member of Pink Floyd who often uses his platform to weigh in on politics expressed support for Nicolás Maduro, calling him the “democratically elected leader” of Venezuela, despite widespread evidence of election fraud and repression.
The musician also gave his stamp of approval to the Iranian regime that credible reports tell us has been executing street protesters, claiming they “don't want regime change.” Waters refused to call the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel “terrorism,” explaining that he has a “moral compass.” He also accused Morgan of propping up the “evil Western empire that is trying to take over the entire world using war.”
What ties these topics together? The reference to the “evil empire” explains that. Waters is a representative of the Cold War–era, anti-American absolutism that launders all moral shortcomings committed by enemies of the West. These ideologues despise Western civilization, dismissing its “Enlightenment values” while pushing the oppressor narrative: many Muslim nations have been colonized, meaning that Muslims are victims to be defended. Islam gets read as part of a resistance narrative.
Criticizing any aspect of the religion—”punching down”—is interpreted as siding with the evil empire. So who’s going to defend all those oppressed Muslims who need defending from their own religion? That's where the hypocrisy of this school of thought comes in.
The modern Left directs its criticism only in one direction—upwards, towards the power. Those on the downward side get a free pass. Consequently, Christianity's associated with historical and current institutional power in the West, colonialism, and cultural dominance, while Islam signals minority status, immigration, and social vulnerability. Islam's 1400-year history of its own colonialism and slavery over multiple continents is ignored under this narrative. While Christianity has nothing in any way resembling ISIS—nothing like the Islamist extremist Charlie Hebdo murders or the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh—progressives find it nearly impossible to admit that Islam inspires much more violence than Christianity does.
In their comparisons between Islam and Christianity, the Left’s reasoning is infected with a logical “category error” with their conclusion that Christianity’s a set of "opinions" that an individual chooses to hold, thus making Christians fair game for satire and the sort of abuse Don Lemon handed them with his church invasion and unsupported “white supremacist” accusation. The presumption that the religious beliefs parents instill in their children from a young age are “chosen” doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
On the other hand, in progressive circles Islam is viewed as a "religio-racial" identity rather than a simple “choice” of faith, framing the religion as an inherited, immutable trait, similar to race. In this context, any attack on Islamic theology becomes a personal attack on a specific ethnic or racial group. Muslims reacting to criticism of their religion with allegations of “Islamophobia” know how progressives will react.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre provides much of the intellectual DNA for how the modern secular Left views Islam today. The father of French existentialism focused not on Islam’s religious doctrine, but rather on political struggle. The author of Being and Nothingness started off holding a belief in “universal human rights,” but European colonial violence in places like Algeria and Vietnam made him start thinking that universal values are selectively applied by those in power—”for us, not them.”
Turning away from the endless debate of what's the right thing for everyone, everywhere, Sartre began looking at who had the power and how they applied it. That change in focus launched what's now known on the Left as “particularism,” which stresses paying attention to the individual’s specific position, history, and power instead of pretending everything can be judged by the same neutral standard.
What Sartre was wrestling with is now often called “moral relativism”—the belief that there are no universal standards of morality. This causes some to look at Christian views on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and gender roles and see only oppression due to that religion’s political history. But viewing Muslim views on these issues—pretty similar, while much more extreme on the gay issue—they find excuses for it. In Iran, apostasy and same-sex sexual activity is criminalized under Sharia law, but people like Roger Waters defend the regime that by many credible measures the majority of Iranians oppose.
Oppressed Muslim women and gays, in Iran and all over the Muslim world, can't expect much help from the West’s progressives. A moral framework that can’t criticize oppression when it emanates from the “right” identities isn’t “progressive”—it’s incoherent. And until the Left is willing to apply the same standards to all religions, it’ll continue to confuse moral seriousness with ideological loyalty, leaving the most vulnerable people stranded on the wrong side of its own theory.