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 Shariah 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 a 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 Shariah 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.
We can go at least as far back as the Crusades. The Crusades are frequently caricatured as unprovoked Christian aggression. In reality, they were a complex response to conquests that, in the first centuries of Islam, had already overtaken large swaths of historically Christian (and, in the case of the Holy Land, Jewish) territory. These campaigns were at least as much about reclaiming conquered territory as they were about imperialist religious zeal.
Fast-forward a few centuries to the 17th-century Battle of Vienna, when the expansionist ambitions of the Ottoman Empire brought Islamic armies to the very gates of Central Europe. The successful defense of Vienna marked a turning point, halting further Ottoman advance into the heart of European Christendom. This was not merely a geopolitical victory but a civilizational one too – a triumph for the Bible over Shariah.
This pattern persisted into the early modern era. The First and Second Barbary Wars – often relegated to footnotes in American history classrooms – were direct confrontations with North African Muslim pirates who enslaved, pillaged and extracted unjust tributes from Western nations. To this day, the well-known U.S. Marines’ Hymn references these conflicts in its early reference to the “shores of Tripoli.” These early-republic standoffs between Americans and Muslim African pirates are part of our national lore.
Nor is this just ancient history. The atrocities of 9/11 were carried out in the name of an Islamist ideology that draws explicitly on Islamic holy texts and traditions. The same is true of the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre, the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting, the Bourbon Street Massacre of Jan. 1, 2025, and countless other jihadist attacks in the homeland just since 9/11. To dismiss such acts as somehow wholly unrelated to Islam, as Carlson and his fellow propagandists do, is to lie and deceive – to engage in their very own form of taqiyya.
And today, in places like Nigeria, the violence continues. Islamist groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province have targeted Christian communities with horrifying brutality – church burnings, kidnappings, rapes and mass killings. Overall, 93% of the estimated 4,849 Christians murdered worldwide for their faith in 2025 were killed by Islamist fanatics.
Carlson’s insidious project reflects a broader confusion on the Right about where Christianity’s natural religious alliance lies. The answer is not Islam but Judaism – the original monotheistic faith from which Christianity itself first emerged. The Hebrew Scriptures are the overwhelming core of Christianity’s Old Testament. The moral, ethical, legal and political continuity between the two religions is profound.
The historical record between Christianity and Islam is contentious and often tragic. And that makes sense: The biblical worldview and the Shariah supremacist worldview are incompatible with one another. To gaslight to the contrary and pretend otherwise, regardless of the motive, is an act of profound intellectual dishonesty – and cowardice to boot.