When Charlie Kirk was murdered, Danish Broadcasting came to our home a few days later.
They were there for half an hour, camera on tripod in the living room, and what they really needed were clips for b-roll over the memorial service they had chosen to show. But along the way another question lay waiting, the way that kind of question always lies waiting, half curious and half investigative - why had we shared his posts and his videos instead of, like proper decent Danes, strongly distancing ourselves from such a polarising and moreover Christian figure.
So we explained that, calmly and thoroughly and in good humour. In the end the journalist came back to the same place anyway, now phrased a bit more directly - whether his Christianity and his conservatism weren't problematic.
And I answered him something along the lines of - and I have it on video, as one does these days when one is to be interviewed by the media, if we're to have it verbatim - that if one experiences Charlie Kirk's entirely ordinary Christianity and conservatism as a problem, that is precisely the foundation the entire Western world is built upon, and which aligns with virtually every value we otherwise walk around saying we hold dear - then anyone who feels that way must, quite practically and logically, have a tenfold greater problem with Islam, which on every single point is multiplied in orthodoxy, in conservatism and in conflict with the European society and order it lives in the midst of.
There was dead silence for a brief moment - followed by complete blank screen in his eyes - "...no compute".
I don't actually think it was because it was complicated. But because it was so obvious. It's the most straightforward conclusion of them all - the one lying right there in front of the feet of anyone who has decided that Christianity is the problem.
I thought about it again when I read a post earlier today that posed the question of where one actually should place Islamism on a left-right scale - it ended by concluding that it most of all resembles the Christian fundamentalists, Inner Mission forty years ago, Jehovah's Witnesses, and parts of the American Christians.
And there's something right about that.
One can easily make a list of things that forbid themselves in both camps - the alcohol, the dancing, sex outside marriage, woman's place, scriptural literalism, and parts of the lists will resemble each other on paper. It's not a lie. It's just not enlightening either, because a list of moral prohibitions is not the same as a societal architecture - and the difference between the two is the entire difference.
The slightly funny thing is that the post itself delivers the answer along the way, in a parenthesis, almost as an apology. Inner Mission, it says, has become a bit soft in the codes the last 40 years. Yes. They have. And that's where the whole matter lies.
For why did they become that?
They became that because there exists something built into Christianity that makes it possible, a crack that has been there from the beginning, from the moment when the Word stood before Pilate and said, my kingdom is not of this world. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
That's the sentence the entire secular space is built out of, and it's not a sentence Christianity had pulled down over its head by the Enlightenment. It's a sentence it came with. That's why Christian movements can be softened, divided, reformed, retreat to conscience and leave legislation alone, without ceasing to be themselves. They have a place to retreat to.
Islam conversely has no Caesar to give anything to. There is no other world to have one's kingdom in. The law, the state, the judiciary, the war, the inheritance, the punishment, it all lies within the faith from the beginning, not as a later temptation but as the construction itself.
One can of course easily find Muslims who live peacefully and privately and completely integrated - they exist in millions - but that doesn't change the architecture, it just shows that humans are larger than the systems they're born into. That they too eat bacon, drink alcohol; have sex outside marriage, value the free independent woman and look past the text and the law - and still call themselves Muslim.
But the direction in the building itself points where it points.
And then there's the scale itself.
Right and left aren't a natural law. It's a seating plan. It's where one sat in the French National Assembly in 1789, in a European space, in a European quarrel, about something that is exclusively a European problem! - namely what one does with a civilisation that has lost its king and still walks around with his inheritance in its body. The entire left-right axis is furniture in our own house alone.
To ask where Islam sits in a democratic assembly is like asking which chair the guest takes, when the guest doesn't acknowledge that there's a house at all.
That's why the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem could easily shake hands with the Nazis without it making Islamism right-wing extremist, just as it didn't make it left-wing when the same cause for decades was armed and carried forward by Moscow - or when they, to this day, march in parades side by side with people who would be thrown from a roof or hung from a crane in the societies they're shouting for.
Because seen through the Islamic worldview, these aren't political placements. They're alliances, entered into against the same enemy, and the enemy has been the same all the way through.
Because there's something about that enemy worth remaining with.
We speak of Islam as if it were an actor in our political landscape, a position among positions, something that can shift a bit to one side or the other depending on who leads it and when.
But that is NOT what we're facing.
We're facing the most conservative self-preserving force that exists on earth, measured in the only way conservatism can be measured, namely how little it has moved and changed.
Place Islam beside ourselves. Over fifteen hundred years the Christian world - quickly and loosely unrolled - has been through monastic movements, schisms, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the wars of religion, Pietism, the Enlightenment, biblical criticism, the separation of church and state, female priests, and a comprehensive dismantling of its own power over legislation - all of it carried out from within, by believers, with justifications drawn from the faith itself. We've torn down our own house and built it up again so many times that we've completely stopped being able to remember who laid the foundation.
In the other building, Islam, not a single load-bearing wall has been touched. There have been attempts - for instance the Mu'tazilites who claimed the Quran was created and not eternal, Ibn Rushd who wanted to let reason walk beside revelation, the Ottomans' Tanzimat, Abduh and his modernists, Atatürk who literally abolished the caliphate with a stroke of the pen in 1924 - and none of this is small stuff. It's precisely the same kinds of movements that ended up changing everything here.
But unlike here, they lost. All of them. Not just every time. But every single time. Not randomly, and not because history was in a bad mood, but because there didn't exist that crack in the architecture and construction that they could wedge themselves into and gain support for their interpretation. Here the reformers had a sentence to stand on, "my kingdom is not of this world", and that sentence carried them. The others had nothing to hold onto, because there is nothing in Islam that says Islam can be less than everything.
That's what faces us.
Not a political wing. But a structure that has seen all our revolutions come and go, and which still answers exactly the same today as it answered before Denmark was even a country.
And this is where it gets truly strange - and why, I think, the original post was posed.
For who is it that marches side by side with Islam here in the West?
It's the left wing, all the way out to the far left wing, who have made the dissolution of reality their life's work. Those for whom the nation is a construction, the family a power structure, gender a feeling, language something to be cleansed, history something to settle accounts with, and the very idea of an inheritance one owes something to, is the real enemy. Those for whom it is essential that EVERYTHING standing firm must be made fluid. That's the entire program, that's the only consistent line there is in it, and that's why it works irresistibly on young people, because it pretends to be and resembles freedom all the way down (it isn't, but that's another post).
And then they stop. Right there.
The one structure on earth that has never dissolved anything whatsoever, that binds gender to the body and the body to the law and the law to God - which hasn't moved a comma in fourteen hundred years in their texts, it's not just exempted, it's protected, it's defended, one marches for it, and anyone who points at it gets called the worst words one has in the language.
One can say much about that - but one cannot say it's a principle.
Because a principle also applies where it's inconvenient. If "liberation from the inherited" really were the matter, then Islam wouldn't be the last bastion one defends, it would be the first one went to tear down - because there exists no more complete system of everything one says one wants rid of.
That it instead stands under the protection of the left wing reveals that it was never about making Man free of the inherited.
It was about settling accounts with one particular house. Our own.
But the real question isn't actually where Islamism should be placed. The real question is why it should even be so difficult.
And the answer is uncomfortable, because if one is to condemn Islamism cleanly and without reservation, then one is forced to admit that a religion can actually shape a society, that it can determine how people live, what is lawful, who has rights and what a woman is for example.
And the same second one admits that, one has also admitted that Christianity did exactly the same thing here - and that Freedom, equality, the rule of law, conscience and the very thought of the inviolable Man didn't fall from heaven in 1968, but is inherited goods from the faith one has spent fifty years calling "the opponent of progress".
That's the bill no one wants on the table.
So rather move the furniture around a bit. Rather create a new category. Rather find a place on the scale where it can all stand still and look manageable while one looks the other way.
The journalist in our living room didn't look the other way. He looked right at it, a couple of seconds, he didn't say anything. But then concluded.
I don't think he lacked or didn't understand the answer.
He lacked a place to put it.
Did you catch it?
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