IS RELIGION THE RIGHT NAME?
You can learn much about an age by noticing what it dares not call by name.
Not what it forbids - prohibition is at least a form of clarity. No, the interesting thing is that which must not be named. That which slips through language without ever being classified, because classification would oblige.
This is where everything has slid over the last four to five decades on our continent.
Look at how Europe speaks of Islam. Not of Muslims - meaning people who pray, fast, raise their children, for that has never been the problem, and it won't be here either.
But of Islam as order. The system of law, power and claim on the common space. The organisations, the money flows, the mission, the licensed and unlicensed preachers - and the erection of power centres for faith, culture, law and politics, brick upon brick, institutions building an entirely different legal order right inside our own.
All of this has had one collective name in Europe for a long time -
RELIGION.
Even though it is anything but.
And this is no accident. Those who carry the order, Islam, know precisely what the word "religion" is worth in Europe - and have chosen the word with care.
For with that word comes a map, which we use to navigate everything underneath in the conversation here.
Religious freedom was written to protect what we in the Western world call "Conscience" - the interior, the person, the faith behind one's own door. It was never written to protect financing streams from foreign states, organisational apparatuses with the constitution as declared opponent, or political movements that carry a theology as mask, uniform and shield.
But the map does not distinguish. The day the order learned to say "religion" - the organisations, the money flows, the power centres, the entire political edifice - it inherited a protection that was intended for people.
And this is where something happens that almost no one seems to notice, because it does not happen as an event, but as an absence - of everything we choose not to do, which we could.
Europe has the tools to restrain, delimit and dam up precisely this - an order that grows strong inside our own. We invented them ourselves. The Germans even gave them a name - "the defensive democracy" - and used them already in the fifties to ban parties that wanted to abolish the free basic order. It means you can ban organisations. You can shut down foreign financing. You can condition residence on behaviour and mean it. The tools lie in the drawer, tested by the courts, tailored precisely to this situation Europe faces with Islam and Islamic order - that someone uses freedom to organise freedom's abolition.
But they only apply to what we dare call POLITICAL.
And if anyone thinks that would be extreme, look at the Islamic world itself. The United Arab Emirates - a country built on Islam, down into the constitution - does not allow anyone to spread anything within its own doors that can undermine the state's foundation. Missionary activity is forbidden. The imams are licensed, the Friday sermon is written centrally, and movements within their own religion that organise against the order are banned for what they are. They do it in both directions - also against their own faith. They do not negotiate with that which wants their foundation dead. They protect it.
So when the classification is wrong - when political order stands registered under the name religion - the entire obvious toolbox disappears from view. Not because anyone locks it. It simply becomes invisible - for one does not regulate faith, does one?
And when the tools are gone, there is only one conversation left -
The negotiation. The dialogue. The integration agreement. Where we have stood for over 30 years. "The European-adapted Islam" that is coming any moment now, if we speak long enough, wisely enough, patiently enough, with outstretched hands and infinite willingness to move ourselves and make more room. Always more room.
And it is worth stopping at precisely this.
The illusion of "the middle" - the notion that there exists a place out there where Islam gives way and accommodates itself - resembles naivety. But it did not come first. The cowardice did not come first either. First came the wrong classification. For when you must not call things the right thing, you cannot reach for the right tools either - and then only the conversation remains. That leaves Europe in a position where we do not negotiate because we - apart from the most naive - believe in it. We negotiate because language has left no other doors.
Therefore the debate cannot move forward from within either.
The hopeful say that "the dialogue will work soon". The disappointed say that "it works too slowly". But both stand on the same floor - in the middle of the Lie "that change exists out there somewhere" - and neither will openly acknowledge that the floor itself is laid by a misclassification.
So let us try to replace the floor in the conversation.
For there, where things are called the right thing, everything becomes quite simple.
The person is Human and lives freely here - prays, fasts, believes, like any human under our law. The machinery however is politics and is treated as politics - organisation by organisation, money flow by money flow, according to the same general rule we would apply against any movement, religious or not, that works to replace the constitutional order. In this way we have no need for any new harshness. No emergency laws. No assault on our own order. Just the defensive democracy, applied where it should have been applied all along.
And then I will ask you to notice one thing at the end. It is important, precisely now, when we have begun debating whether Christianity is even worth preserving - as if it were a piece of furniture one can carry out without the house changing.
The very ability to make that distinction - between the person and the power, between that which belongs to conscience and that which belongs to Caesar - is not a technique we invented along the way. It is the inheritance itself. It is two thousand years of ground beneath our feet, and it is precisely that distinction Islam as order refuses to recognise.
We are not just defending a constitution, then. We are defending the distinction that makes free people possible.
Did you get that?
It is not courage we lack.
For courage can be gathered when the goal stands clear.
We lost the naming first.
If Europe wants to preserve itself, we must take language back and call things by their right names. Unworried and without doubt in our right to uphold our order, our way of life, our view of humanity and our civilisational worldview without moving a single centimetre.
For one does not need strength in sunglasses to know where it ends if we do.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a lovely week, friends ☀
