The Coming Constitutional Clash

America is headed for a train wreck…you can see it coming if you look far enough down the tracks.  There was a small sampling of this coming wreck earlier this month in Garland, Texas.  The locomotive powering the American experiment – the US Constitution, has been chugging along for well over two-hundred and twenty-six years.  That freedom train is headed for a clash with Islam.  Not just radical, militant Islam, but “American” Muslims as well.

Our Constitution, in the very First Amendment, guarantees “freedom of religion” and “freedom of speech.”   Every member of the US Military takes an oath to “support and defend” that right and all other rights enshrined in that sacred document, “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  Our Christian founders knew these rights had to be enumerated to keep the federal government, and others, from dictating the manner in which people could worship, and to prevent the establishment of a national church like the Church of England. 

When someone exercises their First Amendment free speech rights in a way that offends Christians, Biblical response is to, as Jesus half-brother James said, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”   Jesus put it this way, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

How have some Muslims responded to something that offends them concerning their “Prophet”?  We’ve seen it in Denmark, Paris, and most recently Garland, Texas.  Those groups were only exercising what the US should consider, constitutionally protected, First Amendment free speech. 

Wenzel Strategies conducted a poll of six-hundred American Muslims (with a margin of error of less than four percent.)  When asked, “Do you believe criticism of Islam or Mohammed should be permitted under the Constitution’s First Amendment?” 57.8% said, “No.”  A clear majority do not believe the Constitution protects free speech with regard to Islam.  Perhaps because, in the same poll, over 32%, nearly one-third, said Shariah law should be the supreme law of the land in the US.  Is it confusion about the Constitution, or an underlying belief that Sharia trumps the Constitution?     

It’s one thing to have a philosophical or theological disagreement, it’s quite another to believe you should be killed over it.  When those same American Muslims were asked, “Do you agree or disagree that Americans who criticize or parody Islam should be put to death?” 11.5% of the American Muslims surveyed either agree (4.3%), or strongly agree (7.2%), that Americans who criticize or parody Islam should be put to death. 

Given that a majority of American Muslims don’t think criticism of Islam or their prophet is protected, and more than eleven percent thinks that offensively exercising one’s Constitutional right deserves death, just how big is the impending train wreck going to be?  Let’s use the study titled, “The American Mosque 2011″ by Ihsan Bagby of the University of Kentucky.  

Bagby reports there are 2,106 mosques in the US, more than double the 962 in 1994.  This doesn’t include groups not considered Islamic, e.g. Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.  According to Bagby’s work, the states with the highest number of mosques are: New York (257), California (246), Texas (166), Florida (118), Illinois (109), New Jersey (109), Pennsylvania (99), Michigan (77), Georgia (69), and Virginia (62).  Based on his work Bagby projected 2.6 million “mosque participants,” up from 2 million in 2000.  Bagby extrapolates that if non-affiliated adherents were included the total “should be closer to the estimates of up to 7 million.”  

Using a conservative figure of three million American Muslims, there are roughly 1.73 million Muslims (57.8%) here that believe your First Amendment right does not allow you to criticize their religion.  That would also mean there are some 345,000 American Muslims (11.5%) that think Americans who do criticize or parody Islam should be put to death.  

The Center for Immigration Studies reports, “Immigrants from the Middle East are currently the fastest growing immigration demographic coming into the US” and predicts, “the immigrant population from the Middle East will double in fifteen years and triple by 2050.”  

The coming Islamic train crash is not with Christians, it’s with the Constitution.