We stay well clear of politics here, but Donald Trump’s suggestion that there be a moratorium on Islamic immigration has raised a lot of hackles. Despite the outrage, the American people are much more on board with this idea than one might expect. Check out this screenshot of an MSNBC poll on the topic grabbed earlier today:

A friend also sent over some polling data (source) from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in which American Muslims were asked about violence against civilians:

Yeah. So assuming the numbers aren’t actually higher (because of taqiyya), in the both of the most recent polling events, THIRTEEN PERCENT of American Muslims found a time where they could justify “suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets.”

13%.

Estimates on the American Muslim population range from 5 to 12 million. If we take a nice easy number like 10 million, and extrapolate 13%, that’s 1.3 million people. People who very well may live in your community and attend your local mosque.

Last night, I linked to this video from a woman who grew up Muslim in the Middle East, who passionately dispelled the liberal Western narratives about Islam as a peaceful religion. She sounded a lot like our own Andrew Bieszad, in fact, whom I interviewed on this topic last week.

With all of this in mind, we turn our attention to Creative Minority Report, where Pat Archbold lays out the questions we should be asking in our policy discussions about Islamic immigration:

ALL rights come from God, not government, not ever.

Error has no rights. Condemned “Each one is free to embrace and profess that religion which, led by the light of reason, he thinks true.”

Islam is a particularly noxious error perhaps even of Satanic origin.

While the common good of the state and the Church may dictate the need of tolerance of error, sometimes the common good dictates otherwise.

So, it is permissible for a State to suppress Islam to some degree.

So Catholics must dispense with the notion that banning Islamic immigration is de facto anti-Christian and somehow violates human rights. It does not. Period.

The right questions are these:
Q: Does the common good of the State and the Church require this action at this time? Good people can disagree on this.

Q: Is there a prudent way, in a secular republic with increasing antagonism toward Christ and his Church and which increasingly ignores its legitimate and long-standing constitutional limitations, to effect such a policy without establishing a precedent of government power over religion in general that will almost certainly be used against the Church?

Q: And as a corollary to the above: Is the risk of Muslim immigration currently greater than the threat posed by a centralized tyrannical secular republic unfettered in its ambitions by constitutional limits?

For my part, I don’t think so. For Americans, the greater threat is clearly our secular-atheist government.

But whatever your opinion, this is where the debate should be.

So you see, we find ourselves between Iraq and a hard place. (I kid.) But seriously: we are weighing two incredibly potent dangers against one another – the power of the secular state to suppress the 1st Amendment on a case-by-case basis, and the growing power of Islam in our towns and communities, knowing full well that the teachings of Mohammed demonstrate no respect for non-Muslims, and think of us as no better than dogs.

Catholics solved the Islamic problem across Europe over centuries of warfare. The best Catholic minds should be brought to bear now on this issue. It’s a big one, and it’s not going away.