“If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction.
He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”[0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...
Now, contrast with Islamic teachings. Not every Muslim will advocate for Sharia, but there is a non-negligible part of them (leadership included) who think that not advocating for Sharia is a sin.
In any case, I only care about the practicalities. In terms of what they try to achieve, there’s no real difference between the Christian and Muslim dominionists.
Dude I can not believe how it can be anything but horrible to make acts of terrorism and killing of innocent anything but the worst humans can do.
In general, the Church's political power has waned over the last 500 years or so, but there are an awful lot of calls from Republicans saying that this is where we have gone wrong.
One only look to the political donations of Opes Dei (Catholic branch dedicated to getting Cristian influence over the "Lay" sphere) to see them as major power players today. The Heritage Foundation (main writers of Project 2025) are intimately bound with the organization. And Chief Justice Roberts is also associated.
So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
Killing someone for insulting Christianity => goes against Christian theology.
Killing someone for insulting islam/moe => completely in line with Islam.
The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.
And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.
It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.
Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.
And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.
So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.
So are all the other countless media companies, tech corporations, Hollywood, labor unions, pharma companies, academia...
From this list, which one do you think is more intertwined with Government affairs? The Catholic Church or Amazon? The Mormons or Blueshield? Seventh Day Adventists or Disney? The Baptists or General Motors? The Anglicans or FOX News?
And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
The result is very different. If Sharia were fully implemented in your country, you’d go to the local courthouse and the judge would be a religious scholar applying the religious law of the Islamic state religion. Whereas, if conservative Christians vote for laws which encode their moral views (on abortion or whatever), those laws remain formally secular, and the judge enforcing them is not a religious official. Sharia expressly discriminates in favour of Muslims (e.g. it says the word of a Muslim witness is worth more than that of a non-Muslim witness in court); the laws you are complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar.
> And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
How? Trump is not a theonomist. Nor is Vance. Nor is Musk. I don’t believe any of the Cabinet secretaries are theonomists. Nor are any of the Supreme Court justices. The only way anyone can conclude that theonomy has any contemporary influence in the US government is by misrepresenting non-theonomist views as theonomy.
Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about religion, but who do you think put him in office? Who does he pander to?
I am not going to argue that the democratic institutions are not under attack, but I am arguing that there is no key religious figure remotely close to take power and become the head of State, at any level whatsoever.
I don't know who you are calling "fundamentalists" – I personally think the term should be restricted to the historical fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism, and those Protestants who view themselves as heirs of that movement today – but I think the vast majority of people you are labelling that aren't theonomists, and have zero interest in emulating Islamic Sharia by replacing secular courts with tribunals of Christian clergy, or modifying evidence laws to make the word of a Christian worth more than that of a non-Christian. Nobody is asking for anything remotely resembling that, except for a very tiny movement on the fringes of Reformed Protestantism – which the vast majority of Reformed (even conservative Reformed) reject, and I've never heard of a Catholic or Anglican or Methodist or Lutheran or Eastern Orthodox or whatever supporting it.
From a Catholic perspective, replacing secular law with "Christian Sharia" is clearly a heresy – never officially condemned because no Catholic of significance has ever proposed it – but if it ever did become a serious issue I'm sure the Church would waste no time in doing so, since it is just so blatantly contrary to the Catholic tradition. And the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the vast majority of Protestant churches (even otherwise very conservative ones), would say more or less the same thing – the details of their reasons would likely differ, but the conclusion wouldn't.
Again, I don't see the practical difference between religious tribunals run by clergy, and nominally secular courts run by nominally secular judges who make religiously-guided decisions based on religiously-guided laws.
We already have such laws, ranging from blue laws to laws about medical research and procedures. And this is under a much more secular system than the dominionists would like.
Multiple states still prohibit atheists from holding office. Of course, the bans are unenforceable... for now. Such restrictions were enforced before and they could be again with the right people on the Supreme Court. From there, it's a short trip to deciding that only adherents to a proper form of Christianity count. The existing requirements already exclude non-monotheists.