By John W. Morehead
In a pluralistic democracy, strong public expressions of religious conviction often trigger fears of supremacy or cultural takeover. These fears are not merely about power, but about mattering—who belongs, whose story defines the nation, and whether one group’s flourishing implies another’s erasure. Christian Nationalism and Muslim public religiosity are often analyzed separately, but they operate within the same deeper rivalry over meaning, identity, and the public good.
Public Islam, Christian Nationalism, and the Fear of Being Replaced
On February 20th of this year, many Muslims gathered in New York’s Times Square for a large and public street prayer during Ramadan. This event was organized by a Muslim who goes by WayofLifeSQ[i] on social media. He has spearheaded this public event since 2022 and is involved in other efforts that he calls “Street Dawah.” Some of WayofLifeSQ’s comments have raised concerns, such as at the February event where he told crowds, “Let them know that we are taking over New York City.”[ii] In an October 2023 video he said that “we will not stop until [Islam] enters every home.”[iii] In response to this, some Americans see religious freedom in action. Others see an unsettling claim on the heart of the nation.[iv]
Then there are frequently expressed concerns about Christian Nationalism and its role in shaping the right in American politics. When Christians declare that America is a Christian nation or insist that biblical morality must shape public law and who gets to hold political office, some hear historical, theological and moral clarity. Others hear the early stages of theocracy.
Both reactions are real. Both are emotionally charged. And both are often misdiagnosed. The conflict is not merely about policy, church and state issues, or even primarily about changing demographics. It is about whether public expressions of faith signal belonging or supremacy and whether one group’s flourishing implies another group’s erasure.
The Words That Set Everything on Fire: “Reclaiming, and Taking Over”
When religious leaders say things like “we are taking over New York” or “Islam will enter every home,” critics hear conquest. When Christians speak about “reclaiming America for Christ,” secular and minority religious communities hear displacement, or the failure to recognize that everyone has the freedom to express their faith or secular commitments in the public arena.[v]
Perhaps the speaker in each instance intends to convey evangelistic zeal. Perhaps they intend to inspire spiritual revival. Perhaps they intend to express cultural confidence. But rhetoric does not stay inside the speaker’s intention. It lives in the listener’s imagination. In pluralistic societies, talk of “reclaiming” the country or “taking over” can be incendiary.
The uncomfortable truth is that both Christians and Muslims sometimes use triumphalist language. And both react defensively when the other does. In such instances, we’re not just debating theology, we’re also competing over symbolic ownership.
Christian Nationalism: Minority Threat or Majority Nostalgia?
Progressive discourse often presents Christian Nationalism as an existential threat to democracy. There is real research showing that some who identify with it justify political violence at higher rates and support illiberal measures. But only a small percentage of Americans qualify as hardline adherents.[vi] Many who answer survey questions affirming “Christian nation” language mean something far less authoritarian than the headlines suggest. For some Black Christians, for example, the phrase expresses prophetic hope: that America should embody justice, mercy, and righteousness, not racial dominance. Lumping all such expressions into one dangerous ideological category flattens important distinctions.
At the same time, Evangelicals must confront something equally uncomfortable, that in a nation where Christianity historically shaped institutions, laws, and culture, calls to “restore” Christian America sound very different to religious or secular minorities than they do to nostalgic believers. When you have been culturally dominant, even symbolic language carries weight. Intentions do not erase history.
Public Islam and the Anxiety of Visibility
Now consider the other direction. Muslims praying publicly in Times Square are exercising constitutional rights. They are citizens participating in public life. But public ritual in iconic civic space is never neutral. It communicates permanence. It says, “We are here, visibly, unapologetically.” The fact that New York recently elected its first Muslim mayor also raises the perceptional stakes.
For some Americans, especially those already anxious about immigration and cultural change, such displays trigger a deep unease. Not necessarily because they oppose Islam’s existence, but because they fear transformation of the cultural center and its values. Is this fear often exaggerated? I think so. But dismissing it entirely as bigotry misses the deeper psychological reality. When people sense that their cultural reference points are shifting rapidly, they experience that shift as loss. And it is not only the US that is wrestling with this anxiety. Many in the UK are also wrestling with large-scale immigration and how related strains in social cohesion may be changing the country.
Feelings of loss fuel alarm and alarm sharpens rhetoric. When Muslim leaders respond to suspicion with defiant language—“Islam will spread”—that alarm escalates. The result is mutual suspicion.
The Real Issue: Mattering
The core issue beneath both Christian Nationalism and Muslim public religiosity is not simply power. It is mattering.[vii] When Evangelicals say, “We are losing our country,” they are not only talking about policy. They are talking about what for them is sacred inheritance. They are asking whether their moral vision still defines the public story. Some may find it hard to be sympathetic to this perspective given the large numbers of Evangelicals in the country and the cultural dominance they currently hold, but that narrative must be acknowledged.
When Muslims insist on visible belonging, they are asking whether they are perpetual outsiders or legitimate participants in shaping the public square. They also want the same opportunities for persuasion of the populace for their vision of the common good.
Both groups are asking: Do we count? Do we belong? Will our children inherit dignity? Conflict intensifies when either side concludes that the other’s flourishing requires its own diminishment. That is the zero-sum imagination, and it is deadly for pluralism.
The Mirror We Refuse to See
If you don’t think I’ve been provocative enough in this piece, let me remove all doubt with this assertion: Supremacist rhetoric and supremacist anxiety mirror each other. When Christians speak of “taking America back,” religious and secular minorities hear a future in which their rights are in doubt. When Muslims speak triumphantly about Islam’s public expansion, some Christians hear cultural and religious displacement.
Each side believes it is responding defensively. Each side believes it is protecting something sacred. Each side escalates because it feels threatened. And each side accuses the other of supremacism. Christians insist that Muslim visibility threatens democracy.[viii] Muslims insist that Christian dominance already has. Both statements contain elements of concern. Neither captures the whole picture.
Let’s not pretend symmetry where it does not exist. Christianity remains demographically and institutionally dominant in the United States. Christian language still saturates political rhetoric. Christian holidays shape the civic calendar. Muslims remain a minority. Their public expressions occur within a constitutional framework historically influenced by Christian moral philosophy.
That asymmetry matters. But psychological threat does not track perfectly with institutional power. A majority can feel besieged, and a minority can feel emboldened. Fear does not obey census tables.
The Discipline Question
The most important question for both communities is not, “Should we have public faith?” The Constitution provides for that. The deeper question is, “Can we practice public faith without feeling the need to send signals of civil supremacy?”
For Christians, can you affirm Christ’s lordship without implying that those who disagree are civic second-class citizens? For Muslims, can you affirm Islam’s finality without implying that pluralism is temporary?
Strong faith traditions do not need to dilute their theology to survive in pluralism. But they must discipline their rhetoric. We need confidence without domination, and conviction without conquest. That is harder than it sounds.
Progressives sometimes amplify the threat of Christian Nationalism in ways that collapse nuance. When every conservative churchgoer is treated as a budding authoritarian, defensive polarization intensifies. Conversely, dismissing all concerns about Islamist rhetoric as mere Islamophobia prevents serious discussion about how language lands in fragile civic environments. Overreaction radicalizes, and radicalization on one side validates fear on the other in mutual reinforcement. Pluralistic societies destabilize slowly through rhetorical escalation.
The Courage Pluralism Requires
Pluralism is not the absence of conviction. It is the discipline of conviction under conditions of disagreement. It requires believers to make a difficult wager, that my faith is a sacred conviction I will defend, but the civic standing of those I strongly disagree with, my religious and political rival, is equal to my own. That wager feels risky. It feels like surrender, but it is not. It is trust. Trust does not mean agreement. It means refusing to frame the rival’s presence as civil illegitimacy. At the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy (FRD), we take this even further, advocating existential trust. We define this as “the deliberate act of extending trust under conditions where verification is impossible, motives are unclear, competence is uncertain, institutions have failed, and the stakes are culturally or morally high.” At FRD we prepare people we work with to cultivate an understanding of “rivaltrust”—the discipline of sustaining purpose, values, and truth-claims under rivalry—without demanding supremacy, surrender, or silence. Existential trust is the interior moral posture that makes that discipline possible.
For Christians, this may require relinquishing the assumption that America must reflect explicit Christian dominance to remain faithful. For Muslims, this may require relinquishing rhetoric that sounds like cultural inevitability. Both must resist the temptation to answer fear with triumph.
What Happens If We Fail?
If Christians increasingly frame pluralism as a threat, and Muslims increasingly frame visibility as victory, the spiral tightens. Each side will retreat further into identity consolidation. Each public act will be interpreted as a territorial move. Every prayer, every law, every symbol will become contested ground. Democracy will not collapse in a dramatic coup. Instead, it will erode through mutual delegitimization, and neither community will feel safer.
A Harder Path
There is another possibility. Christians can publicly affirm that we will advocate our moral vision vigorously and defend your constitutional rights equally. Muslims can publicly affirm that they will live their faith unapologetically and uphold the civic equality of those who reject it.
That combination of deep conviction plus equal civic standing is challenging but powerful. It requires restraint. It requires rhetorical maturity. It requires leaders who are willing to calm rather than inflame. It requires rejecting the intoxicating energy of “taking over.”
The Final Question
In a pluralistic democracy, no faith community gets to monopolize symbolic territory, but every faith community gets to matter. The question facing both Evangelicals and Muslims is not simply whether their theology or submission will prevail in eternity. It is whether their public posture in history will be marked by attempts at domination or disciplined confidence.
Public faith is not the problem. Supremacy—real or perceived—is. If we cannot distinguish between the two, the future of pluralism will be determined not by law, but by fear. And fear, once unleashed, does not discriminate between majority and minority. It consumes them both.
[i] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kfx81WYXgNBf1bNIcO5Fg.
[ii] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVG6m0rjBBx/.
[iii] https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cx8YqmnOVyS/.
[iv] The negative reactions include not only Jews and Christians, but Muslims as well. One Muslim woman on Facebook expressed concerns about the Times Square event as performative and a weaponized attempt to project street power. See Dalia Ziada’s comments as an example at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/183Br64SRh/.
[v] Jay Wexler, Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life (Standford University Press, 2019): https://www.sup.org/books/religious-studies/our-non-christian-nation.
[vi] While the dominant scholarly and progressive narrative characterizes Christian Nationalism, especially White Christian Nationalism, as a significant threat to American democracy, some conservative and centrist scholars offer more nuanced or critical perspectives on this narrative. Research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) confirms that only about 10% of Americans are “adherents” to Christian Nationalism, with another 20% being “sympathizers.” In addition, roughly 25% to 30% of those who hold Christian nationalist sentiments identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, or another race or ethnicity. https://prri.org/research/mapping-christian-nationalism-across-the-50-states-insights-from-prris-2025-american-values-atlas/
[vii] Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2026) https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324096856
[viii] On Islam and democracy, the work of Muslim scholars like Shadi Hamid are very helpful. See, for example, https://www.cfr.org/conference-calls/future-liberal-democracy.
John W. Morehead is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, and the Director of its Evangelical Chapter (Multifaith Matters). You may contact him at johnwmorehead@msn.com .