Muslim communities are organizing politically in the United States, and they’re doing so without apology. Mosques in North Texas have become places where people can register to vote. In Michigan, Muslim candidates and activists have shown what an organized constituency can accomplish. The state has now elected the country’s first Muslim U.S. senator.
The lesson for American Christians isn’t about theology, exactly. It’s about being willing to bring religious convictions into public life. Christians should take note. For years, many have heard that faith belongs in church and that openly Christian political action is somehow out of bounds. That standard, conveniently, doesn’t seem to apply to every group.
Christianity helped shape the West, including America’s laws, customs, and ideas about human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance is worth preserving, they need to say so. And act on it.
The future, I think, tends to favor communities determined to maintain their way of life—not those that feel compelled to apologize for having one.
America’s early population was overwhelmingly influenced by Anglo-Protestant Christianity. That tradition shaped public institutions, everyday customs, and assumptions about morality. Several states around the founding required officeholders to affirm Christian or Protestant beliefs. Georgia and New Hampshire explicitly favored Protestants; other states had broader religious requirements.
The federal Constitution took a different approach. From the start, it barred religious tests for federal office, while the First Amendment prohibited Congress from establishing a religion and protected the free exercise of faith. Still, those protections didn’t erase the reality that Protestant Christianity remained deeply woven into American life.
For a long time, Protestants didn’t have much reason to think of themselves as a political bloc. When a country’s schools, holidays, and moral language mostly reflect one religious tradition, organizing around that tradition can seem unnecessary. Like a fish in water, you may not notice the environment you’re living in.
Immigration gradually changed that picture. Catholics had been in America since colonial times, as had Jewish communities, but arrivals from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe increased the numbers and influence of religious minorities. The question was hard to avoid: could a country shaped by Protestant assumptions accommodate greater religious diversity without losing its cultural character?
In 1958, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published “A Nation of Immigrants” with the Anti-Defamation League. It presented immigration as central to the American story, rather than treating Anglo-Protestant culture as the country’s defining feature. Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president, in 1960, marked another shift in how Americans thought about religion and national identity.
Then, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended the old national-origins quota system and substantially changed who could come to the United States. The country’s population—and its religious landscape—continued to change.
The meaning of religious liberty shifted, too. A principle once defended in a society largely shaped by Protestantism increasingly came to mean that public institutions should treat competing faiths on equal terms. Courts extended limits on religious establishment to the states, and the ban on an official state church was increasingly understood as a ban on favoring Christianity at all.
Many liberal mainline Protestant leaders supported this change. Their involvement in the civil rights movement helped foster concern that public Christianity, when closely tied to the existing social order, might stand in the way of inclusion. Others accepted the idea that politics should use supposedly neutral language, translating Christian beliefs into secular terms before they could be heard.
The message to churches was appealing, at least at first: give Caesar what belongs to Caesar; Christ rejected an earthly kingdom; perhaps Christians should preach the gospel and leave government to the professionals. Worry about being called intolerant or backward made it easier to step aside.
But Christ did not tell his followers that their beliefs had no relevance to law, education, or the common good. Treating religious liberty as a reason Christians must stay politically passive turns a protection into something closer to a gag.
Conservatives helped promote that retreat, too. Their argument was that government should be smaller and politics should not be used to shape culture. Yet their opponents had no intention of giving up political influence. The result was a right that sometimes treated withdrawal as a principle, while other movements saw organizing as ordinary political work. In schools, public ceremonies, and arguments about family life, that withdrawal left others to set the agenda.
For decades, Christian political leaders have confused the rules of a plural society with a demand to disappear. Secular activists don’t seem to interpret pluralism that way. Muslim organizers don’t either. They take part in politics with their convictions and interests intact. Christians shouldn’t treat that as a privilege available only to other people.
The Moral Majority showed that Christians could work together politically, as have the religious conservative groups that came after it. Still, their leaders have often seemed more focused on defending past losses than offering a clear Christian vision for public life. They speak about “Western values” or “Western civilization” as though Christianity were an awkward subject to avoid.
A spiritual vacuum rarely stays empty. Secular humanism offered moral purpose without religion. Wokeness, in some settings, took on the shape of a competing creed, with its own heroes, heresies, and rituals of public repentance. Muslim communities, confident in their faith, are also seeking influence in public life.
Christians shouldn’t be surprised by that. Political influence won’t remain unused just because they decline to pursue it. And churches are unlikely to regain cultural authority by pretending their beliefs have no consequences beyond the sanctuary.
Christianity shaped the West and helped form America’s laws, customs, and understanding of human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance matters, they should speak up. They should organize, make their case, vote, and work politically for the institutions and moral commitments they hope to pass on to their children.
The claim that doing so violates America’s principles is misleading. Religious liberty gives Christians the same right to organize that other communities already exercise. A faith that refuses to defend its place in public life shouldn’t be astonished when someone else takes up the space it leaves behind.
