Perhaps the only thing worse than Tucker Carlson’s deranged understanding of history is his deranged understanding of theology.
“The people in charge don’t want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus,” the Iranian regime’s top fanboy recently tweeted, later noting that this was why President Donald Trump’s meme “depicting himself as the Son of God offended the president of Iran.”
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Indeed, Jesus is a prophet in Islam. In the Hadith, Muhammad promises that when Jesus returns, He will “break the cross” and establish Islam as the sole faith of the world. The Iranian “president” loves a Jesus that not only doesn’t exist in Christianity but promises to destroy it. This seems like useful context.
That’s a theological position. Shia extremists in Iran aren’t the only people who reject a messianic Jesus, after all. But if the Iranian rulers have such high esteem for Jesus, why is conversion or proselytization of Christianity an apostasy punishable by death? Numerous fatwas issued by Iranian clerics, including one from the recently retired “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei, impose the death penalty on any males and life imprisonment on women who reject Islam.
Preaching the Gospels is considered a “deviant educational” activity in Carlson’s beloved Iran. And because Christianity is gaining popularity underground, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard regularly raids the homes and churches, often arbitrarily arresting and sometimes torturing their prey. In 2023, the regime imprisoned 96 Christians, 22 of them getting 43-year sentences apiece. All of them were convicted of theological crimes.
One wonders if the Armenian and Assyrian Christians of Iran are more offended by puerile and offensive memes from American leaders than by life in an Iranian prison.
The Islamic Republic isn’t unique in its view of apostasy. Afghanistan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, and many others maintain legal penalties for apostasy, which include proselytization and conversion. In most Islamic nations, importing Christian Bibles, for instance, is illegal or comes with severe restrictions.
Some Islamic nations don’t carry out these laws with the regularity of Iran. Others regularly commit atrocities.
Though to be fair, Islamists are running out of infidels to persecute. The Islamic world expelled around 850,000 Jews from their ancestral homes in the years after 1948. At that time, probably around 15% of the Middle East remained Christian. That number is now somewhere under 2%.
And that population would probably be even lower if Christians were allowed to flee. Most Christians do not live in the ritzy oil sheikdoms Carlson hangs out in. But in places Christians have lived for millennia.
There were over a million Christians in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There are approximately 150,000 of them left in 2024. Minority groups are often safest under secular strongmen who hinder the impulses of Islamists. Christians made up around 78% of the Lebanese population in 1910. They are less than 33% today. In Syria, once a bastion of the faith, somewhere over a million Christians have fled in recent decades, a decline of 85%. In the birthplace of Jesus, where Christians were once around 85% of the population, they have been replaced by Palestinian Muslims. Today, they are around 10%.
Those who remain in the Islamic world are in constant peril. People like the Copts, whose presence predates Islamic colonialism, are regularly subjected to violence and discrimination in Egypt. In countries such as Nigeria and Congo, Christians are massacred by Islamists, who, Carlson assures us, love Jesus.
YES, MUSLIMS SHOULD ASSIMILATE
Those who have followed Carlson’s collapse conspiracism and bigotry probably see the con here. President Donald Trump, according to Carlson and his endless stream of crank podcast guests, is controlled by Israel, Zionists, and American Jews who don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah or even a prophet. With the help of dispensationalists, these “people in charge” are manufacturing a wedge between Christians and peace-seeking Shia Twelvers in Iran, who would otherwise be our best buddies.
As with virtually everything Carlson contends these days, reality tells a starkly different story.
