Christianity’s doctrines of human sinfulness, the Imago Dei, and love for neighbor promote limited government, equality before the law, and separation of powers. In contrast, Islam’s rejection of these ideas leads to concentrated power under sharia, legal inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and contested loyalty to non-Muslim governments.

Here is a truth you can count on: when someone tries to tell you that Islam and Christianity are compatible, even similar, in terms of key values and practices, they know nothing about either belief system. The differences between the two are incapable of being papered over. Simply consider just one area (out of many): how the faith has expanded in each:

Islam

For the most part, the first three centuries of growth in Islam was accomplished by the use of the sword. That is, conquest and compulsion were the main means by which Islam spread throughout the Middle East in its early centuries. And much of its later expansion was based on conquest as well, with most of North Africa and the Middle East now under Islamic control mainly because of military conquest, not willing conversions. This is in accord with the example of Muhammad and injunctions from the Koran and the hadith.

Christianity

During the first three centuries of the spread of the Christian church, the preaching of the gospel and the work of the Spirit combined to win many converts. The early church was often the enemy of the State, and had no official power or access to arms to force conversions. For the most part, people became Christians willingly and voluntarily. Yes, later on, Christians sometimes used the sword to force Christian conversion, but this was against the clear teachings of the New Testament.

One can also look at mainstream Western values such as liberty, democracy, the rule of law, religious freedom, respect for women and children, and so on. In these and other areas there is absolutely no comparison to be found between Islam and Christianity.

One of Australia’s—and the world’s—leading Islamic scholars is Rev. Dr. Mark Durie. He just gave a talk on this matter at an Aspire Conference in Sydney on February 25th. His full talk is now available, so I offer a number of key quotes from it.

He starts by sharing a line from historian Tom Holland: “Christianity is the seedbed of everything that makes the West what it is. Without it I worry where we may end up.” Durie then discusses where we get our values from:

Some say that politics is downstream from culture.

A point I want to make is that culture is downstream from religion.

And it matters which religion we follow.

Religion matters, for example, to how we understand marriage. Nations with a Muslim heritage permit polygamy. Nations with a Biblical heritage reject it. Some nations, like India or Lebanon, allow it for Muslims and prohibit it for Christians.

This is not a trivial distinction. The choice between monogamy and polygamy deeply impacts family culture including the rights of women and children. And the cultural difference comes from a difference in religion.

The World Values Survey investigated the values that peoples hold all over the world. Cultural values were plotted in two dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values, and survival versus self-expression values. The results show that the values of nations cluster along religious lines: Protestant versus Confucian versus Catholic versus Christian Orthodox versus Islamic. Religion doesn’t determine everything, but it accounts for a great deal.

The cultural differences between, say, Norway and Saudi Arabia are largely because Norway has a Protestant Lutheran heritage and Saudi Arabia has an Islamic heritage.

He goes on to compare and contrast ten basic biblical values with ten basic Islamic values. Here are the first five biblical values:

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