The fundamentals of a Christian sorting of the world are clear enough. There are Christians: members of the body of Christ by baptism; there are Jews, inheritors of the eternally-valid Abrahamic covenant; and there are pagans, which is to say everyone else.
Are Muslims pagans? Probably not: they are too intimate with us for that, sharing with us as they do a considerable lexicon and common stock of narratives, and having exchanged ideas and blood (and violence) with us for more than thirteen hundred years. Are they Christian heretics? Perhaps. Most Christians from the seventh century until the sixteenth thought of them in this way, because of standard Islamic views about Jesus (a prophet, not the incarnate Lord; he did not die on the cross) and the triune Lord (not triune). Are Christianity and Islam different species of a single genus, namely ‘religion’? No. Neither Christians nor Muslims can easily accept this way of thinking about themselves. The classificatory question remains, for Christians, largely unanswered.
Whatever its answer, one thing is fairly clear. Muslims are genealogically intimate with us; we share with them much, and we have much to learn from them. I hope that this genealogical affinity can extend to an elective one: I hope, that is, that we Christians will increasingly choose to see Muslims as allies and affines against the deadening and bloody weight of late-capitalist democracy. It would be better, I think, for the Church to live under the constraints and difficulties of an Islamic state, violent and restrictive though these can be (as they are, for instance, in Saudi Arabia), than to return with ever more passion, as it is increasingly doing, the bodysnatching embrace of late-capitalist democracy.
