CNN, MSNBC and all of the mainstream media lost their minds when President Trump rolled out a halt on travel from seven majority Muslim countries, insisting the President was abridging constitutionally guaranteed religious freedoms. The case for this argument has been relatively tenuous.
However, when a leftist demagogue literally applied a religious test to a cabinet nominee, ABC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC have not as of this writing so much as mentioned the incident.
Bernie Sanders, the libertine socialist Senator from Vermont (who made over one million dollars last year), demanded with his typical preening certitude that Trump budgetary nominee Russell Vought renounce his mainstream Christian beliefs in a hearing Wednesday. He cited one of English’s most amorphous and meaningless allegations, “Islamophobia”, as the culprit behind his usurpation of the spirit of Article VI of the Constitution.
In a piece last year for The Resurgent, Vought gave a standard recitation of Christian hermeneutics: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned.” This is a standard exegesis on Christ’s proclamation in John 14:6; the only way to eternal salvation is through knowledge and devotion to God’s Son, Jesus Christ (though certain exceptions are made for extenuating circumstances that prevent such knowledge).
Vought’s statement had no legislative consequences for Muslims, atheists or any other non-Christian persons. It’s a belief that Vought is well within his constitutional bounds to hold; vanilla Christian eschatology about eternity and the afterlife are hardly foreign to Capitol Hill.
But the word “condemned,” which has a clear and consistent theological founding, was too “Islamophobic” for Sanders, whose tone had turned from ill-informed lecturing into a bout of spasmodic rage:
I understand you are a Christian, but this country are made of people who are not just — I understand that Christianity is the majority religion, but there are other people of different religions in this country and around the world. In your judgment, do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?
The media and the Left routinely treat Islam with kid gloves when compared to its standards of bigotry for Christians. But, presuming the impossible, if Sanders had dared asked that question to a Muslim nominee, would their answer resemble the epistemic worthlessness he expected Vought to submit to? Put another way, in Islamic theology, what type of fate awaits dissidents and infidels?
Qu'ran 22:19 tells us that for “those who disbelieved” like, for example, the nominally Jewish Bernie Sanders, Allah “will have cut out for them garments of fire” and “[p]oured upon their heads...scalding water.” Further, “unbelievers” will be unable “to ward off the Fire from their faces, nor yet from their backs, and no help can reach them!” (Qu’ran 21:39). If nonbelievers like Sanders might grow thirsty in such a place, the Qu’ran reassures us that he would “given to drink boiling water so that it cuts up” his “bowels (to pieces)” (47:15). But maybe Sanders would accept such an existence if the disparity between punishment was relatively indifferentiable.
The truth, of course, is that Sanders doesn’t care what Islam teaches about the afterlife. He is more interested in further embedding ethnic, economic and cultural divisions into the American public and thereby extracting coalitions of self-conceived victims to vote for redistributive policies.
David French of National Review wrote a fantastic column on this overt religious test by the Vermont senator and transcribed the interaction shown below:
Sanders: Let me get to this issue that has bothered me and bothered many other people. And that is in the piece that I referred to that you wrote for the publication called Resurgent. You wrote, “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned.” Do you believe that that statement is Islamophobic?
Vought: Absolutely not, Senator. I’m a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith. That post, as I stated in the questionnaire to this committee, was to defend my alma mater, Wheaton College, a Christian school that has a statement of faith that includes the centrality of Jesus Christ for salvation, and . . .
Sanders: I apologize. Forgive me, we just don’t have a lot of time. Do you believe people in the Muslim religion stand condemned? Is that your view?
Vought: Again, Senator, I’m a Christian, and I wrote that piece in accordance with the statement of faith at Wheaton College.
Sanders: I understand that. I don’t know how many Muslims there are in America. Maybe a couple million. Are you suggesting that all those people stand condemned? What about Jews? Do they stand condemned too?
Vought: Senator, I’m a Christian . . .
Sanders (shouting): I understand you are a Christian, but this country are made of people who are not just — I understand that Christianity is the majority religion, but there are other people of different religions in this country and around the world. In your judgment, do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?
Vought: Thank you for probing on that question. As a Christian, I believe that all individuals are made in the image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect regardless of their religious beliefs. I believe that as a Christian that’s how I should treat all individuals . . .
Sanders: You think your statement that you put into that publication, they do not know God because they rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned, do you think that’s respectful of other religions?
Vought: Senator, I wrote a post based on being a Christian and attending a Christian school that has a statement of faith that speaks clearly in regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation. Sanders: I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who this country is supposed to be about.
