Should God Be Based?Andrew Tate became a Muslim because in his view, Islam is willing to fight. Tate's a jerk -- but is there something to it?
Rod Dreher
Feb 8, 2023
Excellent essay by Shadi Hamid on the grotesque masculinist Andrew Tate's apparent "political" conversion to Islam. Hamid points out that when Tate converted, he didn't talk about the theological or spiritual aspects of Islam. Rather:
“Islam very closely reflects my personal beliefs,” he said in an interview with the Muslim polemicist Mohammed Hijab. “In my personal life, I’ve learned that if you don’t have standards, and if you’re not a strong person who’s prepared to defend his ideas, you’ll get crushed.”
As Tate sees it, where Christianity in the West is weak, undemanding, and devoid of firm rules, Islam is exacting, masculine, and vigorous. It refuses to be mocked, and it refuses to accommodate itself to progressive norms—particularly when it comes to gender and the family. Where Christianity has, in effect, accepted defeat, Islam, Tate said in the same interview, “feels like the last religion on Earth,” the only faith that stands a chance of mounting an effective resistance to moral decay and decline. (Whether Tate himself is moral, or wishes to be, is secondary.)
It's hard for me, as a Christian, to disagree entirely with what Tate said. (That's Tate above, explaining his conversion to a Muslim podcaster.) In an era in which many churches are making themselves ridiculous by their wokeness (see the Church of England is considering gender-neutral pronouns for God?) or other forms of desperation to be "relevant," Islam, whatever its flaws, ain't doin' that. Even if you reject Islam, as I do, you have to respect it for at least taking itself seriously. Hamid goes on to cite Sohrab Ahmari and me in this context:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/should-god-be-based/
