by skissane | 2025-04-22 08:39:21+00:00
> I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.

The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.

And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.

It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.

Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.

And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.

So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.