{"id":51,"date":"2010-08-09T06:58:59","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T06:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/sharia-is-coming-sharia-is-coming.html"},"modified":"2010-08-09T06:58:59","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T06:58:59","slug":"sharia-is-coming-sharia-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/sharia-is-coming-sharia-is-coming.html","title":{"rendered":"Sharia is coming, sharia is coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her round-up<\/a> of anti-mosque protests in yesterday’s New York Times<\/i>, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who’s been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies.<\/p>\n

\n

\nShe said they read books by critics of Islam, including
\nformer Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She
\nalso attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a
\nFlorida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western
\ncivilization against Islam.\t\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\n“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned
\nthat in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be
\novertaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court<\/a> to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”\t\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The best surveys of Muslims in America indicate that indicate that they now constitute well under one percent of the population. The 2008 Trinity American Religious Identification Survey<\/a>, the third in a series beginning in 2009, shows that over the past 20 years, the number of adult Muslims i grew from 529,000 to 1,349,000–from .3 percent to .6 percent of American adults–growing half a fast in the 2000s as in the 1990s. It’s possible, but unlikely, that Muslims will make up four percent of the U.S. population in 20 years. <\/p>\n

No doubt there are some American Muslims who wish to live by Shariah law, just as there are some American Jews who order their domestic relations according to rabbinic law–halachah<\/i>. Or just as other religious communities, from the Amish to the Roman Catholics, have their own rules governing the conduct of their members. But the idea that Muslims in America represent some kind of demographic\/ideological threat to the American legal system is beyond far-fetched. It’s a lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her round-up of anti-mosque protests in yesterday’s New York Times, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who’s been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSharia is coming, sharia is coming - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/sharia-is-coming-sharia-is-coming.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sharia is coming, sharia is coming - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In her round-up of anti-mosque protests in yesterday’s New York Times, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who’s been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}