Western Civilization Faces Growing ‘Clash’ With Islamic Worldview, Mohler Warns
The world is facing a “clash” of civilizations, theologian and seminary president Albert Mohler says, contending that most Muslims oppose Western ideals and do not embrace an open society.
Mohler made the comments this week following an antisemitic attack on a Jewish Hanukkah event at Australia’s Bondi Beach that resulted in at least 15 deaths and dozens of injuries. Two Muslim men, Sajid Akram, 50, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, carried out the attack and had sworn allegiance to ISIS, law enforcement said.
“The threat from Islam is real. The reality is that the vast majority of Muslims around the world, quite consistent with their own convictions, do not want to join the civilizational project of the West, including the national project of the United States,” Mohler wrote in a World Opinions column. He is president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
“Just in case you wonder, they say this out loud. Islam does not sit easily where Islam does not dominate, and that fits the pattern of the Islamic worldview,” he added. “Consider this: We are constantly told of liberal Islamic figures in the United States as indicative of Muslims becoming part of the American dream, and some do, of course. But just think of New York City’s incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani. The mayor-elect can openly make his case in America’s largest city. It’s less likely that he could safely make the same case, presenting as a Muslim man but acknowledging his liberal views on LGBTQ issues, for example, on the street in Pakistan.”
Islamic civilization, he said on his podcast, The Briefing, “is a very different civilization than Western civilization.”
“It starts with a radically different theology, and it ends up with a radically different vision of society. And as a matter of fact, they’re so radically different, they’re irreconcilable.”
Islam and Christianity, he asserted, have different goals within the modern world.
“Islam is territorial in a way that isn’t true of Christianity, has never been true of Christianity,” Mohler said.
In the Muslim worldview, the world is “actually divided between the world of Islam and the world of war,” where “there is the responsibility of Muslims to wage the battle to bring those unconquered parts of the civilization under Muslim control, under the rule of the Quran.”
“Now, there is no such thing when you look at Judaism or Christianity. It’s a very different logic, but then again, Muhammad was a very, very different founder. … But now you have an absolute naivete for decades on the part of many Western leaders who just assumed that everyone can be enticed to conform to a Western historic understanding of human rights, of the process of law, of the status of nations, of the ideal of citizenship, and all the rest. Clearly, that isn’t true.”
The problem has grown worse due to liberal immigration policies, Mohler said.
“Some people will recoil at the suggestion that immigration and Islamic terrorism have anything to do with these attacks, but the facts are plain to see,” he wrote in his World Opinions column. “Western civilization now faces a direct threat to both liberty and civilizational survival, and denial is not a strategy. It is a form of self-induced delirium.”
Millions upon millions of individuals “who have arrived in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia have come from radically different cultures with different worldviews and conceptions of citizenship,” Mohler wrote.
“Western nations understand citizenship to be a shared project marked by a commitment to the nation. It is now clear and undeniable that millions of recent immigrants have no intention of assimilating into their new host cultures.”
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Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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Originally published December 18, 2025.
