When Moral Systems Collide

Many atheists do not understand the nature of belief. They tend to assume that all religions are equally false and equally irrelevant. Many would prefer religion did not exist at all.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, to the atheist, simply three groups worshiping a sky god.

My father was an atheist. My mom still is. My children lean that way as well. They get bored when I try to explain that different religions produce different moral systems, or when I suggest that, without some way of placing morality above the society it serves, morality becomes subjective. I tell them that, because of the moral relativism that comes from subjective morality, the less there actually is a God, the more we need one.

To me, this paradox is a pretty good reason to believe in God, but, to the atheist, tying morality to religion makes about as much sense as tying economics to the Tooth Fairy.

Many atheists are also progressives, and many of them view Islam not as a religion so much as a minority group they must nurture and protect. To the degree that Islam encourages anti-Semitism, and that nations like Qatar fund anti-Semitic propaganda, it can appear that progressivism and Islam are working together to propagandize the world in what some call “red-green propaganda.” Others say the idea of a “red-green alliance” is simply a conspiracy theory.

Theory or not, the impact is real. Red-green propaganda did not merely distort political debate. It inverted the West’s moral instincts.

Israel was invaded on October 7, 2023, by men who filmed themselves butchering civilians, burning families alive, dragging girls through the streets, and taking children hostage, all while joyously screaming “Allahu akbar!” The footage spread across the world within hours, and YouTube videos showed crowds in London train and subway stations cheering the carnage.

The streets of Western cities filled with crowds waving the flag of the attackers. University campuses erupted in chants and encampments, harassing Jewish students and staff and calling for the destruction of Israel, while professors who once lectured about human rights suddenly excused slaughter as a noble—even “exhilarating”—form of resistance.

Marxists who once promised liberation suddenly defended the most rigid religious law on earth.

Feminists who once marched for women’s freedom marched beside men who would stone women for defiance. Gay activists who once demanded tolerance shouted in support of regimes that imprison or execute gay men.

“Colonialism” is used to condemn the return of a people to their ancestral land, while praising empires built through conquest. “Oppression” is shouted by crowds living under the protection of the freest societies in history, while the same people cheer movements that crush dissent wherever they rule.

These contradictions sit in plain view, yet nobody involved feels the need to resolve them.

This did not happen overnight. The changes grew year by year in lecture halls, newsrooms, cultural institutions, and schools. Children were taught that the West is uniquely wicked and that victims are righteous regardless of what they do.

And Islam has been defined as one of the victims.

When activists reached the streets, they did exactly what they were designed to do, repeating the slogans they had already been taught. 

Activists frame every conflict through the same moral script: oppressor and oppressed. Once that script was applied, the details no longer mattered. The identities determined who was righteous and who was evil.

This is how propaganda works when it succeeds. It does not merely persuade. It restructures the categories through which people interpret reality.

Once those categories are accepted, atrocities can appear as justice and self-defense as genocide. When justice is redefined that way, cheering the murder of civilians no longer feels monstrous. It feels righteous instead.

The power of this moral framework, cultivated over decades, is that it turns ordinary people into defenders of the indefensible while allowing them to believe they are standing on the side of virtue. The result is one movement built (originally) on class hatred and another built on religious submission, marching beneath the same banners, shouting the same slogans, and attacking the same enemy. The political left has become beholden to this unholy convergence, and now portions of the political right are merging with the alt-right to spread an anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic message from the other side.

The propaganda has been so effective that when Israel and the United States killed Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, a CNN poll showed that 59% of Americans disapproved. Within Iran, countless millions of people celebrated the death of this horrific figure and the promise of freedom they hope will follow; but, in America, much of the public posted about Khamene’i as if in mourning—like his own demented followers—either unaware or indifferent to the fact that the Iranian people wanted out from under his regime.

The propaganda has not merely been effective. It now appears to be in control, as if the standards of evil have been inverted to turn the West against itself.

But is the red-green propaganda conspiracy real?

Conspiracy claims are often impossible to prove, but actions and incentives are not. When different groups behave in similar ways that match their shared incentives, often at the expense of other incentives that are not shared, something real is usually happening, whereas when actions do not align, the theory is likely false.

Let us examine the red-green alliance through such a lens.

This theory holds that global progressivism (red) is working with global Islam (green) to spread both.

We will examine progressivism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian West they seek to replace as moral systems. Each defines good and evil differently, and those definitions shape their incentive structures. Then we will look at what progressive and Islamic actors are actually doing to see how closely their actions match.

The Judeo-Christian moral order can be reduced to the two rules Jesus used to summarize God’s moral law: love God above all things, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40, Mark 12:29–31, Luke 10:27). Love sits at the center of Judeo-Christian morality and leads us to exalt one another through the natural rights of the individual.

This belief sits at the center of the Enlightenment. It took the merger of the Judeo-Christian moral order with Greek philosophy to produce it, but once that merger occurred, the Enlightenment was inevitable.

Islam calls for total submission to Allah’s law (Qur’an 3:19, 5:44), and it exalts those who force others to submit (8:39, 9:29). Forced submission is considered deeper than theological agreement, which is why dying in jihad is treated as the only guarantee of paradise (Sahih Bukhari 2795, Sahih Muslim 1876).

Murder, torture, rape, terrorism, theft, and many other acts the Judeo-Christian tradition calls evil can be justified, even glorified, if they serve the purpose of forcing submission to Sharia (Qur’an 8:12, 9:5, 47:4).

Western “excesses” (everything that does not conform to Sharia) are considered evil under Islam (Qur’an 5:44, 9:29). The United States is called the “Great Satan” across much of the Islamic world specifically because of what Islam sees as American excess, the political center of the West.

To Islam, civil rights represent a license to reject Sharia (Qur’an 5:44, 33:36). Nothing could be more evil than that. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God loves us and offers communion with Him for eternity (John 3:16), but we are free to accept or reject the offer (Joshua 24:15, John 7:17).

Islam reverses that structure. It calls for total submission to Sharia and glorifies the use of force to make others submit against their will. Islam is evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is evil under the tenets of Islam.

These traditions are diametrically opposed. They cannot, and, in the long run, will not, coexist.

That does not mean Christian and Muslim people cannot coexist. Of course they can as individuals. The ideologies themselves, however, define one another as evil, making it impossible for a society to merge them into a cohesive whole.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, evil is the conscious violation of moral law (John 3:4, Romans 7:7). That law is fixed, revealed by God, and rooted in His unchanging nature (Exodus 20).

In the Judeo-Christian world, evil originates in the heart (Mark 7:21–23), not in social circumstance. A person who is kind, honest, and generous is considered good even if they come from privilege. A person who lies, cheats, or steals is evil even if they come from poverty or oppression.

Judaism and Christianity both teach that all people are sinners (Ecclesiastes 7:20, Psalm 14:3, Romans 3:23). None are righteous by their own merit (Romans 3:10). Redemption comes through grace rather than achievement (Ephesians 2:8–9), and no sin places someone beyond forgiveness (Isaiah 1:18, 1 John 1:9). Judaism and Christianity recognize that people commit evil, but they do not define the person by it (1 John 1:9).

Progressivism turns this structure on its head by rejecting fixed moral law.

Progressivism denies original sin but embraces collective guilt, defining evil by group identity rather than individual behavior. People are judged less by what they do than by the power they are believed to hold.

Progressives often equate speech with violence while excusing actual violence. A white person who cites factual data may be accused of doing harm. A rioter who sets a building on fire may be defended or even celebrated.

For Jews and Christians, evil is something we all carry (Romans 3:23) but can overcome (1 Corinthians 10:13, Romans 6:14). In the progressive worldview, evil is something others carry and can never shed. One system holds that truth rises above power. The other insists that power dictates truth. They are not compatible.

Islam and progressivism are often grouped together because of their authoritarian tendencies, but the comparison collapses once you examine how each defines evil. They are not the same. They are not even close.

Halal and haram are not open to debate. To violate Sharia is to rebel against God, and such rebellion is evil by definition (Qur’an 5:33, 16:116, 33:36). The rules are strict, often brutal, but they are stable, rooted in the belief that good and evil exist independently of human feeling.

Progressivism rejects that idea entirely. It does not recognize objective morality. It denies that good and evil are fixed categories and instead defines morality through lived experience, emotional harm, and power dynamics. Under progressivism, evil is not what violates an external code, but what offends the wrong person or disrupts the current narrative.

What is moral today under progressivism may be immoral tomorrow, and what is condemned today may be celebrated a year from now. The only constant is obedience to the current narrative.

Islam believes truth is handed down from above (Qur’an 2:2, 16:102, 26:192–193). Progressivism believes truth is constructed from below, shaped by the feelings and identities of those who claim oppression. In Islam, blasphemy is evil because it insults God (Qur’an 9:65–66, 33:57). In progressivism, blasphemy is evil because it makes someone feel unsafe.

Both systems suppress dissent, but they do so for entirely different reasons.

Both systems also enforce submission, but Islam defines evil as defiance of divine law (Qur’an 4:13–14, 5:44) while progressivism defines evil as defiance of the shifting social consensus, especially when that consensus is presented as the voice of the oppressed.

From the outside, the results may look similar: censorship, fear, and conformity. The internal logic, however, is the opposite.

Islam, incidentally, considers progressivism evil. It aligns with the progressive movement only because progressives treat Muslims as an oppressed minority to be elevated, and that posture serves Islam’s central objective of spreading Islam by force.

Western elites, soaked in post-modern delusion and utopian fantasy, believe they control this convergence. They imagine themselves as architects, using each ideology to reshape society. In reality they are accelerating the collapse of the only structure that restrains these forces from devouring one another, and then devouring us.

If Islam and progressivism truly formed a single ideological alliance, their actions would consistently reinforce one another’s long-term goals. They would build the same institutions, pursue the same legal structures, and defend the same moral framework. That is not what we see. 

What we see instead is a pattern of overlapping incentives that occasionally produce the same political behavior.

Progressivism works to weaken the moral authority of the West by redefining it as the primary source of oppression in the modern world. Western institutions, Western history, and Western identity are all recast through this lens, teaching generations to view their own civilization as uniquely guilty and uniquely corrupt. 

Islam benefits enormously from this process. Every institution progressivism delegitimizes is an institution that once defended the Judeo-Christian moral order, and every historical narrative it tears down removes another cultural barrier that once resisted Islamic expansion.

Progressivism does not intend to advance Islam. Its objective is to dismantle the West. 

Islam does not intend to advance progressivism. Its objective is to replace the West. 

In the short term, those incentives overlap. Progressives defend Islamic actors because their moral framework defines Muslims as an oppressed minority, while Islam accepts that protection because it weakens the societies most capable of resisting it.

The result is a convergence without a true alliance. Progressivism erodes Western confidence in its own moral legitimacy, while Islam exploits the vacuum. Progressives defend regimes and movements that would criminalize their own beliefs, because their ideology defines the West as the greater evil, while Islamist movements tolerate progressive activism inside Western societies even as they suppress it everywhere else.

Each movement is using the other to weaken a common enemy. Their goals diverge, but their incentives occasionally align, and that alignment is enough to produce the appearance of cooperation. The moment the common enemy disappears, that convergence will disappear with it, as Islam and progressivism only share the same battlefield.

There is no red-green alliance so much as a progressive rot that Islam exploits. These are not allies. They are rival executioners, momentarily aligned against a common victim, with Islam playing progressivism as a fool.

What looks like a red-green alliance sits inside that confusion. Sometimes cooperation is deliberate. More often it is simply the result of incentives aligning against a common enemy.

When propaganda reaches this level of influence, people begin to doubt their own eyes, even when the evidence is undeniable. That is how crowds end up cheering men who butcher civilians while condemning the societies that protect their freedom to protest. That is how gay people champion those who would like nothing more than to shove them off the tallest building in town.

The red-green alliance may not be a conspiracy in the sense of a single movement acting in concert, but, unlike the Tooth Fairy, the threat is real.

And by the time progressives wake up to the danger, it may already be too late.