Are Islam and Christianity essentially the same?

Assuming similarity

The idea that Muslims and Christians are essentially the same is still doing the rounds today. My naive teenage assumptions have gone mainstream. In particular, one frequently hears people lump together the three major monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam under the general term ‘Abrahamic faiths’. To many people it seems obvious. Muslims, Christians and Jews all believe in one god, they all believe in scripture, they all believe in heaven, indeed they even have figures like Abraham in common,6 so surely it’s clear that these three religious traditions are branches of the same tree, cousins in the same family. For example, Anglican vicar and journalist Giles Fraser wrote: ‘Christians should remind themselves that Muslims are our brothers and sisters with whom we share a faith in the living God.’7 While across the Atlantic, in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Joe Biden cheerfully announced: ‘I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith . . . [What people] don’t realize is that we all come from the same root here in terms of our fundamental, basic beliefs.’8

This is not just a popular assumption; one can also find it being expressed by serious-minded scholars. Miroslav Volf, an incredibly highly regarded Christian theologian based at Yale University, wrote a popular book addressing this whole question of the relationship between Christianity and Islam. In the opening pages of Allah: A Christian response, Volf writes: ‘Christians and Muslims worship one and the same God. They understand God’s character partly differently, but the object of their worship is the same. I reject the idea that Muslims worship a different God than do Jews and Christians.’9 The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, during a trip to Morocco in 2019, also leapt on the hey-isn’t-it-great- we-believe-in-the-same-god bandwagon, choosing to pontificate in, of all things, a tweet: ‘We Christians and Muslims believe in God, the Creator and the Merciful, who created people to live like brothers and sisters, respecting each other in their diversity, and helping one another in their needs.’10 To be fair, Pope Francis wasn’t entirely innovating here, but reflecting a theme that goes back some sixty years to the Second Vatican Council, which stated that Muslims ‘together with us adore the one, merciful God’.11

A fascinating survey in 2018 of British and American Christians revealed how versions of this idea are seeping down from the lofty world of theologians, vicars and popes into the wider church. The market research company ComRes surveyed thousands of Christians about their beliefs and, as part of their survey, asked respondents whether they would agree with the statement ‘God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam’; 63% of British Christians and 80% of American Christians said that they would.12 While this may be a watered-down version of the full-fat, super-sized ‘same god’ idea, nevertheless, it’s still very much in the same ballpark and is one more indicator of how the assumption that religions in general (and Christianity and Islam in particular) are essentially the same (at least in most of the important ways) is becoming ever more mainstream.

6 As well as appearing in the Bible, in both the Old Testament (the part of the Bible also sacred to Jews) and the New Testament, Abraham is frequently mentioned in the Qur’an, with an Arabized form of his name (Ibrahim). 
7 Giles Fraser, ‘The Hagia Sophia is for prayer, not pictures’, UnHerd, 10 July 2020, <www. unherd.com/thepost/the-hagia-sophia-is-for-prayer-not-pictures>.
8 ‘Joe Biden speech at the Million Muslim Votes Summit transcript July 2020’, Rev, 20 July 2020, <www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-speech-at-the-million-muslim-votes- summit-transcript-july-20>.
9 Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian response (New York: HarperOne, 2011), p. 14.
10 Pope Francis, @Pontifex Twitter account, 29 March 2019, <www.twitter.com/pontifex/ status/1111697027107184640>.
11 Pope John Paul VI, Lumen Gentium, II.16, 21 November 1964, <www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_ en.html>.
12 You can explore the whole survey at <www.thestateoftheology.com/uk> (for the UK results) or <https://thestateoftheology.com> (for the USA results). And by way of illustration, see the letter in the Church Times of 24 July 2020 by Paul Reynolds, which casually remarks that ‘the God whom Muslims worship is the same God as we worship’: <www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/24-july/comment/letters-to-the-editor/letters-to- the-editor>.