When Ben Carson said over the weekend that he doesn’t think a Muslim should be president, he couched his argument in language you’ve probably heard before: He suggested that Islam is “inconsistent with the values and principles of America.” This is not a new sort of claim — it isn’t hard to find people making versions of it all over the place, whether the argument is about American Muslims or migrants in Europe.
The basic idea is that some fundamental aspect of the Koran or, more broadly, “Muslim culture” (which doesn’t really mean anything since there are so many different varieties of Islam, and they’re dispersed over such a wide geographic range), just doesn’t mesh well with human rights or democracy or [insert other good thing]. These arguments take a really large group of people and assume, by virtue of their religious identification, they’re incapable of certain beliefs (thinking governments should elected by the people), behaviors (abiding by rules protecting women’s rights), or both.
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