My recent post with Lauren Morgan, “Islamism in the Popular Imagination,” serves as a rebuttal to a remarkably inane Huffington Post article about the terminology Westerners use to describe political Islam. One rather implausible claim put forward in that piece is that Rick Santorum is in fact more extreme than are newly empowered Islamist politicians in Egypt:

In his own interviews, for example, [Mansoor] Moaddel has found that, “In some respects, Mr. Santorum is more extremist” than leading figures of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, who today talk relatively less about Islamic law than about having to face the challenges of economic development and cutting back on pollution.

There are also a number of other misleading arguments advanced in the Huffington Post, as our entry outlines at length. But Bernard Finel, in a thoughtful entry that is on the whole supportive of our argument, challenges our comparison of Santorum and Islamist figures. The thrust of his argument is that — while the policies advocated, put in place, or likely to be maintained by Islamist parties are in fact worse than anything Santorum has proposed — the comparison itself is misleading:

I’d argue this is an apples to oranges comparison. Santorum’s limits are defined, I think, more by the limits imposed by American institutions rather than his ideology per se. In other words, GR is comparing institutionally unconstrained ideological positions with those heavy constrained by institutions. It actually is not at all difficult to find actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed.

I have two responses to this. First, in most countries where Islamist parties have been victorious or ascendant, there are in fact institutional constraints on their political programs. Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Libya all have significant and very visible constraints on the agendas of their respective political parties. (Iran and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, have institutions that in practice support theocratic rule.) That being said, Finel is correct that institutional constraints do play a role in shaping the policies that religiously-inspired political actors will advocate, or can implement, in the West versus those they will advocate or can implement in the Muslim world.

That being said, my second point is that the role of institutions doesn’t actually undercut our initial argument. (Although we didn’t mention them explicitly in the earlier post, we certainly had them in mind implicitly: for example, constraints created by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas account for some, but by no means all, of the differences in terms of the legal treatment of homosexuality.) In comparing the relative extremes of Santorum versus those of Islamist parties, we were not trying to offer a moral judgment on the relative righteousness of those two actors (to be clear: we use “actor” in the loosest possible sense here, since Islamist politicians are by no means a unified actor). Rather, we were comparing exactly what we have just specified: the policies Santorum has advocated or implemented versus those that Islamist parties have advocated or implemented. It is true that institutional constraints play a role in defining said policies, but our goal was illuminating policies that are likely to have an impact on anyone’s life, and not judging Santorum’s “heart of hearts.” Hence, it is a direct apples to apples comparison of what policies are advocated by these two different actors. It would only be an apples to oranges comparison if our goal were moral judgment.

So Finel writes: “It is surely true that Santorum is not worse than various Islamist regimes in the Middle East, in terms of religious freedom, women’s rights, and gay rights, but man that is damning with faint praise isn’t it?” That would indeed be damning with faint praise if our purpose were to praise — but instead it was to correct a flawed analogy, one where Finel (by his own framing of the subject) actually agrees with the substantive points that we made.

Finel makes one interesting point at the end in terms of moral comparison: “But the bigger issue is that comparing ideology to ideology is perhaps more useful than comparing policy outcomes simply because institutions matter.” Again, our purpose was not moral comparison, but I do want to make one point in response: institutions and context help to shape our ideology. The ideology of a 21st century American Christian is likely to be very different than the ideology of a Christian living in 16th century Spain; the ideology of a white 21st century American on racial matters is likely to be very different than the ideology of a white 19th century American. And the ideological and societal context with respect to the relationship between religion and state that Santorum has known all the life is different than that which has shaped politicians in the Brotherhood. So, while it is a bit beside the point I intended to make in my earlier post, I think Santorum would still almost certainly look less extreme in this regard even in a direct ideology-to-ideology comparison that ignores policy outcomes.