Munther Isaac and the Theology of Moral Certainty |
Western Christianity today listens most closely to voices that speak with moral certainty. This is what attracted so many to Charlie Kirk. Every podcast I can think of displays rhetoric marked by absolute confidence. This is not because those voices are always the most careful or the most theologically serious. It is because they sound confident at a moment when many churches do not. When institutions stop trusting their own foundations, they start looking for certainty elsewhere. Only later does it become clear that the confidence was borrowed—and that something important was given up in return.
This piece isn’t about Munther Isaac as a private person, or as a stand-in for a distant conflict. It’s about him as a theological voice, and about what his influence shows about changes happening in Western Christianity. He matters because his work brings together moral certainty, hard political positions, and a form of theology that has lost much of its depth. Israel and Palestine provide the setting in which this convergence becomes visible, but the argument here is not finally geopolitical. It concerns the kind of theology now doing the church’s moral work.
Anyone familiar with contemporary Western church life will recognize the scene. A conference hall fills with pastors and activists. The language of lament, justice, and solidarity fills the room. Bethlehem, the cross, and suffering are spoken of in the same breath. The audience responds in a way that feels like worship. Yet no creed is spoken, no sin confessed, no prayer offered for enemies. The moment feels sacred, but it is no longer shaped by Christian form.
The system taking shape in these moments can be named. Call it Palestinianism. This is not Palestinian identity, Palestinian suffering, or legitimate political advocacy—all of which are real and morally serious. Palestinianism refers instead to a moral framework that functions like a religion. It names who is righteous and who is guilty, grants moral authority, and offers its own ways of seeking redemption. It presents itself as justice. Disagreement within it is not treated as error, but as moral failure.
Precision matters here. Palestinianism does not describe Palestinian Christians as such, nor does it exhaust the theological reflection emerging from Palestinian churches. There are Palestinian theologians and pastors who resist this framework, complicate it, or reject its asymmetries altogether. The term names not a people, but a moral system—one that has traveled especially well in Western church settings.
You can recognize Palestinianism by how it works in practice. One side is always treated differently from the other. Blame is spread across whole groups instead of being tied to individual actions. In essence, what has taken place is that the Christian idea of original sin has been replaced. The primary source of sin is no longer the human heart. Now this source of sin is in systems, and those systems are created by the oppressor. Once sin is located there, some people are no longer understood as fallen, but as morally innocent by definition. Disagreement stops being disagreement and starts being treated as guilt. Public shaming begins to feel like a way of fixing things. When all of this shows up together, a belief system is already doing its work, whether people realize it or not.
In practice, this system is rarely held with much clarity. Many people fall into it without quite realizing they........