Imagine that some splinter Christian sect existed that preached a sneering contempt for women, sex slavery, hatred for Jews, death to non-believers (and homosexuals), child-marriage, religious conquest, segregation and gross religious discrimination, and the legitimacy of lying whenever it suited the church’s purposes. Imagine that it had been practicing all these evils since shortly after its founding, and had left mountains of corpses on three continents — complete with burned libraries, looted cities and ruined civilizations.

Do you think that secular leftists would spend their time and energy making excuses for such a church? Would they fight like wildcats to admit millions of its followers into Western lands? Or would they boycott any country where it predominated as they did racist South Africa? Would they subject its American followers to ruthless surveillance and government harassment, as the Clinton administration did the Branch Davidians? Would they send the FBI to fill its ranks with helpful informers, as the government did to the white-nationalist Christian Identity “churches”?

The question answers itself.

People whose minds work in linear fashion draw from all this the conclusion that leftists concerned with equality, social justice, and personal freedom would strongly oppose orthodox Islam and rethink their attitude toward Islamic immigration if only they knew the facts. Clearly these well-meaning people just haven’t been informed about the teachings of orthodox Islam and the track record of its faithful followers. So it’s our job to share those facts.

So far so good. We have the duty to do just that. Marshal those Quranic suras, those authoritative haditha, and cite abundant examples of atrocities which those canonical texts have directly inspired. Recount the recent sermons of highly placed widely respected Muslim religious authorities who approve recent attacks of terrorism or gross religious violence.

But don’t get your hopes up.

Far too many leftists have built insuperable barriers to that information, and nothing — literally nothing — you say or do could convince them. While knowledge may be power, the human will is stronger. We are richly capable of denying the facts in front of our faces if they go against where our guts want to lead us.

That raises another, more interesting question: Why would leftists who are outraged, say, that the Catholic church won’t ordain women or that Southern Baptists won’t celebrate same-sex weddings, give a pass to a faith that endorses child polygamy and executes homosexuals? What’s in it for them?

As the author of a book on the Seven Deadly Sins, let me step in here and tell you. I’ll taxonomize the motives of pro-Muslim progressives according to each of those classic human motives. Perhaps not every progressive who’s in denial about Islam is in the grip of Deadly Sins. But I’ll wager that most of them are driven by one or more of the following:

Lust

Plenty of progressive men first adopted their views as a mating strategy. And indeed, spouting feminist rhetoric probably did help them in the bedroom. But this easy intimacy filled their lives with a series of thin-skinned, self-righteous women with an unsleeping vigilance for the slightest trace of “patriarchy.” Perhaps, on a deep, subconscious level, such men can’t help admiring bearded foreigners with harems who don’t have to pay this price for pleasure.

Gluttony

This might seem too trivial to make much of a difference, but you’d be shocked at how many progressives form their immigration policies around the crucial issue of access to ethnic restaurants. It’s not just food, of course. People who hunger to see themselves and be seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitan also want access to hookah-pipe cafes, funky foreign clothes and “exotic” neighborhoods where they can dip into alien cultures — but of course, would never live. Other progressives hunger for approval, and look for a cost-free way to gain it, by siding with supposedly “oppressed” groups like Palestinians, or radical Muslims forced out of countries by secular governments.

Wrath

Too many progressives nurse a deep, insatiable hatred for the Christian and Western past, and also for those of us in the present who are loyal to such things as church, nation or Western civilization. These people don’t so much think as feel that if a roadside Pentecostalist church in Oregon is allowed to abstain from gay weddings without swift and certain punishment, within five years the Spanish Inquisition will be burning witches on Wall Street. Or something. As I said, they don’t sweat the details.

Greed

For the past 30 years, no one has been kept off a TV network or failed to get tenure because he was too friendly to exotic, foreign cultures, or too hostile to Western ones. Even Fox News won’t air the most candid critics of Islam. Those critics have to resort to online TV shows (some of which are excellent, by the way, like The Glazov Gang).

Sloth

It’s so much easier to follow the narrative that makes you comfortable, pumped out by elites whom you have decided to trust, than to ferret out facts that are only likely to ruin your day. And anyway, what can you do? What will happen will happen, and trying to push back against overpowering forces of history is exhausting. What’s the point?

Vainglory

Nothing is lower prestige in our culture today than being a narrow-minded bigot — which is how everyone who matters sees people who criticize other cultures. It suggests that you haven’t traveled to foreign countries, attended elite academies, or mixed with the best kind of people. You might as well just put on a Trump hat, drive a red pickup truck to a NASCAR rally, and stand there listening to Nash-Trash while drinking Budweiser (non-ironically). Please.

Envy

If there’s one worldview that’s predicated on frustrating natural human drives and diverting them into strange, unnatural byways, it’s progressivism. You’re expected to prosper while loathing capitalism, raise boys to play with dolls and girls to play with guns, and compete for social status while battling for equality. Muslims don’t have to fake any of that. Their faith is nothing if not candid: It’s about joining the winning team, with God on its side, which will gladly use force and fraud to make sure it comes out on top — in this life and the next one. Its ethics could have been crafted by bands of Vikings or a cabal of adolescent boys. What fun we would have, some progressives may imagine, if they could only swallow Islam. Most can’t. But they can take vicarious pleasure in seeing it in action, and in watching the Christians squirm. Delicious.