By Evan DutmerAugust 5, 2026“There is no compulsion in religion.” Micah Beckwith’s calling Islam a “demonic death cult”, I reflected on Desiderius Erasmus’s call for enlightened, virtuous leadership in his Renaissance treatise, Education of a Christian Prince. He also claimed that Islam, the world’s second largest religion with around 2 billion adherents, is not a religion but a “military and political ideology”. Medieval Islamic philosophers such as Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes read and appreciated Greek and Roman philosophy. Evan Dutmer is Senior Instructor in Ethics in the Department of Leadership Education at Culver Academies, a boarding school in Culver, Indiana.