The Deconstruction Ceiling: Why Jesus-and-Buddha Spirituality Stops Short of Muhammad
How Sufism Exposed the Blind Spots I Didn’t Know I Had
This piece grew out of the uncomfortable realization that my understanding of other traditions was far narrower than I believed. Working through Living Presence: The Sufi Path to Mindfulness and the Essential Self forced me to confront assumptions I didn’t even know I had inherited — especially around Islam and the Sufi lineage that shaped much of the world’s contemplative heritage. As those blind spots surfaced, I began to see how easily Western deconstruction stops at the edges of its own comfort zone. What follows is an attempt to name the boundaries we pretend we’ve crossed but rarely do.
This brings us to a pattern almost no one in the deconstruction world is willing to face directly.
The Pattern No One Acknowledges
There is a curious and rarely acknowledged pattern among Western Christians who “deconstruct.” When they begin distancing themselves from the rigid forms of the faith they grew up with, they often announce their openness by embracing a kind of curated spiritual cosmopolitanism: Jesus as wisdom teacher rather than savior, Buddha as compassionate guide, Rumi as poetic companion, and perhaps a bit of mindfulness repackaged through secular psychology. This allows them to feel expansive, liberated, and intellectually adventurous. But for all the talk about openness, curiosity, and breaking free from constraints, there remains one conspicuous absence that reveals the limits of this transformation. Almost none of them will mention Muhammad.
They will publicly cite the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh. They will discuss the Tao Te Ching, quote Richard Rohr, or praise Christian mystics. They will affirm Jesus as an archetype of awakened consciousness. But Islam — and specifically the figure of Muhammad — remains off-limits. The silence is striking not because Muslims need validation, but because the omission exposes how much of their worldview remains governed by Western cultural conditioning. They have left the church, but not the West.
I had to face this in myself the day I walked into that Muslim prayer room — the moment I described in “When My Piety Collapsed in a Muslim Prayer Room.” I thought I knew something about devotion until I saw people bowing with a sincerity that didn’t need an audience or a narrative. The atmosphere in that room shattered the cartoon version of Islam I didn’t realize I’d inherited. All my unconscious assumptions dissolved in the presence of actual prayer, actual surrender, actual humility. That encounter showed me how deeply Western conditioning shapes our spiritual instincts, and how quickly it falls apart the moment we witness a living tradition instead of an imagined one. It became a doorway into a more honest kind of self-examination — not about Islam as a label, but about my own blindness.
Inherited Western Fear, Not Spiritual Discernment
A genuinely liberated mind would interrogate why Christianity conditioned generations to view Islam as a threat, why Western culture has spent centuries defining itself against Muhammad, and why, even after shedding institutional religion, those reflexes remain in place. Instead, many deconstruction journeys simply carry old fears into new settings. They renovate the attic while ignoring the basement.
Part of the reason is that Buddhism has been made safe for Western consumption. It arrives packaged through yoga studios, meditation apps, and secular therapy. It demands little cultural or existential surrender. Westerners can borrow Buddhism without joining its community, rituals, ethics, or metaphysics. It becomes another lifestyle accessory, not a transformative path.
Muhammad, however, represents a living revelation and a structured spiritual path that demands surrender, remembrance, community, discipline, and accountability. He cannot be turned into a metaphor or a meme. Unlike the sanitized Buddhism of suburban wellness culture, Islam asks something of you — and that alone makes it unsettling for those who fled Christianity because they didn’t want a path that rearranged their life.
Deconstruction or Rebranded Western Ego?
This is why much deconstruction reveals itself not as spiritual liberation but as the Western ego reasserting itself. People leave evangelicalism but keep the empire-shaped imagination. They reject doctrines but preserve the myth of Western cultural superiority. They abandon the language of sin but retain deeply embedded Islamophobia, even if they would never name it as such. Their spirituality becomes one more consumer choice in a culture that prizes autonomy but avoids true interior transformation.
The irony is that the contemplative practices many rediscover — centering prayer, interior stillness, purification of the heart, the language of divine union — often reached Christian Europe through Sufi channels, not internal Christian development. Medieval Christians in Spain, Sicily, and the broader Mediterranean lived in constant contact with Islamic civilization. It was primarily the Sufis, not the legal or political structures of Islam, who shaped Christian mystical vocabulary. Scholars such as Louis Massignon and Miguel Asín Palacios have shown how deeply Sufi metaphysics influenced Christian writers like St. John of the Cross.
Sufism’s Influence on Western Mysticism
St. Francis of Assisi — the icon of Christian humility — famously crossed Crusader battle lines to meet Sultan Malik al-Kamil. Francis wasn’t seeking a debate or a triumph. His writings after the encounter show shifts toward simplicity, poverty, humility, and inner surrender that resonate deeply with Sufi teachings. He saw something in Muslim piety — especially in its interior warmth and devotion — that his own tradition had obscured under layers of institution and empire.
Cynthia Bourgeault goes further, suggesting that Sufism preserved the contemplative heart of Jesus more faithfully than the institutional church. Sufis maintained practices of remembrance, inner stillness, breath-attunement, purification of the heart, and surrender to the Divine Beloved — all central themes in Jesus’s original message. This continuity arose not because Christianity lacked sincerity, but because empire buried contemplation under doctrine, whereas Sufi orders cultivated the heart’s awakening for centuries.
So when Western deconstructionists quote Rumi but ignore Muhammad, they are extracting the flower while denying the soil. They claim spiritual breadth while avoiding the tradition that most directly challenges the West’s inherited worldview. And that avoidance says more about conditioning than courage.
The Door Deconstructionists Refuse to Open
A truly open spiritual path would be willing to ask: What if Muhammad is not the shadow of the Western imagination but a missing conversation partner? What if Islam is not a rival but the sibling Christianity forgot? What if the Qur’an is not a threat but another transmission addressing the same human longing for union, justice, and surrender? What if Jesus and Muhammad are not incompatible but complementary teachers illuminating a shared mystery from different angles?
These questions do not demand conversion. They require honesty. They require the courage to examine the walls of the mind that Western culture taught us to treat as natural. They require humility to recognize that the West is not the axis of the spiritual world — only the narrator of its own story. Most of all, they require moving beyond curated spirituality into the deeper work of dismantling the stories empire planted within us.
Virgin Monk Boy’s Benediction for the Half-Deconstructed
May those who escaped the church but kept Caesar’s imagination finally recognize the water they swim in. May those who quote Rumi meet the Sufi path that nurtured him. May those who fear Muhammad encounter his mercy before their projections. May those who praise Jesus and Buddha recognize the lineage that kept Jesus’s inner teachings alive when the West forgot them. And may those who believe they are open-minded discover that openness is measured not by eclectic reading lists but by the walls one is willing to dismantle inside the heart.
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Just starting to read Living Pressence.
A thought after reading your thoughts. There are aspects to different Christian faiths that require deep surrender to the divine. Unfortunately there are also loud aspects that want performative action not surrender unless it is surrender to a human being not God. This is on display everywhere here now. Profess but do not follow God but follow man.
I think there maybe a "fear" of Islam for the cultural differences built in and for fear of the super radical extreams of it. But maybe the deeper unsaid fear is that of the surrender to God and the direct uncharted (by people) relationship required by the faith.
This is uncharted territory for me - typical Westerner who has not been exposed to Muhammad in any way, shape or form beyond what you wrote & definitely Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, etc. seem to be held in a “safe” light while Islam has been given the suspicious treatment. I had no idea why, didn’t understand, & didn’t take the time to investigate. You did & I touched the tip of an iceberg I’ve wondered about my whole life. The spiritual paths I’ve walked on the most are Alcoholics Anonymous & the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition from indigenous Peru before the Spanish & Catholicism took over. Both in their own way off the beaten path of traditional religions but minus hostility in my experience at least except for the occasional dismissive “huh? What’s that?”
As i’m exploring the Sufi path (Living Presence), I’ve been introduced to more depth than before, definitely in my traditional Christian upbringing. And am totally baffled by the truthful history you shared re: Islam & specifically Muhammad.
I need to read it again. And maybe again and again. Very grateful for the enlightenment, truth & wisdom you share. It expands the scope of my life in this body on this planet. 💖