Ted Nugent is known for many things. Subtlety isn’t one of them.

This is a man who treats volume knobs the way toddlers treat bedtime: with open defiance. So when a mosque in his Michigan town began broadcasting the early-morning call to prayer over loudspeakers, Nugent reacted in the way only Nugent would. He turned his back yard into a launchpad for a one-man rock assault.

You don’t need to be religious to see the problem. You only need to have ears.

Excessive? Perhaps. But it tapped straight into a frustration millions feel but rarely voice — not loudly, anyway.

The early-morning Islamic call to prayer echoing through American suburbs isn’t “diversity” or a charming cultural detail. It’s noise — loud, sudden, inescapable noise. It jolts families awake, spooks pets, startles infants, and demands that the entire block adapt.

Nugent’s counterattack may have been a little over the top, but beneath the distortion pedals sits a simple point: Public peace matters. In a free country, quiet hours come first. And no imported custom, however sacred to some, earns an automatic exemption.

Richard Dawkins once called the Islamic call to prayer “hauntingly beautiful.” This from a man who spent decades explaining that God doesn’t exist. It’s a strange kind of aesthetic tourism: Romanticize a religious ritual while rejecting the very religion that produced it. Dawkins was wrong about the existence of God, and he is equally wrong about the Islamic call to prayer.

The call to prayer wasn’t designed as background music, and it wasn’t conceived for multicultural suburbs where everyone keeps different hours and believes different things. It was forged in a seventh-century society where faith and authority were fused, where religion structured public life down to the minute, and where submission — literal, explicit submission — wasn’t merely encouraged but expected.

Islam’s founding worldview assumed a unified religious community, a shared legal and moral order, and a sharp distinction between believers and nonbelievers. That distinction shaped status, obligation, and allegiance.

In the Muslim context, the adhan makes perfect sense. It is a public summons for a public faith, a declaration of dominance over the rhythm of the day, and reminder that life moves according to Allah’s schedule — not yours. It reminds everyone, believer or not, that the community’s obligations take precedence over the individuals’ preferences.

But transplant it into America (or any predominantly Christian society), and it makes zero sense. The operating systems and expectations are different. The very idea of a faith dictating the morning routine of people who don’t share it runs directly against the grain of Western life.

RELATED: Why progressives want to destroy Christianity — but spare Islam

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This is the part Dawkins missed entirely when he praised the adhan.

It’s easy to romanticize a sound when you encounter it on holiday, filtered through distance, novelty, and sand-warm nostalgia. It’s quite another when it is broadcast at 5 a.m. into a neighborhood that never agreed to have its eardrums shattered before the coffee even brews.

Dawkins hears melody, but he ignores meaning. He praises the tune while overlooking the text, which was never written for pluralism. It was written for a social order in which Islam set the terms — and nonbelievers either complied or faced the consequences.

You don’t need to be religious to see the problem. You only need to have ears.

The adhan doesn’t float gently on the breeze. It is projected through megaphones with the explicit purpose of commanding attention. It is designed to override the soundscape of daily life. Barking dog? Buried. Garbage truck? Drowned. Your alarm clock? Irrelevant. The Islamic call to prayer cuts through everything because that is precisely what it was built to do.

And that is where the first collision occurs. In America, no foreign religion should be granted the right to reorder everyone’s routine. Christianity, which most readers know intimately, offers a useful contrast. Church bells ring, yes, but briefly and symbolically. They don’t deliver multi-minute recitations meant to summon or correct anyone.

But with fewer bells ringing, other sounds inevitably move in to fill the void. These include ones far louder, far longer, and far less rooted in America’s traditions.

There’s a difference between freedom of religion and freedom to dominate the public square.

In a predominantly Christian society, faith is personal, chosen, and interior. Prayer happens inside churches, inside homes, inside hearts — not broadcast across rooftops as compulsory ambience. The Western idea of worship is reflective and voluntary. The call to prayer, by contrast, is commanding and public by design.

Sound, as Ted Nugent knows well, is anything but neutral. A community’s soundscape shapes its psychology. People become anxious, irritable, exhausted, and far more prone to accidents when their sleep is disrupted. After all, we prosecute noisy neighbors for far less.

Yet Western elites recoil at the idea that a religious practice might be subject to the same standards as the guy who revs his motorcycle at midnight. If anything, a more intrusive and more extended ritual deserves more examination — not less.

Although I truly dislike what Islam represents, this isn’t about hatred. It is about the delicate, daily compromises a pluralistic nation depends on. When one group insists on broadcasting its obligations to everyone else, the common ground cracks, the social contract comes apart, and people start to feel like strangers on their own streets.

The call to prayer has no place in polite society. There’s a difference between freedom of religion and freedom to dominate the public square. One belongs in America. The other never will.

​Christianity, Christian, Prayer, Ted nugent, Islam, Call to prayer, Islamic call to prayer, Faith 

If you’ll indulge one more cabin story, it’s only because remodeling an unlevel structure may be the clearest metaphor for the challenges caregivers face — and, I suspect, for the condition of America itself.

Out here in rural Montana, you learn quickly that when a project needs doing, you can pay a lot for it, wait a long time, use duct tape, or learn to do it yourself. Usually it’s some combination of the four. And while I’ve adapted to that reality, certain home-improvement tasks still give me the willies — mainly anything with a blade spinning fast enough to launch lumber toward Yellowstone National Park.

There is something life-giving about facing the hard thing in front of us instead of avoiding it.

Who knew you needed a helmet to cut boards?

I’ve been a pianist longer than I’ve been a caregiver, and since my hands pay the bills, I prefer to keep all my fingers intact. Let’s just say that when it comes to carpentry, I can really play the piano.

Recently we removed an old door in our cabin and needed to rebuild the wall. Help was delayed, so I decided to tackle it myself. The wall wasn’t the problem. The miter saw was. When I noticed the blade catching the afternoon light, it looked downright smug.

It knew.

Still I’ve met many builders in our county, and only one is missing a finger. Thankfully none answer to “Lefty.” If they can keep their body parts, maybe I can too. My rule is simple: Measure 17 times, cut once — and do it slowly.

So I got to work. In an old cabin nothing is plumb, so my level and I argued for quite a while. Even so, the studs went in, something close to square took shape, and despite a few caregiving interruptions, the wall was framed by sundown.

I was proud of myself. I took pictures. I bragged a little. Some builders may roll their eyes, but I’d do the same if they bragged about playing “Chopsticks.”

But it wasn’t really the blade. It was the fear behind it — the fear of getting something wrong, of creating a problem I couldn’t undo. And that fear isn’t limited to carpentry. When we let fear or anxiety keep us from picking up the tool and learning, whole parts of our lives remain unfinished.

We live in half-built cabins — studs exposed, projects stalled, confidence untested because we never moved toward the thing that intimidates us.

America was built by people who weren’t afraid to try hard things. They carved farms out of wilderness. Built railroads with crude tools. Raised barns without safety manuals. When something broke, they fixed it; when they didn’t know how, they learned anyway. Imperfectly, but persistently.

That spirit carried us for generations. Today we struggle to find it.

We’ve created a culture that treats effort as optional and discomfort as a crisis. We warn people not to push themselves. We offer labels and excuses instead of encouragement. We outsource everything, including our resilience. Hard things are treated as unsafe instead of character-building.

Many believe our greatest dangers are political, economic, or global. Maybe. But something quieter may be worse: We are losing the courage to try.

I say that as someone who has spent 40 years as a caregiver. Disease, trauma, addiction, aging — none of it yields to effort or skill. Day after day, fighting a battle you cannot win wears down confidence. Caregiving rarely gives you the satisfaction of a finished job or something tangible you can hold in your hands.

RELATED: My crooked house made me rethink what really needs fixing

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But tackling something you can finish, even if it makes the hair on your neck stand up, pushes back against that erosion of self-reliance. There is courage in doing the thing we’d rather avoid. When we take on something small but intimidating, we rediscover a steadiness we thought we’d lost — not bravado, not swagger, just the quiet certainty that we can still learn, grow, and accomplish something in a world that feels increasingly out of control.

And sometimes the payoff is simple. It’s something you can point to. That framed doorway in my cabin isn’t perfect, but it stands as proof that I stepped toward something unfamiliar and did it anyway. In a culture that avoids discomfort, even one small visible victory becomes fuel for courage. It tells you that you can do the next thing too.

As Emerson put it, a person who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. There is something life-giving about facing the hard thing in front of us instead of avoiding it.

That is the spirit America needs again — not bluster or political chest-thumping, but ordinary people choosing to try the hard thing right in front of them.

I will probably always be nervous around saws, but that doorway reminds me that courage often appears in the quiet places where we decide to try.

And there is absolutely no shame in wearing a helmet.

​Opinion & analysis, Homeownership, Ralph waldo emerson, Courage, Virtue, Caregiving, Caregivers, Montana, Life 

Never has it been more obvious that politics are spiritual in nature. The partisan battles over authority, morality, justice, life, and truth can no longer mask the supernatural war raging between good and evil in the unseen realm.

Although the great war has already been won through Christ, the forces of good often lose earthly battles because Christians refuse to enter the fray. Progressives have a zeal and commitment to their doctrine more ferocious than the majority of Christians these days.

We’re “dealing with a rival religion,” says Steve Deace, BlazeTV host of the “Steve Deace Show.”

“If you aren’t as convicted in yours, you cannot defeat [your progressive opponents]. They’ll just keep beating you.”

So what needs to happen in order to flip the script?

To explore this query, Deace spoke with former U.S. senator, author, and devout Christian Jim DeMint.

“The great divide in Washington and across America really comes down to whether or not you believe the Bible is true. Our whole culture, all of Western civilization, is built on Judeo-Christian ideas that come from the Bible,” says DeMint. “Everything from the moral laws that we see in the Old Testament to how families are formed to marriage, concepts of compassion and charity — everything we take for granted as a country is derived from the Bible.”

Twenty-five years ago, both parties acknowledged and respected this reality, he says. But today, that isn’t true. One party has departed so far from any sort of moral standard that it fights for nationwide abortion through all three trimesters, equating the barbaric murder of babies to essential health care.

When these progressive policies are successful, it’s a win for Team Satan, but Christians at large tend to just shrug and hope for better days.

But they need to pick up their sword and fight. “Pastors and Christian leaders and folks who call themselves Christians [need] to step out of the shadows and start to participate more in deciding how we’re governed as a nation,” says DeMint.

DeMint has a brand-new book out that tackles this subject. Titled “What the Bible Really Says: About Creation, End Times, Politics, and You,” it dives into how centuries of theological misinterpretation and church tradition have neutralized the Bible’s explosive political power, leaving Christians defenseless in today’s spiritual war. It also argues that returning to the plain, unfiltered text of Scripture can re-arm believers to fight and win the battles over authority, life, marriage, justice, and truth that now define our culture.

Today’s churches are often too “watered down,” “lukewarm,” and “you-centered” to be effective in the political sphere, Deace adds.

But if Christians got biblically serious, they’d see that Washington’s war is God’s war.

“Republicans have their flaws, and I spent most of my time in the House and the Senate criticizing Republicans for not doing what they said they were going to do, [but] their platform is built on Judeo-Christian concepts. But the Democrat platform is not,” say DeMint.

But while political victories should be important to Christians, they aren’t the end-all, be-all. “We can’t win the battle that way,” says DeMint.

The real battle remains in each individual heart, where people must finally settle the question DeMint keeps asking: Is the Bible actually true — or isn’t it? Because until we bet our lives that every word is God-breathed, we’ll keep losing the culture to a rival religion that is far more convinced of its own lies.

To hear more of Deace and DeMint’s conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Steve deace show, Blazetv, Blaze media, Spiritual warfare, Jim demint, Progressive religion, Christianity, Lukewarm christians