(RNS) — When many Americans hear the word “Shariah,” they do not think of a neighbor, a family or a shared life. They think of a threat. They imagine a foreign legal code waiting to overtake American courts and communities. That fear has been repeated so often in political discourse that it now passes for common sense.

I, Jon Fogel, am a pastor of Hope Covenant Church in Orland Park, Illinois, and the founder of Whole Parent Academy, an online parenting resource. I see Shariah, or Islamic religious law, differently. My next-door neighbors are a devout American Muslim family from Jordan. Their children and mine have grown up side by side, spending long hours together every week, sharing meals, rides, homework and the ordinary details of life.

Over the years, that shared life has quietly changed me. I will tell you that I trust these Muslim neighbors more than almost any Christian I know. I have watched them raise their children with tenderness and discipline, show up when someone is sick and open their home with generosity. Their friendship has become, in my mind, one of the clearest pictures of what it means to love one’s neighbor.

That story matters because, as a pastor, I am not suspending my Christian convictions in order to say it. I am speaking from my Christian convictions. I am also careful not to flatten real differences between Christianity and Islam. But precisely because Christian faith is meant to produce love of neighbor, honesty and mercy, it should lead Christians away from fear-based caricatures of Muslims and toward deeper moral seriousness.

This is where my co-author’s recent reflections on Shariah are so important.

I, Salam Al-Marayati, am co-founder and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. In American politics, Shariah is often treated as though it were a secret plan to replace the Constitution, overturn civil law and impose a rigid religious order on an unwilling public. That narrative persists even though American Muslims make up only about 1% of the U.S. population and have no realistic capacity to impose anything on the other 99%.

The hysteria survives not because it is true, but because it is useful. It stokes fear, mobilizes voters and distracts from the far more common reality that religious influence in American politics is usually asserted by those who most loudly warn about “Shariah law.”

To move past that fear, it helps to say plainly what Shariah is not. It is not a single, uniform legal code governing all Muslim-majority societies. Legal systems across the Muslim world differ dramatically, shaped by national histories, constitutions, political systems and human choices. Nor is Shariah identical to every legal ruling ever associated with Islam. Those rulings belong to jurisprudence, a long history of human interpretation, debate and disagreement.

At its core, Shariah is better understood as a moral framework. Islamic scholars have long described its objectives in terms of protecting and advancing human rights such as life, faith, expression, family and property. Those aims should not sound foreign to Americans. They resonate with values already familiar in constitutional life and with moral concerns that Christians, Jews and many others would recognize as part of a just society.

The Quran does not lay out a rigid political blueprint. Instead, it offers moral principles such as justice, consultation and accountability while recognizing that communities may live under different legal arrangements. For American Muslims, that means loyalty to the U.S. Constitution is not in tension with faith. Upholding rights, honoring the rule of law and protecting the dignity of others are not civic duties set apart from religion. They are expressions of religion.

Still, my (Jon’s) point as a pastor is that few hearts are changed by arguments alone. The people most frightened by the word “Shariah” are often not seeking a careful explanation of Islamic jurisprudence. They are responding to a story they have been told, about who belongs and who does not. And stories are not undone by logic alone. They are undone when people encounter a different story in real life.

That is why the family next door matters so much to me. When I hear warnings about Muslims in American public life, I do not first think of a legal code or a cable-news segment. I think of the family I trust with my children and my house key. I think of kids who have become best friends and of parents who have learned, through proximity and care, how much we share despite theological differences.

This is not an argument for pretending those differences do not exist. They do. Christians and Muslims understand revelation, scripture and salvation in profoundly different ways. Honest interfaith work requires saying so clearly. But it also requires refusing the lie that difference must become fear and that fear must become exclusion.

The most revealing feature of anti-Shariah rhetoric is that it often says more about American politics than about Islam. When candidates, pundits or activists invoke Shariah, they are rarely describing Muslim belief with care. They are signaling that some forms of religious identity belong in public life while others do not. In practice, the phrase becomes a tool for stirring suspicion toward mosques, immigrants, school curricula and Muslim civic participation.

We believe Christians should reject that strategy not only out of solidarity with Muslims, but out of fidelity to the gospel. If Christian faith teaches love of neighbor, concern for the marginalized and truthfulness about those who are different, then caricaturing an entire religious tradition for political gain is a betrayal of Christian ethics.

And Muslims, for our part, should continue to explain Shariah with clarity and patience, not as a slogan but as a lived commitment to justice, mercy and responsibility. Living Islam in America also means being an integral, enriching and engaging element in American pluralism.

(Jon Fogel is a pastor of Hope Covenant Church in Orland Park, Illinois, and the founder of Whole Parent Academy. Salam Al-Marayati is co-founder and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. The opinions expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)