Watch: How people respond to Bible quotes when told they’re from the Quran

People make a lot of assumptions about Islam compared with Christianity and Judaism — particularly that it’s more inherently violent. But do people really know what they’re talking about, or are they simplifying complicated belief systems to make a political point?

The team at Dit Is Normaal decided to put this to the test in the Netherlands, where they’re based. So they disguised a Bible as a Quran, read verses from the Bible (such as “You will have to cut off her hand”), and asked people for their thoughts. People by and large reacted with a lot of “othering” of Muslims — making remarks like, “If you’ve been raised with this book and these kinds of thoughts, it’s going to influence the way you think.”

Then they found out the verses came from the Bible, not the Quran. They were shocked. “It’s all just prejudice, really. I always try not to be prejudiced myself, but apparently I already am,” one person said. Another person added, “Of course I’ve heard Bible stories when I was young, and I went to a Christian school, but I really had no idea this was in there.”

The general lesson here isn’t that all religions are bad and everyone should feel bad. These types of demonstrations, instead, show one aspect of religion that’s largely accepted for Christianity and Judaism but not Islam in the West: You get from these faiths what you put into them.

If you read the Bible front and back, you will read about several ideas that frankly don’t mesh with modern Western standards. You could do the same with the Quran or the Torah. But you can also find overwhelming messages of peace and love from all three faiths’ scriptures.

The great majority of people who practice these religions focus on the broader or specific lessons of peace in their faiths. People in the West even seem to take this for granted for Christianity and Judaism. But as Dit Is Normaal’s video shows, there’s still a lot of similar understanding to build toward Islam.