Works
Bawer's works have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, The Nation, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The American Spectator and The Hudson Review.
In A Place at the Table, Bawer argues for what he considers a centrist and mainstream political philosophy at odds with the gay left. In Stealing Jesus, Bawer levels sharp criticisms at evangelical, Pentecostal, and other strains of modern Christianity, including premillennialism and evangelical apologism for capitalism. In While Europe Slept, Bawer writes that Europe's politically correct culture defends and protects the Islamic fundamentalism that is preying upon its liberal social systems. Bawer argues that Islamists use welfare and religious grants to fund extremist mosques and support imams with violent pasts. Once established in Western European nations, Bawer maintains, the Islamists avoid integration and answer only to sharia law, while avoiding the legal systems of their host nations, allowing abuse of women and gays, as well as Jews and other non-Muslims. In his conclusion, Bawer states that rising birthrates among Muslims and their "refusal" to integrate will allow them to dominate European society within 30 years, and that the only way to avoid such a disaster is to abolish the politically correct and multicultural doctrines that, according to him, are rife within the continent.
While Europe Slept was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006 in the criticism category, which led to controversy. Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the Circle, stated when he presented the list of nominations that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." The President of the Circle, John Freeman, declared: "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's When Europe Slept," and claimed that "its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Bawer declared that comments such as these came as no surprise, as he had been expecting a considerable amount of criticism from "politically correct" officials. He stated that he had never criticized a race, only Islam as a "political ideology." J. Peder Zane, a member on the nomination committee, said that Freeman "was completely unfair to Bruce Bawer" and insulting to the committee.
Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, cited While Europe Slept in his manifesto. Bawer has noted that Breivik's citations were not direct but the result of his wholesale reproduction of Fjordman's essays.
In a review, Stephen Pollard described Bawer's book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009) as an argument that liberal appeasement is paving the way for a replacement of European civilization by Islamic culture.
Since 2009, Bawer has also been an associate of the Oslo-based organisation Human Rights Service.
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