This article responds to the papers by O’Donovan, Rizvi and Heck by identifying four convergent themes emerging from their accounts of Christian and Islamic political thought: the denial of salvific efficacy to the state; the claim that political authority is legitimated and limited by law; the attribution of a normative purpose to the state; and the ascription of a positive role for the people in the legitimation and scrutiny of political authority. The article poses the question whether this amounts to (...) something that might be termed a shared ‘monotheistic democratic constitutionalism’. (shrink)