Out of Many Faiths

Religious Diversity and the American Promise

Eboo Patel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780691189000
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

1

Religious Diversity and the American Promise

In his book What It Means to Be an American, Michael Walzer observes that political theorists since the time of the Greeks have generally assumed that diversity and democracy do not mix well together. A state works best when it is made up of human beings who view themselves, as a consequence of certain bonds of identity, as a single people. Uniformity of belief was understood as especially important for peaceful participatory societies. Walzer summarizes the view of generations of political theorists thus: “One religious communion, it was argued, made one political community.”¹

A few paragraphs later, he writes, “The great exception to this rule is the United States.”² The American Founders set for themselves the remarkable task of building a religiously diverse democracy, an experiment never before tried at such a scale in human history.

What will it take for the American experiment to thrive in the twenty-first century? That is the question that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has set for itself in launching the Our Compelling Interests series. We find ourselves in the midst of what William H. Frey calls, in an essay written for the first volume in the series, “the diversity explosion … a demographic force that will remake America.”³ Will the United States leverage the current diversity explosion to promote the common good, or will it blow up in our faces in forms such as open prejudice, rampant discrimination, deeper disunity, further inequality, and identity conflict?

This volume focuses on the topic of religion. The growing immigrant and minority populations in the United States bring different colors, languages, foods, and family patterns, as well as varied expressions of faith. Religion gives individuals a powerful sense of purpose, and it also induces guilt that brings them to the edge of despair. It binds what would otherwise be a random collection of people into a caring community while simultaneously providing a sacred justification for painfully excluding others. Religious language has given the United States some of its most enduring symbols (“city on a hill,” “beloved community,” “almost chosen people”), and it is the source of a significant amount of the nation’s social capital and the inspiration behind many of our most vital civic institutions (universities, hospitals, and social service agencies, for example). This is not an unalloyed good. In a diverse society, symbols, networks, and institutions can just as easily be mobilized in the service of violent conflict as inspiring cooperation.

Of all the various forms of diversity that we speak of these days (race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and so on), religious diversity may be the one that the Founders came closest to getting right. These (generally) wealthy, (loosely) Christian, (presumably) straight, (most assuredly) white male slaveholders managed to create a constitutional system that protected freedom of religion, barred the federal government from establishing a single church, prevented religious tests for those running for political office, and penned more than a few poetic lines about building a religiously diverse democracy.

Here, for example, is George Washington responding to the Jewish leader Moses Seixas, who wrote the first president a letter asking about the fate of Jews in the new nation: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”⁴

James Madison believed that allowing religious diversity to flourish was essential to establishing social peace. In the Federalist Papers, he stated, “The degree of security … will depend on the number of interests and sects.”⁵

Benjamin Franklin appeared to take that counsel to heart when he decided to make a financial contribution to every one of the diverse religious communities building a house of worship in Philadelphia. Just in case there were groups that were not represented, Franklin raised money for a hall in Philadelphia that was, in his words, “expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something,”⁶ and he explicitly stated that it would be open to Muslim preachers. The religious leaders of Philadelphia expressed their gratitude to Franklin in a variety of ways, including by fulfilling Franklin’s wish to celebrate July 4 “arm in arm” and also observing his funeral together.

The Founders intended for the ethic of religious pluralism they were nurturing at home to extend to international relations. President John Adams signed a treaty with Tripoli in 1791 that stated, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the countries.”⁷

And they were not the first European settlers on the Eastern Seaboard to express such sentiments. Over a century earlier, a group of citizens in present-day Queens, concerned about the threats that Director General Peter Stuyvesant of what was then New Amsterdam (now New York) was leveling against Quakers, gathered to draft a statement of welcome that became known as the Flushing Remonstrance. They wrote, “The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extend[s] to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sonnes of Adam.… Our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us.”⁸

And Roger Williams, banished from John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony for disagreeing with the Puritan insistence on enforcing religious law with civil authority, had this to say about the prospect of a religiously diverse nation in 1644: “And I aske whether or no such as may hold forth other Worships or Religions, (Jewes, Turkes, or Antichristians) may not be peaceable and quiet Subjects, loving and helpful neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill government? It is cleare they may from all Reason and Experience in many flourishing Cities and Kingdomes of the World, and so offend not against the civill State and Peace; no incurre the punishment of the civill Sword.”⁹

It is this long tradition that Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, recalled during his first inaugural address, standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, looking out toward the Lincoln Memorial:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering a new era of peace.¹⁰

In many ways the United States has lived out this vision. We are the most religiously devout nation in the West, and the most religiously diverse country in the world, at a time of religious tension, conflict, and crisis. How do we affirm and extend the ethic that welcoming religiously diverse people, nurturing positive relations among them, and facilitating their contributions to the nation is part of the definition of America? Responding to that question is the task of this book.

For my approach, I have chosen to foreground the Muslim situation in America, using it as a window through which to examine broader themes about America and religious diversity. At earlier times in American history, Mormons, Catholics, and Jews would have served as useful vehicles to illustrate the challenges of our religiously diverse democracy. Twenty or forty years from now, Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists may be the most relevant community to focus on. At this moment, the controversies swirling around Muslims are clearly the most salient, and they raise the sharpest questions about America’s traditions, values, and identity.

My section is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1, which you are reading now, lays out some of the key themes and tensions regarding American religious diversity. Chapter 2 tells the story of Cordoba House, more commonly known as the Ground Zero Mosque, using it as an illustration of a Muslim group seeking to serve the nation in a very American way, only to be thwarted by a very un-American religious bigotry. Chapter 3 delves into the anti-Muslim atmosphere of the Trump era, highlighting how the combination of Islamophobic rhetoric, discriminatory policies, and tacit support for anti-Muslim groups has raised even higher barriers to the contributions of Muslims to American society and violated the ethic of religious pluralism. Chapter 4 contextualizes the current anti-Muslim atmosphere within the broader arc of American history, underscoring its similarities to anti-Catholic nativist movements of the past and noting that the positive pluralist response to those nativist movements provided the United States with its self-understanding as a “Judeo-Christian” nation. Chapter 5 asks what it means for a religious community to be or become “American” and explores the manner in which American Muslims are going about this process. Chapter 6 presents a case study of a group called the Inner City Muslim Action Network, which exemplifies, in my mind, America, Islam, and American Islam. Chapter 7 is a short postscript.

The story of Keith Ellison serves as a preview for many of the themes I will discuss in my section. In 2006 Ellison, an African American attorney from Minnesota, became the first Muslim elected to Congress. Glenn Beck, the controversial media personality, had Ellison on his show and marked the historic occasion by saying, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”¹¹ Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia objected to Ellison’s choice to use a Qur’an during his private swearing-in ceremony, writing to his constituents that Ellison’s decision was a “wake up” moment for America. The danger was clear: if the nation allowed this to happen, it was a slippery slope to “many more Muslims being elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.” For Goode, the threat was connected to foreigners: “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”¹²

But in the case of Ellison, the description didn’t quite fit. Ellison politely pointed out to his fellow congressman that he was the descendant of slaves and that his ancestors had been in this country since 1742. Given that as many as 25 percent of the human beings ripped off the west coast of Africa and brought as slaves to the United States were Muslim, Ellison may well have been “reverting” to his ancestral religion when he converted to Islam in college. In any case, if legitimacy is bestowed by length of ancestry in the homeland, Ellison’s is impressive.

The episode, and indeed Ellison himself, casts light on several interesting dynamics, many of which I will discuss over the course of my section. The first and most obvious is that the term Muslim is understood to refer to an alien and a threat. In fact, Muslim has become something of a multiple-use slur, meaning that it does not necessarily refer to a belief system or religious community but is frequently invoked to signal disgust for any range of minority identities. Don’t like the Vietnamese immigrants who own the coffee shop next door, the Mexican laborers doing roof work on your apartment building, the black executive? Call them Muslim. One can almost see the lips of certain people who use it, say, in reference to Barack Obama, curling into a sneer.

On a somewhat different note, Ellison’s victory highlighted the internal diversity within the Muslim community in the United States, which is in fact one of its signature qualities. As Su’ad Abdul Khabeer explains in her book Muslim Cool, the standard frame on Muslims in America is the “diaspora narrative in which Muslims emigrated from an ‘Islamic homeland’ to the ‘West.’ ” But while Muslims from at least seventy-seven different countries live in the United States, a 2017 Institute for Social Policy and Understanding report found that approximately half of Muslims were foreign-born and half were native. Moreover, according to the ISPU study, Muslims were the only faith community in the United States with no majority race.¹³

Inevitably, there are tensions between these various communities. Given the volatility of the Muslim world, it stands to reason that diaspora communities carry some vestige of the prejudices, rivalries, and animosities they grew up with, whether it is Salafi versus Sufi, Sunni versus Shia, Pakistani versus Indian, or Asian versus Arab. This is illustrated by the mosques established by first-generation immigrants—this one for Bosnians, that one for Syrians, and so on.

What often draws these various communities together is a shared immigrant identity, but the binding tie of that solidarity often widens the divide between it and another Muslim social experi...