Following up (sort of) on Lincoln’s post about the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero, check out Bruce Feiler’s commentary in today’s Huffington Post: “Obama a Muslim! Lincoln a Catholic! FDR a Jew! Why Americans Don’t Like Their President’s God.” Coming on the heels of a report from the Pew Forum that 1 in 5 Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, Feiler’s article points out that campaigns of religious intolerance have targeted U.S. presidents since the nation’s founding.
Here’s a taste:
Americans taking out their discrimination toward minority religions on the president of the United States is as American as apple pie; the custom has been going on as long as there has been a presidency. George Washington was the subject of widespread grumbling that he was a more loyal Mason than he was a Christian.
The entire debate about the “Ground Zero mosque” and the even-wider campaign against Islam in general that’s been waged across the United States this summer misses a larger point: These kinds of campaigns have been waged in the United States since our founding. . . .
But as reliably as Americans have adopted these views, they’ve also moved past them. In every case of religious discrimination in the United States, whether it was Methodists in the eighteenth century, Catholics in the nineteenth century, or Jews in the twentieth century, the once reviled and ostracized “outsider” religion in America eventually makes it into the inner circle.
And odds are the pattern will repeat itself with Muslims in the twenty-first century.
I find Feiler’s argument to be rather compelling, and his historical contextualization helpful. Thoughts and/or responses?
To read the entire article, click here.
HT: John Fea
What I find most fascinating is that 43% of respondents said they didn’t know what Obama’s religion was, up from 34% in 2009, the largest percentage change on that poll question. Perhaps this number is a vague popular identification with the possibility that one’s religion may be different from the institutional church to which one claims to belong.
@John: Interesting observation, though I would assume it has more to do with Obama’s lack of overtly religious “behavior.” As a recent Washington Post article observed, Obama is rather good at “keeping public expression of religion to a minimum.” Perhaps the number suggests that Americans are more interested in how a person acts than in what a person says/professes. Certainly Bush was good at publicly professing his faith; perhaps Americans are now more interested in publicly acting out faith professions.
Here’s a link to that WP article, by the way:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/19/AR2010081906659.html?hpid=topnews
I suspect that it is no accident that the recent increase in the number of Americans who believe that Obama is Muslim has been matched by a increase in the number of Americans who disapprove of Obama’s leadership. Since – for a large segment of Americans – Islam has become a term to describe a dangerous other, it should not be surprising that as Obama becomes less popular more people will associate him with other things that they fear.