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