Religious politics

The Meaning of Defeat in the “Ground Zero Mosque” Issue

Although concern over the “Ground Zero Mosque” never made much sense, the lategame opposition appears to have collapsed into the truly absurd. Sarah Palin, and a few other Republicans, see the Cordoba House – a community center open to all, built with the explicit intention of bridging interfaith divides  — as the moral equivalent of burning Korans. It’s worth mentioning this brings all of them in line with the would-be book burner himself. Donald Trump thinks it would be significantly less offensive if moved only three blocks north. We’ve never gotten an adequate answer to how far the “mosque exclusion zone” should extend around the sites of national tragedies… tragedies that affected American Muslims too… but Trump’s chosen line of demarcation ought to prove that this debate is no longer about “offense,” if it ever even was. It’s about putting American Muslims in their place, on the periphery of American society. If the site were to move, no matter how far, we would ratify this sickening turn of events.

In the hands of our demagogues, the “mosque” issue has become the wedge by which the thin veneer of interfaith respect can be peeled back, and the hopes of the hateful energized for an important election season. We now owe it to ourselves to ensure that coexistence is forced upon us, not for the benefit of downtown Muslims (although that’s nice too), but to prove to the world, and ourselves, that we are not ruled by our baser elements. I remain convinced that, once the building is actually built, this will fade away in a matter of days. Whether or not that result obtains, we no longer risk validating hate. We must insist on a peaceful future. Nine years ago, and every day since, some of our countrymen died for something. Let them have died for that.

Update: Peacekeepers are already getting hurt over this absurd nonissue.

Update:  “Ground Zero” is now all of Manhattan west of Broadway and south of Park Place. There are about six halal carts in that vicinity.

Rights and Discretion

Obama’s remarks on the “Ground Zero Mosque” lack, for once, his usual clarity. He’s come down quite strongly on the point that Muslims have a right to build where they choose, but less so on whether they should use that right. The distinction is one between the right to an act, and the discretion which one should employ in its exercise. (RedState actually hits on this, but Erickson’s bullet-pointed, talk-show style writing deprives the point of its eloquence, while his confusion about the scope of the rights discussed deprives it of its meaning.) For my part, to be clear, Muslims have the right to build where they want, and the reasonable exercise of discretion does not suggest otherwise.

There is no principled argument that a religion does not have the right to build a place of worship wheresoever it pleases, unless barred by a law of general application. It’s rare that the phrase “un-American” can be appropriately used, but those who suggest otherwise are precisely that. Thankfully, they’re few, but vocal.

The discretionary argument is harder to make, and I’m not sure if our side has been able to make it in a satisfying manner, yet. Surely it’s true that ordinary Muslims can’t be tarred with the crimes of a violent minority, just as Fred Phelps doesn’t speak for Christianity. But the anti-”mosque” group doesn’t have to make that argument to make their case. To sustain the charge that building the “mosque” is insensitive, they only have to prove that a non-trivial amount of society will draw the connection, whether or not it’s erroneous to do so. How do you answer that?

As stated, I don’t think we have yet. I’ll take three shots at it.

First, societal decisions can’t be held hostage to a misguided minority. Rules of polite society don’t, or shouldn’t, vest a heckler’s veto in the first party to make a plausible case for “offense.” This is a principle to which conservatives normally subscribe, but I guess “political correctness” is okay, so long as it confers rather than restricts a right to take a shot at unpopular minorities.

Second, leadership is found in defeating, not succumbing to, our baser instincts. This is a teachable moment that carries no small importance to our relationship with the East, if not diplomatically, then culturally. Clashes of civilizations become self-fulfilling prophecies, left untended. I keep going back to Foreign Affairs‘ brilliant verse review of Huntington’s book:

Politicians prone to pick what’s overripe or rotten
May resurrect a culture that is gone but not forgotten,
Building on the current state of cultural confusion
To craft a cult of closure or a culture of exclusion.
We publish at our peril and we magnify the dangers
By lending credibility to cultural estrangers. [. . . .]
History’s indispensable to shape our understanding,
But it needs to be there at the takeoff, not the landing.
To find our voice and tools of choice in shaping human futures,
We need to nurse that vision not with scalpels, but with sutures.
Huntington as scientist may well deduce his stances,
But Huntington as moralist might just reduce our chances.

Finally — and this is a point friend-of-the-site Mike makes — if we agree that discretion requires Imam Rauf, and Financial District Muslims, not to exercise their right to religious freedom, the requisite discretion swallows the right. Religious freedom doesn’t exist for the easy cases. It exists for the hard ones. That’s tough, but also the way the system was designed. Being an American is hard. It’s supposed to be hard to be the good guy. This country was built for men of moral courage, by men of moral courage.

“No Special Rights for Special Classes”?

A curious new conservative organization, “Stop the Islamization of America” (SIOA), demonstrates one of the more clever anti-equality tropes we regularly see from the far-right. Move past the classy, blood-spattered logo, and look to the mission statement:

SIOA is a human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.

The first clause should be understood to omit a qualifier — “for Christians” — but the second seems baffling. Who, in their view, is receiving “special rights” that they ought not? Presumably Muslims? We see this with gay rights, too, where moves towards marriage, and employee non-discrimination, are read to confer “special” rights, that further stratify society, rather than erase inequalities. Why?

This follows because the far-right operates under a distinct theory about what “rights” we are due. American history, in general, reveals a progression of rights, such that the original compact, conferring set rights on set groups only, was flawed in its application, but perfect in its stated goal of conferring all rights that were due. To vindicate that vision over time, as society changes, we must continue to confer new rights as they are adjudged to flow from identical principles.

Naturally, the right doesn’t see it that way. Under the alternate view, rights aren’t iterations of larger principles, but entitlements that exist in isolation, and admit of no abstraction. Any expansion of rights from the way they existed at the founding, then, is a gift of “special” rights — not “special” as in, as distinct from the rest of the population, but “special” as in “new,” and therefore non-deserved. Putting gays on an equal plane with the rest of the population is definitionally “special,” because only recently have we begun to view sexuality as something immutable, and blameless, even if it just equalizes those groups who should be equal. Characterizing that grant as “special” leverages its novelty to suggest its illegitimacy.

Applying this principle to Muslims is strange, though. At the founding, Muslims did acquire the “special” right to religious freedom, contemporaneously with disfavored Protestant sects, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, etcetera. To view it otherwise, you have to completely disregard the clear statements of numerous founding fathers, and especially Thomas Jefferson. I guess that’s not new, though.

The Freedom to Speak Implies a Duty of Self-Control

Query whether the anti-mosque sect’s decision to deploy ads like these across town:

Draws into question their main concern with its construction — that it betrays an insensitivity to the 9/11 families. I wonder how those same families feel, seeing the manner of their loved ones’ death splattered across MTA-controlled buses? Surely Mike Huckabee is right, that the best argument against the Muslim community center is that polite society places supervening limits on acts that, while legal, are just rude:

Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgement to not build it?

I don’t think it applies in this case. But why doesn’t the same principle militate against this display which, unlike the community center, is designed to offend? And why can’t the far-right seem to express a political point without deploying images of death, dismemberment, and pain?

Two other local notes: first, the building, at 51 Park Place, will not have a star and crescent on it. Plans have been released and contain no such indication. Second, the forced perspective in the ad makes 51 Park look imposing. It’s not. It’s a dumpy little thirteen-story building in desperate need of renovation, in a run-down part of the Financial District that is, nonetheless, full of massive skyscrapers. My apartment building is maybe ten minutes away, off Wall Street, and at 40ish stories, it’s in the mid-range. Similarly, taller buildings block the view from 51 Park to the future site of the trade towers. There is no line of sight, and literally no way to comprehend the two buildings in the same gaze. Third, again, the site is two blocks south of a thriving Muslim congregation, forced to use the street for prayer, because the indoor space is too small. Locals are only offended if they haven’t been paying attention.

Violence, Appropriation, and the Cordoba Initiative

RedState uses some surprisingly big words to come to a theory of why the “9/11 Mosque” is wrong. Says RedState, it is wrong for “the site of an infamous slaughter [to be] appropriated by promoters of the group that perpetrated that slaughter.”

This is a clever (and maybe even correct) rule, but does not compel the desired outcome, because neither the Cordoba Initiative, nor Islam, is a “promoter of the group that perpetrated the slaughter.”

But RedState’s rule is useful. Let’s take their examples, glossing over some weird assumptions in them…

Ask yourself whether any of the following would be morally acceptable, if not simply rejected by an outraged world:

A League of the South monument in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

A Turkish-culture office at Deir ez-Zor.

A Shinto shrine in Nanjing, China.

A Serbian Orthodox Church on the fields outside Srebrenica.

Or even, for that matter, a Catholic convent outside Auschwitz.

…and extrapolate. What about a Confederate flag, over the capital of an American state?

Freedom is Merely Privilege Extended, Unless Enjoyed by One & All

Riding the crest of a new tide of Islamophobia, NRO’s The Corner and Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor, Ron Ramsey, have settled on the theory that Islam isn’t a religion — it’s a cult, or a way of life, or some other construct of lesser dignity, therefore not entitled to First Amendment protection. This is a cutesy way of translating subjective disapproval and hatred into an objective-sounding argument.

I need hardly add, too, that it doesn’t hold together, legally: the First Amendment definition of “religion” is almost intolerably broad (Scientology qualifies. Ugh.). The Supreme Court’s first succinct statement of religious freedom in America defined the concept’s reach quite broadly, as reaching all matters “of opinion”:

[T]o suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.

Reynolds v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145, 163 (1878) (quoting early, pre-independence Virginia lawmakers); see also id. at 164 (summarizing) (“Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”).

By trying to erode the definition of religious freedom to exclude disfavored sects on that basis alone, the new right is attempting something truly unprecedented: the rolling-back of a concept that is definitional to the American experience, and our shared history. We might term this as something broader: the law should vest no individual with an advantage, or privilege, merely due to the fortune of his birth. There is no greater distinction between republicanism and pre-Enlightenment theocracy than the application of this principle to religious liberty. How strange to see that line blurred.

A Trenchant Tract to Counteract a Clear Exaggeration

With apologies to Fred Tipson.

The National Review displays a worrying bit of candor in its latest discussion of the “Ground Zero Mosque.” It’s not about location, it’s not about 9/11, and it’s not about national honor. It’s about Islam:

The Ground Zero mosque project is not about religious tolerance. We permit thousands of mosques in our country, and Islam is not a religion. Islam is an ideology that has some spiritual elements, but strives for authoritarian control of every aspect of human life — social, political, and economic. The Ground Zero mosque project is a stealth step in the ” Grand Jihad,” the term used by the Muslim Brotherhood and its confederates for what they describe as a “civilizational” battle to destroy the U.S. and the West from within, by sabotage.

The choice of the word “permit” speaks volumes, for how thoroughly it misunderstands the basic concept of “religious liberty.” Medieval Islam, under the Caliphate, “permitted” hundreds of Christian temples and Jewish synagogues within the dar al-Islam, so long as non-Muslims (dhimmi) paid the religious tax (the jizra). Similarly, fundamentalist ideologues like The Corner would “permit” Muslims to live and worship freely, so long as they keep to themselves, and avoid any interaction with the community that surrounds them. That’s not freedom, and that’s not tolerance. The point of a free country like ours is that the minority doesn’t have to ask the majority’s permission before worshiping as they see fit.

As to the rest, we should decline the invitation — also offered by Gingrich — to treat isolated offenses, perpetrated in the name of Islam, as a causus belli justifying some new crusade against the entire religion. Surely Osama bin Laden agrees with his Christian fundamentalist counterparts that America and Islam are locked in existential conflict, to be resolved only by the utter annihilation of one or both. But we as a country needn’t engage in their shared delusion, and shouldn’t, at the risk of legitimizing him.

Curious, too, to hear The Corner complaining about a religion that “strives for authoritarian control over every aspect of human life,” when some of its authors seem to understand America only as an outgrowth of, and a vehicle for Christianity.

Shar’ia or Liberal Activism: Pick a Side, We’re at War!

“Liberal activist judges,” the common trope goes, want to expand the Constitution to protect everyone. Even the gays! And from there, there’s no stopping them: once homosexuality is legal, polyamy and bestiality will be too. Just terrible. All because liberals have no respect for the narrow values protected by the Constitution.

Or is it, because liberals hate America so much, they would, instead, implement Shar’ia law, which would require gay men and women to die? These seem to be contradictory, but not to identified Oklahoma state senators.

The notion that Shar’ia law is coming to America has always been founded on paranoia, and nothing else. It’s never happened in a Western nation; where it has, it’s been a result of courts (briefly) accepting binding arbitrations from religious courts, before realizing exactly what that rule imports, and frantically overturning the relevant statute. To my knowledge, no judgment has actually become final based on Shar’ia law, and none ever will in America, especially because of the conservative movement’s erstwhile foe, the First Amendment. I understand that the contrary position is a useful windmill for the far-right to tilt against, but that’s all it is.

History, Symbols, & Faith

Seventeen hundred years ago, Constantius II, leader of the newly-Christian Roman Empire, removed from the Senate Curia an altar to the Goddess Victory. Spoils of an earlier war, it had inhabited the House since the last days of the Republic. Rome’s polytheistic elements associated the altar with the Empire’s quick rise — nevermind its pending fall — and, though unsuccessfully, fought its removal bitterly.

Set aside the faiths of the parties to the dispute — there’s something particularly noxious about pulling a piece of antiquity from a place of reverence. Like covering a partially nude statue, it’s a denial of history, and kind of pointless, too. Through the passage of time, art acquires meaning independent of its original nature — by the time it was removed, the Altar of Victory wasn’t a pagan icon. It was a Roman icon.

Accordingly, even if Kennedy writes the opinion too broadly (as he often does), I find it hard to worry too much about Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472 (Apr. 28, 2010) (pdf), decided yesterday. Separating the case from the procedural morass that forms the real substance of the dispute — and recognizing that this is not, in fact, a final decision on the merits — Salazar is “about,” politically, a cross, privately built and maintained, and situated on federal land, to honor soldiers who perished in World War I. As noted, the real issue in the case is a complicated question of procedure, but the Court’s resolution of it leaves the cross intact, while the contrary conclusion would’ve pulled the cross down, as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

In deciding the procedural question, Kennedy makes almost passing mention to how he’d resolve the Establishment Clause question, were it squarely before him, of whether a private monument, in the form of a cross, placed on federal land, ought to violate the Establishment Clause. He focuses on the monument’s antiquity:

Time also has played its role. The cross had stood on Sunrise Rock for nearly seven decades before the statute was enacted. By then, the cross and the cause it commemorated had become entwined in the public consciousness.

It’s foolish to say that such monuments ever truly lose their religious context. A cross is a cross. But it’s also foolish to equate this case with that of a hypothetical monument, built yesterday, amidst a background suggesting it was built to convey a message of exclusionary religious endorsement. Such facts are nowhere indicated here, and if they were seventy years ago, they’ve long since lost their sting.

Time does, indeed, play its role, by changing the posture of any controversy. Building a monument is an affirmative act; maintaining it, in this case, is a passive one, and one taken as much in defense of history, as in defense of any particular faith. Why tear it down? Because people in the past used to be Christian, and used to have the government’s ear? They were, and they did, but these aren’t facts we have to run from. And if we do, are we really rectifying an offense, or perpetrating our own?

What Conservatives Really Think of the Founders

Last week saw a brief debate about simplifying history for classroom consumption — “the Civil War was about slavery”; “Rome fell in 476 C.E.”; “the Dark Ages were dark”; “Columbus discovered the New World,” etc. — but there is a simplification that trims nuance to facilitate understanding for elementary students, while inviting further inquiry, and a simplification that elides significant facts to effect a materially different story.

Apparently, contemporaneously with us, Texas was having its own debate, which, to my dismay, resulted in a paradigmatic example of the noxious type of revisionism. There the school board, packed with paleo-conservatives who lost their elections for just that but seem determined to make the most of their lame duck status, made the following changes to the state’s social studies curriculum:

(•) The board rejected a proposed standard requiring students to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” That means the board opposes teaching students about the most fundamental constitutional protection for religious freedom in America.

(•) Even as board members continued to demand that students learn about “American exceptionalism,” the board stripped Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. In Jefferson’s place, the board’s religious conservatives succeeded in inserting Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. They also removed the reference to “Enlightenment ideas” in the standard, requiring that students should simply learn about the influence of the “writings” of various thinkers (including Calvin and Aquinas).

These changes, among other shockers omitted from this post because I just can’t spare the outrage, amount to an utter rejection of one of the basic definitions of who were are as a people — we are free, not just from foreign tyrants and government overreach, but from the requirement that we think or worship a certain way. A candid look at the history of the founding generation reveals several inconvenient truths for modern fundamentalist Christians — among them, the fact that several presidents of that era, beginning with the third, considered public prayer too much of an establishment of religion to risk in the nascent republic:

Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect [N.B. omitted from final draft. - Ed.].

And that several of the Constitution’s framers, most notably Jefferson and Franklin, were Enlightenment men through and through, who regarded the supernatural component of religion as utterly secondary to, or even detrimental to, its moral power. Wrote Jefferson:

[T]he greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man [. . . .] The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, [FN1] invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted man kind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the historians of his life.

[FN1:] e.g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, re generation, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c. T. J.

Ouch. Search through the rest of his letters for the name “Jesus” for some more zingers. Jefferson has some especially choice words for John Calvin. Interesting, then, which one Texas school children will hear the most about.

It’s wrong to say that America was built exclusively by deists and atheists, but wronger still to teach that America was built to be a Christian Nation as modern culture warriors mean the term, complete with public prayer, and invocation of the deity to justify prejudice against fellow citizens. We may fairly conclude that America was built to be a nation where Christian Morality would be felt, but not heard as such; but to support or counter that argument, or even recognize this country’s place in world history, students need a fair understanding of the Enlightenment, and an awareness of the voices of all of the founding generation, not just those whose lives, or cherrypicked versions thereof, best support Phyllis Schlafly’s latest book.

The Christian right is happy to embrace “American exceptionalism” — but only so far as it jives with their latent theocratic impulse. And they’ll happily defend us all against “brainwashing” by public officials, but only when the speaker isn’t, ah, “like” them.