By Bill Leonard
In the last few weeks religion has occupied headlines across the political and theological spectrum, with public attention focused on a variety of issues related to numerous religious groups.
Among the most public perhaps were concerns about Muslims raised by New York Congressman Peter King, who insists that some 80 percent of Islamic mosques in the United States are radicalizing their youth.
King feels compelled to raise these questions in hopes of heading off another 9/11, this one potentially provoked by Muslim Americans. Likewise, he charges that much of the Muslim community in the U.S. remains dangerously hesitant to report potential terrorists in their midst.
King’s initial hearing (others apparently lie ahead) created a firestorm of response from strong affirmation to troubled hesitancy.
The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty joined with representatives of such groups as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the American Baptist Churches USA in challenging King’s action, declaring: “As faith leaders, we are committed to building a future in which extremism is an artifact of the past, and where religious identity is not the cause of hostility but of acceptance. This country’s spiritual, religious and ethnic diversity serves to enrich our public discourse. When our public discourse is enriched, extremism is seldom given quarter.”
During the same week, the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, Justin Rigali, announced the removal of 21 priests from their duties as a result of grand jury actions that identified them with various cases of sexual abuse stretching over many years. The action was compounded by accompanying claims from victims’ rights organizations that the diocese had not sufficiently disciplined the priests or dealt appropriately with the accusations. The Cardinal initially insisted that no priests accused of abuse were still active in his diocese and responded only after the grand jury produced specific names.
About the same time, in an 8-1 decision the Supreme Court ruled that members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church were within their First Amendment rights to protest at the funeral of a specific soldier killed in Iraq. Judges noted that while the church members’ activities were distasteful and compounded the pain for grieving families, their efforts were constitutionally protected. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts stated: “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”
These diverse but interconnected events related to multiple faith communities offer important insights into the American religious landscape in the year 2011.
First, they illustrate how prominent religion remains in the culture, suggesting that while church and state may remain ideally “separate,” they inevitably engage each other at every possible turn.
Second, Rep. King is not the first government official to scapegoat an entire religious group that seemed “alien” or “foreign” to the “American way of life.” In 1890, Wisconsin Gov. William Hoard declared: “We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism…. The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state.”
The “Nativist” movement supported by Gov. Hoard brought charges that Catholics — in Hoard’s view especially German-American Catholics — were agents of a foreign monarch, the Pope, and their faulty citizenship required government investigation.
In 1666, Thomas Goold, Thomas Osborne and other Boston Baptists were imprisoned for “Schmisatticall opposition to the Churches of Christ here settled.” Two years later they and other Baptists were hauled before the court for a public disputation regarding their faith and citizenship.
Historian David Benedict reported that one magistrate made “a long speech” “showing what vile persons the Baptists were and how they acted against the churches and the government here, and stood condemned by the Court.” The Baptists demanded “liberty to speak,” but were denied, since “they stood there as delinquents and ought not to have liberty to speak.”
Americans, at least some among us, then and now appear to grant religious liberty grudgingly. Many Americans belong to “foreign” religions that were once or remain suspect.
Third, religious groups themselves are often defined, indeed tainted, by their own members who act outrageously, claiming or hiding behind the name of God. Truth is, some terrorists have done terrible things in the name of Islam; some Catholic priests have committed unspeakable assaults on children in their care; and some Baptists have carried out misguided actions masquerading as prophetic gospel.
Of course, all Muslims aren’t terrorists, all Catholic priests aren’t threats to children and all Baptists aren’t members of the tiny Westboro Baptist Church, but we are all affected by such actions nonetheless. Religion can destroy as readily as it can heal. If people of faith have a lot to live up to, they often have a lot to live down, even without government intervention.