'Muslim President Obama' and the Careful Stand for Religious Freedom

The Washington Post reported today that nearly 1 in 5 Americans believe the president is Muslim. When the president took office, about half those polled believed him to be a Christian; now that figure is down to 34%. Post writers Jon Cohen and Michael Shear suggest that these results, drawn by the Pew Research Center, show there could be serious political danger for the White House as the Lower Manhattan mosque debate continues.

News of this confused religious perception is released on the heels of President Obama’s two-stepping comment about the proposed Islamic Center a few blocks from Ground Zero. Early last weekend, President Obama greeted guests for an iftar dinner at the White House. There, our first president to have spent part of his childhood in a Muslim country spoke eloquently about tolerance, and said America’s real fight is maintaining our core democratic values. He got specific, saying the controversy surrounding the building of the Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan is misplaced because our religious freedoms ensure that any person can worship or build a place of worship as they choose. He spoke like a constitutional scholar should.

Then he walked it back.

Rather than digging in and saying freedom is freedom, even when it’s unpopular, the president explained that he wasn’t really talking about the religious center per se. By Saturday, Obama said, "I was not commenting, and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding." So, people have the right, but he doesn’t want to get into whether that right should be exercised—at least this was his opinion as of Saturday. Yesterday, the president asserted in a two word response concerning his original comments, that he had 'no regrets.'

What makes the last few days’ news coverage and man-on-the-street commentary so troubling, is the repetition of the mantra, we can’t let them win. They did this. They can’t get away with this—as if they (the terrorists) are those proposing the build. Many challenging the Islamic Center are taking the dark nub that could properly color in a handful of deranged Islamist terrorists and instead wholly painting American Muslims with the same brush. If those slandering don’t like President Obama, he gets smeared with the same paint too, as though being Muslim (which, I feel compelled to mention, he’s not) vilifies.

The Post article maintains that perception of the president’s supposed Muslim belief system has more to do with his increasing unpopularity than theology: “…the shifting attitudes about the president's religious beliefs could also be the result of a public growing less enamored of him and increasingly attracted to labels they perceive as negative.” The number of conservative Republicans saying Obama is Muslim has doubled since last year, among Independents the perception is up 8 points (to 18%). If a person claims Obama is Muslim—or foreign-born—what are they really suggesting?

What I believe is happening here is the same thing that has happened, by my estimation, for as long as human beings could string words together and poke one another with sticks: we hate members of a group, generalize that feeling, and despise the whole.

It’s like railing against the KKK (monsters who any freedom-loving American would oppose), but instead generalizing and protesting the construction of a church, because “Christians”—which includes a few members of the violent, radical extreme—have a heinous history. In the analogy Christian : KKK Militant :: Muslim : Islamist Terrorist, good people dwell in the first term of the analogy, and the militants and terrorists are the disfigurement of pure religion. The latter are the few, the deranged, distorters of their faith. They are also, in both cases, the ugly minority. The extremists are few.

In a CNN interview this week, an exchange between Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core and anchor Don Lemmon got heated. It's a prime example of what happens in this debate when terrorists are confused with the whole of Islam. Patel argued that American freedom means that people cannot be barred from a place due to their race or religion.

Lemon: [interrupting] I understand that, but there's always context, Mr. Patel . . . this is an extraordinary circumstance. You understand that this is very heated. Many people lost their loved ones on 9/11 --

Patel: Including Muslim Americans who lost their loved ones. . . .

Lemon: Consider the context here. That's what I'm talking about.

Patel: I have to tell you that this seems a little like telling black people 50 years ago: you can sit anywhere on the bus you like - just not in the front.

Lemon: I think that's apples and oranges - I don't think that black people were behind a Terrorist plot to kill people and drive planes into a building. That's a completely different circumstance.

Patel: And American Muslims were not behind the terrorist plot either.

(Emphasis added at Salon.com)

I was tucked warmly in my college dorm room on the morning of 9/11. I woke to a phone call and with bleary eyes clicked on the television. The shock I felt as I watched smoke piping from the North Tower melted into a surreal day filled with tears and girls screaming that they wanted to join the army. But I wasn’t near the sites of the attack. I experienced America’s common sense of fear and uncertainty, but not the devastation of the people on the ground or those who lost family members. What I saw was those around me turning dark, mistrusting “towel heads” and, in their distress, learning to hate.

After 9/11, even after President Bush’s pleas to be tolerant of American Muslims, for many, “Muslim” became code for enemy. And that perception led people to all manner of cruelty to their neighbors.

We all remember the personal attacks on Muslims after 9/11, beatings, Sikh’s harassed for wearing turbans. Muslim-owned businesses went empty even in the Midwest, far away from the epicenters of tragedy.

I think, as ever, our first amendment reminds us of who we could be as Americans. The freedoms protected there are also our ideals and describe a tolerant people bound to live together peacefully. It also is a challenge, a model for people gripped together by differences of opinion, who nevertheless, live side by side. They are mature people who may fall short, but strive for truth. It’s the America our families, all our families, came together to make.

I find myself wishing the president actually were Muslim. Rather than tiptoeing and winding back his statements, I wish he had a direct personal stake in keeping his position firm. I wish that “Muslim” had not become a political epithet. And I wish for all these things, not because I’m afraid some group of enemy outsiders will win, but because when fear guides us, we all lose. If this strange season of bigotry is allowed to seep deeper into the American fabric, we all are lost.