Never mind Muslims ... Can a Catholic be president?
By Dan Hannan • 9/28/15 12:01 AM
Can a Roman Catholic be president of the United States? Silly question, right? Sixty-five years have passed since John F. Kennedy went from Mass at Holy Trinity in Georgetown to take his inauguration oath on the Fitzgerald family Bible; and, while there are plenty of grounds on which to criticize that priapic shyster, his faith isn't one of them.
Go back to the early days of the republic, though, and you find a very different attitude. John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers, who went on to become the first U.S. chief justice, argued that his home state of New York should extend full toleration to every sect "except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of this state."
What made John Jay so skeptical? The same thing that makes many Americans skeptical about this hypothetical Muslim presidential candidate about which we keep reading so much. Jay had no problem with Catholic beliefs. He didn't complain about priestly celibacy or transubstantiation. What worried him, rather, was the idea that Catholics wouldn't be properly patriotic; that they might, in the last analysis, have divided loyalties.
The founders would have been shocked to see a pope addressing Congress — a pope, moreover, who openly urged American Catholics to support certain policies on climate change and migration.
"Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?" asked John Adams. On this point, at least, his successor as president, Thomas Jefferson, agreed: "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
In much the same way, the mild-mannered Ben Carson's objections to our imaginary Muslim candidate are political rather than theological. He's not fussed about the zakat or the hajj. But he wonders whether this candidate — the first candidate I know of who exists only in the subjunctive — would uphold American values.
His concerns, like Jay's, are a product of their era. When the United States was born, the English-speaking peoples had been in a state of intermittent war with the world's preponderant Catholic powers, France and Spain, for two centuries. Then as now, foreign policy had domestic consequences, and Catholics were seen — quite unfairly — as potential fifth columnists.
The founders, like today's politicians, also fretted about terrorism. Bonfires used to be lit across New England each November to mark the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot, the 1605 scheme to blow up the House of Commons and install a Catholic monarch. It was George Washington, hoping to win Canada for the Revolution, who ordered an end to the popular practice of burning the pope in effigy each anniversary. As the historian J.C.D. Clarke observes, "The virulence and power of popular American anti-Catholicism is the suppressed theme of colonial history."
Of course, the objections of Jay and Adams and Jefferson were refuted in practice when American Catholics enlisted in huge numbers in various wars. Immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy and, later, Latin America turned out not to be in the least servile or dictatorial. America's air worked the same magic on them as on everyone else.
Will Muslim-Americans be similarly assimilated? I'm optimistic. There are plenty of passages in the Old and New Testaments that can be read as incompatible with giving your first loyalty to a secular republic, but Jewish and Christian Americans, for the most part, have learned how to compartmentalize their beliefs.
It's a two-way process, of course. Muslim-Americans, like other religious newcomers before them, should loudly advertise their patriotism. All minorities must learn to respond to even the most hurtful accusations patiently and courteously. Sulkily demanding victim status is rarely popular.
But, in the end, I see no reason why our putative Muslim president shouldn't sincerely swear to uphold the Constitution — perhaps on Thomas Jefferson's own copy of the Quran, now in the Library of Congress. He might go on, in his inauguration speech, to point out that his was the only major religion founded by a businessman — a businessman who, in his last sermon, stressed the sanctity of property. Sanctity of property: Now there's as neat a summary of American values as you'll find.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/never-mind-muslims-...-can-a-catholic-be-president/article/2572743?custom_click=rss
