American Bigots

"Muslims don’t belong in American society," Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, posted on X on Monday. "Pluralism is a lie."

By Tuesday afternoon, 14.3 million people had viewed Ogles's post and more than 47,000 had clicked "like" — and the number was still climbing. America has always had its share of bigots. Demonizing religious minorities is a tradition as old as the republic, and politicians were exploiting it to win followers long before social media existed.

Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel Jews from New Amsterdam in 1654, branding them a "deceitful race" of "hateful enemies." Colonial Massachusetts savagely persecuted Quakers, four of whom were hanged on Boston Common. On the eve of the American Revolution, Baptists in Virginia were jailed and beaten for preaching without a license.

So pervasive was hostility toward Catholics in the 19th century that the Know-Nothing Party, explicitly anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, became one of the most powerful political forces in America. Mormons were driven at gunpoint from state to state, their prophet murdered by a mob. During the 1940s, violent mobs repeatedly targeted Jehovah's Witnesses, whose faith prohibited them from saluting the flag.

In every generation, some Americans have been convinced that some religious minority in their midst posed an intolerable threat to everything decent and dear. Ogles is just another in a long line of haters eager to go viral by whipping up hostility against a disfavored faith.

But while the first sentence of Ogles's post is vile, it is the second that reveals the depths of his malignant worldview.

For Ogles isn't merely maligning Muslims. He is repudiating the foundational idea of American nationhood. E Pluribus Unum — Latin for "Out of many, one" — is the original motto of the United States. It has appeared on the country's seal since 1776, and is engraved on all US coins.

The United States was not built as a homeland for any single tribe, creed, or ethnic stock. It was built on the radical proposition that people of every background and faith could become, and remain, fully American. There have always been boors and demagogues to claim that some minorities are so alien, or their beliefs so malignant, that they can never become true Americans. But there have also always been other Americans to prove them wrong.

Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan was one such American. He was 14 when the Twin Towers fell. The horror of that day made him resolve to help defeat the Islamist fanatics who had not only attacked his country but disgraced the religion he cherished. Khan enlisted in the Army the day he graduated from high school and was deployed to Iraq in July 2006. He was killed in Baqubah 13 months later. Khan was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, and he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, his headstone marked not with a Christian cross or a Star of David but with the crescent of Islam.

Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan

Someone ought to ask Ogles whether Kareem Khan "belonged" in American society. Come to think of it, a good person to pose that question to might be Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, about whom I have written in the past. Jasser is a devout Sunni Muslim, a retired US Navy commander, and an Arizona physician.

After 9/11, he founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, dedicated to fighting the Islamist ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a mortal threat to his country. He is currently running for Congress as a Republican.

Khan and Jasser are not outliers. Years of survey data confirm that American Muslims have followed the same melting-pot path as the Catholics, Jews, and Mormons who were once denounced as unassimilable. "Muslim Americans express a persistent streak of optimism and positive feelings," the Pew Research Center reported in 2017. "Overwhelmingly, they say they are proud to be Americans." Cato Institute scholar David Bier, commenting on Ogles's post, noted that American Muslims "are the most socially liberal and religiously tolerant in the world and becoming more so with each passing year."

Pluralism is no lie. It is what makes America worth loving, and even dying for.

Far from finding America's civic values indigestible, most Muslims who become US citizens have embraced those values with the fervor of people who know only too well how unbearable it is to live without them. Jasser's own parents fled a Syrian dictatorship; his family came here because America was the place where faith and freedom could flourish together.

During the debate on independence in 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia declared that the promise of America had no religious barrier, and would extend to "the Mahomitan" no less than to adherents of any other creed. George Washington wrote to assure religious minorities that the blessings of America were meant for them, too. They understood that pluralism is no lie. It is what makes America worth loving, and even dying for.

This op-ed originally appeared in The Boston Globe