Peter Gottschalk, a religion professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, says he was “raised with the national creed ... that the United States is synonymous with religious freedom...” However, Jews, Quakers, Native Americans, Irish Catholics and Muslims might disagree, and justifiably so.
The abiding U.S. self-image of peaceful, multi-religious pluralism is a distortion of fact, as Gottschalk shows in “American Heretics: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the History of Religious Intolerance” (242 pages; Palgrave Macmillan). Americans historically have been hostile toward religious minorities in this country.
In New England in 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston Common as a heretic. What was her “crime?” She embraced a Quaker theology that was different from that of the Puritan majority – the same Puritans who sailed across the tempestuous Atlantic in search of religious freedom.
Puritans and Quakers both represented dissent- ing movements of “a larger stream of protest” collectively referred to as the Protestant Reformation, the author relates. Throughout the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church dominated Europe’s religious and social life, “while playing no small part in political and economic matters, too.” Beginning in 1517, though, European Christians rebelled against the papacy.
In 1620 the Mayflower transported the first English Puritans and Separatists, known collectively as Pilgrims, from Plymouth, England, to Massachusetts. But just as the Catholic Church accused its dissenters of blasphemy and heresy, so did the Puritans treat anyone who disagreed with their beliefs.
In Mary Dyer’s lifetime, Quakers endured worse persecution at the hands of Puritans than Anglicans in England meted out to Puritans, Gottschalk claims. Puritan punishments for what they considered to be serious offenses – which included declaring a minister’s sermon uninspiring (read: boring) or walking in a garden on Sunday – entailed public ridicule in stocks, cutting off ears, slitting noses, boring holes in a person’s tongue, whipping, and hanging. Quakers eschewed all clergy and the rituals of baptism and communion, for example.
As Gottschalk points out, white Americans perceived Native Americans to be “primitive” “heathens” and “savages” – Puritans were convinced that Native Americans were devil worshippers – which justified “the mass appropriation of Indian lands, the corralling of Indians onto reservations, their coercion into Christianity, and the annihilation of those who resisted.” The Irish are a well-established ethnic group in America today, but it was not always so.
The Irish flocked to America in the 1600s and 1700s. Another wave arrived in the 1800s to work on construction projects such as the Erie Canal, and later to escape the Irish Potato Famine.
Many of those immigrants were Catholics, even though there were “plenty” of Irish Protestants and non-Irish Catholics, Gottschalk writes. The Catholics were “associated with hierarchy, monarchy, and state religion – a matter of potentially grave threat” to Americans.
“Echoing the slurs of the English press,” newspapers and popular opinion in many American cities portrayed the Irish as “dirty, lazy, superstitious, and driven to drink.”
Irish Americans were deemed suspect for generations. John F. Kennedy, when he ran for president in 1960, felt compelled to assure Americans of his “freedom from papal influence,” Gottschalk notes. Jews have been persecuted throughout history, and have come in for their share of abuse in the U.S. Auto manufacturer Henry Ford was a virulent anti-Semite, and the Ku Klux Klan, once a powerful political force in the U.S., was an equal opportunity bigot, condemning blacks, Jews and Catholics alike.
Religions “are seldom solely responsible for conflict,” the author writes. Instead, religion “often serves as the flashpoint for conflicts involving many other ingredients.” Islam is a perfect illustration.
Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. did not originate with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Before that was the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo, the first attack on the World Trade Center, the 1991 Gulf War, and a myriad of Arab-Israeli conflicts.
As a general rule, Americans assume all Arabs are Muslim (even though many Arabs are Christians) and that all Muslims are Arabs (only 20% are, the author writes).
In August 2012, teenagers attacked a Haywood, Calif., mosque, and vandals destroyed a sign outside a Rhode Island mosque, burned a mosque in Joplin, Mo., and shot paintballs at an Oklahoma City mosque.
In October 2012, an intoxicated man pummeled a taxi driver who turned out to be Sikh, not Muslim.
Similarly, in December 2012, a woman confessed to shoving a New York commuter into the path of an oncoming train. Apparently, she was attempting to exact revenge belatedly for 9/11 – but her victim was a Hindu.
Several polls “find most Muslim Americans well in line with Christian American perspectives,” Gottschalk reports. And notwithstanding fears of Muslim terrorism, “the greatest threat of terror- ism,” he contends, “arises from right-wing militia and hate groups who target government officials” – such as Timothy McVeigh and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City – “law enforcement, and racial, ethnic and religious minorities.”