Muslim in Congress? Framers of Constitution would approve

By Sam Fleischacker

It is interesting to consider what the founders of our Constitution might have said about the election of Keith Ellison to Congress, the first Muslim to hold such a position.

Ellison, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was elected in November to fill the vacant seat for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

One might imagine that talk-show radio host Dennis Prager and outspoken Rep. Virgil Goode (R., Va.), who have been waxing hysterical about the prospect of Muslims in high office, might have the framers of our Constitution on their side. Or one might imagine that the framers never considered that possibility, never spoke one way or the other about Muslim officeholders.

The truth is more interesting. It turns out that our constitutional founders explicitly considered the possibility of Muslim officeholders - and explicitly welcomed it.

Some early opponents of the Constitution attacked it for Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for national office, precisely on the ground that it made room for Muslims to become lawmakers. Defenders of the Constitution, however, argued that this was a good thing, not something to be feared.

The issue came up most directly in the North Carolina ratifying convention of 1788. One speaker asked whether the absence of religious tests might allow “Pagans, Deists, and Mahometans [to] come among us.” To which James Iredell, a fervent supporter of the Constitution and later a Supreme Court justice, replied: “How is it possible to exclude any set of men” from office, “without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?”

Elsewhere, a newspaper article complained that the Constitution could lead to “Mahometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity” becoming our lawmakers - along with “Quakers, who… make the blacks saucy,” and Jews, who might order Americans to rebuild Jerusalem. (One anti-constitutional pamphleteer raised the specter of the pope becoming president.)

The Constitution’s defenders, including a number of Christian ministers, responded to such attacks by stressing how important it is that religion not derive its strength from temporal authority, as well as how dangerous it is for politics to call in the aid of religion. James Madison insisted that any law favoring one religious group over others “degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority.”

Wise words - words that, disturbingly, we seem still to need to hear today. Rep. Goode spouts religious and cultural bigotry from which our founders would have recoiled. In a recent letter, he wrote: “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” Not only are these sentiments irrelevant - since Ellison is not an immigrant but was born here - but they also go against the openness and pluralism that are the true traditional values and beliefs of America.

Prager, an observant Jew, bizarrely claims that “Judeo-Christian values” are the best protection against another Holocaust - forgetting, apparently, that the last Holocaust happened in a Christian country, and that Christians in Serbia, Rwanda, and Russia have been responsible for a number of genocidal killings since that time.

The real protection this country offers against genocide - and it is a great one - is its staunch refusal to ground politics on religion, its long history of opening political office to all and of not using law to favor some religions over others. This has not been a simple history, and there has been a process of increasing secularization, and increasing openness to non-Christians, in the development of our politics and law. But that process protects the rights of all of us, and the ability of all of us to practice our different religions with dignity.

With that in mind, the election of a Muslim to the U.S. Congress should be welcomed as a wonderful occasion. Like Prager, I am an observant Jew, but unlike him, I am delighted, and I hope Ellison will indeed be the first of many. One of the possibilities held out by our Constitution at the time it was ratified has now been more fully realized. The shame is just that it has taken so long for us to get to that point.

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Sam Fleischacker is a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Article originally published January 1, 2007 in the Philadelphia Enquirer