Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (30 page)

While the new Constitution would meet the need for an effective response to actual threats from Muslims in North Africa, Federalists found themselves fending off anxieties about the charter’s potential to create a threat from imaginary Muslims at home. Anti-Federalists worried that the proposed document opened the door to future Muslim
citizens—and possibly even presidents. To accept the religious pluralism the Constitution envisioned, including the abolition of a religious test for federal office, was to risk not merely the exclusively Protestant character of the nation but even the possibility, however remote, that non-Protestants, once granted full political rights, might eventually exercise power over an American Protestant majority. It was precisely the sort of oppression that some Protestants had come to America to escape. And so Anti-Federalists instructed their delegates to state ratifying conventions to insist on an explicit guarantee of their own rights of conscience, which was absent from the document being debated.

Nowhere was the debate over religion and political rights more heated, or its record better preserved in detail, than at the Hillsborough, North Carolina, state convention. There, as the next chapter explores, the chief Federalist defenders of the Constitution became by extension the first and most ardent supporters of future Muslim citizens and their political equality.

Muslim Rights and the Ratification of the Constitution, 1788

I
N A LETTER
to Thomas Jefferson in Paris in October 1788, James Madison in New York warned that “one of the objections in New England was that the Constitution by prohibiting religious tests opened a door for Jews Turks and infidels.”
¹
Madison clearly thought such fears of non-Protestant officeholders were absurd, but they elicited no comment from Jefferson, who in 1776 had recorded in his notes Locke’s support for the religious and civil rights of Muslims, along with Jews and pagans.
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He could not have forgotten that in 1779 opposition to his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom “dominated” the
Virginia Gazette
and had elicited anxiety about the same issue Madison was inclined to dismiss.
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By affirming “that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities,”
⁴
Jefferson’s bill had indeed opened a door, at least theoretically, to a prospect of political equality many found unthinkable.

One of Jefferson’s Virginia critics at the time, writing under the pseudonym a “Social Christian,” admonished him about the need for laws to support a purely Protestant Christian America. He distinguished between toleration of non-Christians (freedom from persecution, not religious freedom), which he could endorse, and political equality, which he could not: “if there be a few who are Jews, Mahomedans, Atheists or Deists among us, though I would not wish to torture or persecute them on account of their opinions, yet to exclude such from our publick offices, is prudent and just.”
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To do so was necessary in order “to restrain them from publishing their singular opinions to the disturbance of society.”
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The access of non-Protestants to positions of government authority might one day result in their control over the Protestant majority, of which even the remotest possibility had to be avoided, argued Jefferson’s opponents, at all costs. Accordingly, in November a petition was sent to the legislature from Amherst County, Virginia, demanding that no Catholic, “Jew, Turk, or Infidel” should “be allowed to hold a civil or military position” in the state.
⁷

While Jefferson remained in Paris, attempting to forge treaties with North African and European powers, Madison helped draft and promote the new Constitution at home, where the ultimate fear of a Muslim becoming president entered national debates about the necessity of a religious test, nowhere more vociferously than in
New England. In Massachusetts, an Anti-Federalist from Worcester in the western part of the Commonwealth wrote in February 1788, expressing fear that without a bill of rights, freedom of conscience would be imperiled. But the anonymous author only worried about religious freedom for Christians. Without a religious test in the Constitution, he wrote, “There is a door opened for Jews, Turks, and Heathens to enter into publick office, and be seated at the head of the government of the United States.”
⁸
Meanwhile, in
Freeman’s Oracle
that same month, an Anti-Federalist tract addressed to “the Inhabitants of New Hampshire” warned that “according to this” Constitution “we may have a Papist, a Mohomatan, a Deist, yea an Atheist at the helm of the Government.”
⁹

The same anxiety would echo throughout the New Hampshire ratification debate, during which at least one delegate to the state convention actually raised the specter of a Muslim president.
¹⁰
In a private letter to a friend in Massachusetts,
John Sullivan of Durham, a supporter of the Constitution and former Revolutionary War general, reported the incident among various “specimens of New Hampshire ingenuity.”
¹¹
As president of the convention, Sullivan was in a position to observe all the arguments over the abolition of religious tests, which ran almost an entire day as Anti-Federalists struggled to limit government offices to Protestants.
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Unfortunately, these exchanges were not preserved in their entirety.
¹³
Sullivan did, however, record with some irony the insistence of a fellow delegate that presidential candidates at least “ought to be compelled to submit” to the test, for otherwise “a Turk, a Jew, a Rom[an] Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universal[ist], may be President of the United States.”
¹⁴

Universalism’s doctrine of universal salvation was considered heretical by most Protestant denominations and as dangerous as Deism.
¹⁵
Coupling the Universalist with “a Turk,” or Muslim, represented the height of Protestant invective, the ultimate sectarian slur, though the threat of a Universalist or Jewish or Catholic president was obviously considered marginally more imminent than that of a Muslim. Still, the fear was that members of all these religions were threats to American Protestant exclusivity in government control.
¹⁶

Could a Muslim in fact become president of the United States? Only if at least nine of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution, including Article VI, section 3, which declared:

To swear to support the Constitution, a civic oath rather than a religious test of the sort then operative in all the states, seemed the unraveling of the Protestant order to some.
¹⁷
And although it was conceived mainly to eradicate “Protestant
sectarian warfare”—the fear that one group would dominate and exclude others—unintended consequences
nevertheless abounded in some delegates’ imaginations.
¹⁸
Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists would refer to Muslims respectively to assuage fears or to stoke them about the fate of Protestant dominance.

It was quite inadvertently, then, that the abolition of a religious test heralded a new vision, one of a future that included Muslim citizens, as well as citizenship for minorities of Jews and Catholics already known to exist in the country. Previous studies of those groups in the early Republic have treated the presence of Muslims alongside them in this political rhetoric as accidental, derogatory, or unimportant. But the presence of all three in the North Carolina debate challenging religious tests defies prevailing scholarly assumptions that Muslims were deemed “totally behind the horizon of civility”
¹⁹
and “outlandish,”
²⁰
and thus mentioned with other non-Protestants merely for rhetorical effect. In fact they played a more substantial role, particularly in North Carolina, where the record of debate concerning the question of a religious test is best preserved and most detailed.

On July 30, 1788, for the first time, Federalist delegates to
North Carolina’s ratification debate at Hillsborough defended a new American political ideal: the possibility that in the United States a Jew or a Catholic—or a Muslim—might become president. Analysis of their debate complicates our conceptions of Muslims in this context by introducing a momentous if momentary exception to this pivotal era’s otherwise prevalent negative references to Muslims and Islam.

When the Constitution was first drafted in 1787 and presented for ratification, almost every one of the thirteen states promoted Christianity, and more specifically Protestantism, as the sole religion acceptable for political officeholders. Most state officials submitted to a religious test or otherwise affirmed their belief in God, along with particular aspects of some Protestant creed. And so to propose removing such a bar to non-Protestants was, at the federal level, truly new, provocative, and revolutionary, a precedent that would encourage a religiously plural future for the United States.
²¹

Most states codified the superiority of Christianity, and particularly Protestantism. New York was the sole exception, with the thirty-eighth article of its 1777 state constitution extending religious liberty,
implicitly at least, to its small Jewish community—and to whatever other non-Christians might one day appear, theoretically including Muslims:

Despite this promulgation of universal freedom of conscience, Catholics were excluded from holding state office under a clause that judged their religious beliefs “inconsistent with the peace and safety” of the state.
²³
This exclusion, based on the prevailing fear that their political allegiance was to a foreign power, the pope, was the only one worth specifying, it seems, the prospects for non-Christians being so remote.

In
Pennsylvania,
Benjamin Franklin had opposed religious tests for state officeholders, but to no avail.
²⁴
The 1776 state constitution extended religious freedom to all, affirming that “all men have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences and understanding.” But language that defended anyone “who acknowledges the being of a God” from being “deprived or abridged of any civil rights as a citizen, on account of his religious sentiments or peculiar mode of religious worship,” was qualified by an oath for officeholders, inserted over Franklin’s objections:
²⁵