Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (48 page)

Jefferson recorded that Leland came to the White House one last time on the fourth of January, when the president paid the preacher two hundred dollars, because he could not ethically accept the cheese as a personal gift.
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Jefferson and others would go on to consume the mammoth cheese, “with the occasional pruning of rotten bits, for at least two years.”
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The idea of a “wall of separation between Church & State” would, of course, last even longer, though Jefferson and Leland would continue to differ on the reason for its necessity.

Leland had spared no praise of Jefferson at the time of his election: “This exertion of the American genius, has brought forth the
Man of the People
, the Defender of the rights of man and the rights of conscience, to fill the chair of state; who, in his inaugural speech, cries out, ‘America, be free, be happy, guard your own rights, and leave them not to the disposition of officers.’ ”
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More than a decade later, Leland was still singing Jefferson’s praises. On March 4, 1813, he addressed the Sons of Liberty in Cheshire, reminding them that “you assemble to commemorate the inauguration of the man who saved his country from the curse of despotism,” the man who embodied “a mound of our liberties, who snatched the constitution from the talons of its enemies, and turned the government into its natural channel.”
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Leland’s sentiments about his hero had not changed in the interim, but his expectations that Jefferson might deliver the Baptists of Massachusetts from their legal oppression had dimmed. Already by 1811, the evangelical activist had decided that to effect change he would have to seek office himself.

John Leland won his seat in the Massachusetts legislature in 1811 as Baptists had new cause to fear that they were to be taxed to support Congregational ministers. The reason for alarm was an 1810 ruling by the state’s chief justice declaring that “unincorporated societies,” like the Baptists, were not led by legitimate religious authorities.
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The ruling promised an end to the certificate dispensation: Baptist taxes would automatically be applied to the support of the established Congregational faith. Once in office, Leland took swift action to ensure this didn’t
happen. Within just a few months, he won passage of the “Religious Freedom Act” of June 1811, which allowed all nonincorporated Protestant denominations an exemption from paying taxes to the Congregationalists.
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For the Baptists, one perennial frustration was ended.

Leland’s speech to the legislature in 1811 boldly took aim at the state constitution specifically and government interference in matters of religion generally:

Leland not only echoed founding Baptist values in support of the separation of government from matters of faith, but also tapped arguments Madison had made in his 1785
Memorial
against Virginia’s public support of the Anglican faith. His setting the legislature’s majority on a par with the pope was a calculated insult to those Congregational members who had traditionally regarded him as the Antichrist. But Leland’s complaint was not merely sectarian; he rejected outright government support for any clerics, down to those serving his fellow representatives:

It was a view some Baptists, including Isaac Backus, would not have agreed with. He and many others believed in a “sweet harmony” between religion and government, equating Protestant Christianity with beneficent rule.
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Departing from that standard and even Jefferson’s, Leland demanded a more absolute principle of separation, a wall impermeable to money as to everything else.
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In this he was nearer to Locke and Madison, believing it was more beneficial for Christianity to take no support of any kind. Leland was as ever concerned foremost with the threat to religion from government, but the reverse danger was not lost on him: “Let Christianity stand upon its own basis, it is the greatest blessing that ever was among men; but incorporate it into the civil code and it becomes the mother of cruelties.”
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Where beleaguered religious minorities typically pressed only for their own political equality and protection, Leland always pled for universal rights, envisioning a religiously plural society with full membership for all, including Muslims and Jews—a goal he had come to understand could be achieved only legislatively:

Leland would propose that amendment, one separating religion from government and establishing political equality for all believers as a right and not a favor. But he would leave office without having won its passage. Reflecting on his two-year term, he remained convinced that matters of religion should be exempt from state interference, even his: “my conscience was not long enough for a legislator. I gained no evidence that the legislature of Massachusetts had inspiration sufficient to legislate about souls, conscience, or eternity.”
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But Leland was far from defeated. In 1820, he proposed more changes
to the state constitution, again imagining an ideal society of religiously diverse equals:

Again, too, we see his attachment to Locke’s notion of government as compact, and to a civic arrangement that “promotes the man of talents and integrity, without inquiring after his religion.” It had been a persuasive sentiment when expressed earlier by James Iredell and Samuel Johnston at North Carolina’s ratification convention. Jefferson too had won many in Virgina to the idea that religion should cause no civil disabilities for any free white male citizen. Much to Leland’s consternation, his home state was a harder case:

In a later declaration against the “the kings-evil,” a ruler’s malevolence, or that of “priestcraft” (by which he means clerical interference in government), Leland makes a hypothetical case for his ideal plural society, which he believed already existed “in many parts of the world.” He asks his fellow Christians to imagine themselves subject to a government whose official creed they despised:

His ultimate plea, however, comes by way of admonishing Christians to conform their legal treatment of other faiths to the Golden Rule, which he believed condemned political injustice based on religious difference. In so doing he advances a defense of Deists, whom most ardent Christians of whatever denomination condemned as infidels:

It was a remarkable gesture: a man who had devoted his life to preaching the divinity of Jesus and the existence of the Trinity now defending the consciences of those who denied both, not on account of having been born in a foreign culture but as a refusal of the faith of their fathers. Deists were far more numerous than any other non-Christian group, including imaginary Muslims, and as such were by far the greatest threat to Christian society in the eyes of most American Protestants. The defense of their rights attests to the purity of Leland’s convictions, a purity limited only by lack of understanding.

Like his hero, Leland frequently misunderstood or condemned Islamic beliefs while championing equal rights for Muslims. We have seen how,
in his tract on the rights of conscience, he criticizes the Prophet by contrast with a noncoercive, nonpolitical Jesus, accusing the former of spreading faith by force, a common Christian claim.
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Leland also wrongly asserts a Muslim belief in the divinity of Muhammad. Unlike Jefferson, Leland never read the Qur’an. We cannot be sure of his sources, but he presents as “an article” of the holy book the strange notion “that the world stands upon a great ox—the ox stands upon a great stone—the stone rests upon the shoulders of an angel—and the angel stands upon God knows what.”
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We do know he shared Jefferson’s reductive view of the sacred text as merely a book of law.
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Still, Leland correctly understood that all the verses of the Qur’an “by the Turks, have been considered as coming from God.”
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He also knew that the Islamic calendar began with “the flight of Mahomet,” his
hijra
or emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622, marking the first Islamic year. And he rightly notes elsewhere that Muslims are not allowed to drink wine, though he attributes only to the Jews a prohibition against pork.
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As we have seen, in 1801, following the example of Thomas Helwys, his seventeenth-century coreligionist, Leland made the case for Muslims to be granted religious liberty based on the Golden Rule, which he expansively reformulated: “Do unto
all men
as you would they should do unto you.” Indeed, he insisted they do so or “give up the name Christians.” In return, he wished the same treatment be extended to Christians in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa: