Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  As Kennedy did his best to keep religion out of the election of 1960, a group of Evangelical Protestants were doing their best to keep the issue on the front burner. In April 1960, the National Association of Evangelicals passed a resolution that stated that “due to the political-religious nature of the Roman Catholic Church we doubt that a Roman Catholic president could or would resist fully the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.”6 Evangelical publications offered the specter of a nation under the thumb of the Church. “A Catholic President: How Free from Church Control?” was the cover story in the May 1960 issue of the NAE’s flagship magazine. A tract published by the organization titled Shall America Bow to the Pope of Rome? included a picture of the US envoy to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, bowing before the pontiff. Wherever Catholics were a majority, these Evangelicals claimed, the church hierarchy put policies in place that marginalized other communities. Crimes of Intolerance: The Slaughter of Protestants in Mexico and the Fate of Protestants in Columbia and The Truth about the Protestant Situation in Spain were two popular tracts along these lines.7 The Catholic hierarchy, the claim went, had similar designs on America. Selective quotes from Catholic leaders were trotted out for proof: a 1948 statement of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that called the separation of church and state a “shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism,” a quote from Pope Leo XIII from 1885 that called for Catholics to “penetrate, wherever possible” into circles of influence in their nations.8

  One of the leading forces among Evangelicals seeking to keep Kennedy from the White House was Billy Graham, the reigning king of the community, perhaps the most influential American Protestant of the twentieth century. Graham carried on a correspondence with Nixon, pleading with him to raise the issue of Kennedy’s Catholicism “at this uncertain hour of history.” He invited Nixon to make a public visit to his home in North Carolina, believing that it would both tip that state in his favor and focus the spotlight on the religion issue. Graham also emphasized that he himself was playing a direct role in influencing the election of 1960. He had encouraged the Southern Baptist denomination to pass a resolution that was effectively a denouncement of Kennedy and an endorsement of Nixon. He had also sent a letter to the 2 million American families on his mailing list encouraging them to “organize their Sunday school classes and churches to get out the vote.”9

  In the summer of 1960, Graham brought a group of American Evangelicals together at a conference in Europe to set a strategy to defeat Kennedy. It was a moment of inspiration for Norman Vincent Peale, one of the nation’s most prominent religious figures and one of Nixon’s former pastors. Peale decided to make Graham’s mission his own, and to continue to galvanize Evangelical forces in America against the Kennedy candidacy. On September 7, 1960, at the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, DC, Peale held a gathering that amounted to a larger, higher-profile follow-up to the Graham meeting. “Our freedom, our religious freedom, is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Peale told the conference of 150 people representing a broad spectrum of American Evangelical Christianity. The conference manifesto stated that the “actions and policies of the Catholic Church have given Protestants legitimate grounds for concern about having a Catholic in the White House.” Each participant received a fact sheet on what made the Catholic Church so dangerous. Among the charges were the following:

  The Roman Catholic church is both a religion and a political force whose doctrine is ultimately incompatible with the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy;

  Wherever Catholicism is the majority religion, it dominates other groups and faiths, effectively making them second class citizens;

  The Catholic Church demands total obedience and gives explicit guidance on a comprehensive range of belief and behavior;

  If conflicts arise between the conscience of the individual believer and the doctrine of the church, these are always resolved in favor of the Church. Individuals who persist in their own independent thought are excommunicated;

  The Catholic Church, through both its religious figures and elected officials, has a history of exerting its influence on public policy for its own benefit, including procuring funds for its own schools and hospitals.10

  The Reverend Harold Ockenga, pastor of the Park Street Church, the flagship of New England evangelicalism—located at the corner of Boston Common, where Lyman Beecher had stirred the Protestant masses to violence a century earlier—gave one of the opening keynotes. “If we want to know what will happen if Roman Catholic America ensues, we must understand the official teaching of universal Roman Catholicism,” he declared.11 The purpose of the Catholic hierarchy was to become the state, he continued, to use the instruments of government to convert every soul and to program the thoughts and actions of every citizen. And Catholics, he warned, were closer to their goals than most Americans thought. Their numbers were growing in America at an alarming rate. Once they achieved some combination of critical mass plus political influence, well, the best Protestants could hope for was to be tolerated. The election of John F. Kennedy could well be the final straw.

  What of the fact that Kennedy had repeated over and over again that he believed unambiguously in the separation of church and state, that the church would neither influence nor speak for him on matters of public policy, that his record of fourteen years in Congress betrayed no evidence of preferential treatment for the views of the Catholic Church? According to Ockenga, none of this mattered. The Catholics had a doctrine called mental reservation that allowed them to lie in order to advance their faith.12

  Ironically, Protestant politicians were all over the map on the various issues that American Evangelicals put before Kennedy. For much of the presidential campaign of 1960, Nixon refused to say whether he would appoint an ambassador to the Vatican. Moreover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—all Protestants—each did appoint such an envoy. And on the central issue, whether religion should influence politics in America, the Evangelicals organizing against Kennedy were far guiltier than the Catholic candidate. They were, with seemingly no sense of irony, using the power and platform provided by their religious offices to force a presidential candidate to say he would grant no power to religion.13

  “John is such a poor Catholic,” his wife, Jacqueline, once remarked about him. His aide and confidante Theodore Sorensen claims that he never remembers Kennedy talking about religion in any depth. But for the anti-Catholic forces of the mid-twentieth century, the question wasn’t about how Catholic Kennedy was; it was about the thirst for dominance of the Catholic hierarchy, the inherent totalitarian code of the tradition itself.

  Replace “Catholic” with “Muslim” and “church hierarchy” with “sharia law” and, fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. Like the anti-Catholic movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the central argument of the forces of Islamophobia is that the very nature of Islam is in conflict with American values, especially freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. The problem is not with individual believers; the problem is with the belief system, which requires its adherents to adopt its policy of domination. Their secret weapons are overpopulation, conversion, and acquiring the mechanisms of political influence. The best evidence for this is in how that religion is wrecking other countries—Latin American nations, in the case of Catholicism; the Middle East, in the case of Islam. And the danger is not only in developing nations; ample evidence exists of the domination of the Catholic hierarchy or sharia law in Europe. When speaking of such dangers, above all else, be dire. Highlight America’s imminent decline. Underscore the need to wake up and recognize that the barbarians are at the gate: “Our American culture is at stake,” Peale said of the prospect of a Catholic in the White House in 1960. “I won’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.”14 “Nobody in our secular elites is prepared to stand up and defend Western civilization against the routine steady erosion,” Gingrich told his audience
at the American Enterprise Institute.15 In today’s parlance, Kennedy was part of a stealth jihad meant to replace the American Constitution with sharia law launch a dawa offensive on the American population, and he was practicing taqiyya in order to get elected.

  At one of the early debates between the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, the question was raised about whether any of these candidates would allow Muslims to serve in their administrations. Not without an explicit declaration of their loyalty to the United States, said Herman Cain, a declaration that he would not require of either Jews or Christians. This was Gingrich’s moment, and he seized it. He told the story of a Pakistani-American Muslim who built a car bomb that luckily failed to go off in Times Square (without, incidentally, mentioning the Muslim street vendor who notified the police about the suspicious vehicle) and continued, “Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I’m in favor of saying to people, if you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period.”16

  As he said it, I had two thoughts. The first was whether Gingrich the historian, the recently converted Catholic, the man who had helped Muslims find a place to pray in the Capitol, who had gone to meetings about sharia financing with the goal of wooing Muslims into the Republican fold, who had written eloquently on America’s first principle of religious tolerance, was giving any thought to what a past Catholic candidate for president had experienced on account of his faith. The second was which group did Gingrich seek to appeal to with that statement? That’s when it occurred to me: the very community that opposed Kennedy’s candidacy based on his Catholicism was attracted to Gingrich’s presidential aspirations because of the Speaker’s recent conversion. A mere fifty years separated the two campaigns. It was one of the most remarkable shifts in the religious and political landscapes in American history, a shift that Newt Gingrich was going to take full advantage of.

  “I began to realize that what happens with Evangelical Protestants and with Catholics is this strong sense of . . . assault . . . they are under siege from radical Islamicists,” Gingrich told the Los Angeles Times.17 After the spectacular fall, Gingrich’s subsequent political rise can be attributed in no small part to the popularity he has built with Evangelicals. Gingrich has somehow managed to make his personal sins work for him politically with this group, tearfully asking forgiveness of God, country, and Evangelical kingmakers like James Dobson. Many Evangelicals have been moved by these acts of contrition, and impressed by Gingrich’s conversion to their policy issues. In 2009, Gingrich institutionalized this support, launching Renewing American Leadership, an organization whose mission is “to preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage by defending and promoting the four pillars of American civilization: faith, family, freedom, and free enterprise.” The board and staff involve highly influential Evangelicals like David Barton, a phony historian who likes to portray America’s founders as the fathers of a Christian nation, and Jim Garlow, who spearheaded the campaign to prevent same-sex marriage in California. Gingrich’s central role in the Cordoba House affair and the anti-sharia movement have proved quite useful to Renewing American Leadership, helping the organization raise millions of dollars and gather names and addresses that can easily be repurposed as a list of supporters for a presidential campaign.18

  Gingrich seems to enjoy the company of Evangelicals in Iowa best of all. In 2010 and 2011, he visited the state often and typically had meetings with pastors on his schedule. “I think he’s just excellent,” gushed Pastor Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville. So did the majority leader of Iowa’s state House of Representatives—whose company all the prospective 2012 GOP candidates appeared to enjoy—and who gave his endorsement to Gingrich.19 Gingrich played a key role in the unprecedented campaign to recall three Iowa state Supreme Court justices who approved same-sex marriage, offering “strategic advice” and arranging for about $200,000 in seed money. Iowa is, of course, the state that holds the first caucus in the presidential race, giving it outsize political influence. Sixty percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers describe themselves as Evangelicals, and a large number seem quite taken by Gingrich’s faith, even though it is not the same as theirs.

  The Catholic Church is not Gingrich’s first religion, and Callista is not his first wife. The former Speaker is on his third in both departments. Raised a Lutheran, he left that church to become a Southern Baptist (an Evangelical denomination) when he lived in the South, and he left the Southern Baptist tradition for his current Catholic faith around the time he started making noises about running for president. But if anything raises the eyebrows of Evangelicals about Gingrich’s candidacy, it is his number of marriages, not his number of conversions. Richard Land, for one, remarked that Gingrich has “one ex-spouse too many for most Evangelicals.”20 Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, frequently represents Evangelicals in the media. That he appears more concerned about Gingrich leaving his second wife than his second church (the one he served as a senior officer, no less) is further evidence of just how much religious attitudes and interfaith relations have changed in the past half-century in America.

  Sharia translates as “the path to a watering place.” In a religious context, the term refers to various abstract values like the importance of life, religion, and education as well as more practical matters dealing with prayer times and funeral rites. In other words, it’s the ways of believing, behaving, and belonging that makes Muslims Muslim. The key sources of sharia are the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Throughout the course of Islamic history, various Muslim scholars applied these sources to real-life situations in different ways, a process of judicial interpretation known as fiqh. Plainly speaking, there is not a single sharia, just as there is not a single way of being Muslim. In Muslim-speak, there are a variety of schools of fiqh. But in any version of sharia, criminal codes—meaning punishment for destructive or deviant acts—are a very small part. When the term sharia comes up in an American court, it almost always has to do with personal matters like marriage and divorce, probating wills, and resolving money disputes—the very same matters other religious communities expect American courts to consider.21

  This is one of the reasons many American Jews have found themselves alarmed by the anti-sharia movement. In fact, a number of Jewish groups have sent letters to state legislatures considering sharia bans, urging them to reject such laws. As an article on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s website by Ron Kampeas stated, “If the state legislative initiatives targeting sharia are successful, they would gut a central tenet of American Jewish religious communal life: The ability under US law to resolve differences according to halacha, or Jewish religious law.”22

  The evidence that Muslims are poised to impose a draconian version of sharia in America boils down to a single court case in New Jersey. A Muslim woman sought a restraining order against her husband, stating that he was forcing her to have sex with him. The man claimed that sharia law allowed him to do so. The trial judge agreed with the man and did not issue the restraining order. The appellate court overturned the trial judge’s ruling, stating that US criminal law trumped any other body of law. Abed Awad, a New Jersey–based attorney and an expert on sharia, wrote, “The appellate ruling is consistent with Islamic law, which prohibits spousal abuse, including nonconsensual sexual relations.”23

  While the material used to justify the sharia scare is thin, there are instances when other religious laws have been cited to cover up clear and heinous crimes. Joanne Mueller was surprised when her seven-year-old seemed upset that Father John Geoghan was coming over to visit. He was a popular, playful priest, and she was a single mother of four boys, over-joyed that a man wearing the safety of a collar would come to take her kids out for ice cream or to play in the park. Father Geoghan even did bedtimes, and he didn’t mind giving the boys baths. “He was our friend,” she said. Something strange was happening with her son
that evening, though. He didn’t seem happy about the news that Geoghan was on his way. He was silent for a while, and then he started to sob. “What is going on?” Mueller wondered, thoroughly confused. Finally, her son said, still wailing, that he didn’t want Father “touching my wee-wee.” Mueller simply stared at her seven-year-old in disbelief. She summoned her youngest son, five years old, and told him that Geoghan was coming over. He broke down into tears as well. She called for her two older boys. When she mentioned the priest’s name, they stood next to their two sobbing brothers, stiff and speechless, and then they started to cry as well. Then the oldest took the responsibility to speak the words of their shame aloud: “Father said we couldn’t talk about it and tell you, never to tell you, because it was a confessional.”24