78. Ibid.; Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 144.
79. Greene, Religious Liberty, 287–88. Leland later published several notable political statements attacking the Connecticut state constitution, including “A Blow at the Root, a fashionable Fast-Day Sermon,” and in 1803, “Van Tromp lowering his Peak with a Broadside”; see Leland, Writings, 423, 329.
80. Greene, Religious Liberty, 376; Lambert, Founding Fathers, 285.
81. Leland, “The Yankee Spy,” in Writings, 213.
82. Leland, Writings, 229; Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 357–94.
83. Brooke, Heart of the Commonwealth, 172–88; see also Charles P. Hanson, Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 205–6.
84. Leland, Writings, 220. Article II, in the original, read, “It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession of sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in religious worship”; in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 3:1889.
85. Leland, Writings, 220–21.
86. Ibid., 221, 223. The Declaration of Rights, Article III, read, in part, “Therefore, to promote their happiness, and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily”; in Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 3:1889–90.
87. Leland, Writings, 223–24.
88. Ibid., 224.
89. Ibid., 226.
90. Ibid., 229.
91. Quoted in Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 34. The episode was first described by Butterfield, “Elder John Leland,” 154–56, 214–29. A more up-to-date overview is given by Barbara B. Oberg, ed., “Editorial Note,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 36:246–49; and Daniel L. Dreisbach, “Mr. Jefferson, a Mammoth Cheese, and the ‘Wall of Separation between Church and State’: A Bicentennial Commemoration,” Journal of Church and State 43 (2001): 725–45. Recent historians who offer an account of this event include Steven Waldman, Founding Faith, ix–x, 171–73; Kidd, God of Liberty, 4–5; and Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 474–76.
92. Pasley, “Cheese,” 34, describes the “sensation” in the eighteenth-century newspapers.
93. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 154; Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:406.
94. “From the Committee of Cheshire, Massachusetts,” December 30, 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:249.
95. Pasley, “Cheese,” 47.
96. “From the Committee of Cheshire, Massachusetts,” December 30, 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:249.
97. Pasley, “Cheese,” 45; Dreisbach, “Mr. Jefferson,” 743–45; Oberg, “Editorial Note,” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:246–49.
98. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 214–18.
99. “Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes,” January 1, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:261. Jefferson weighed the cheese at 1,230 pounds. Butterfield, “Leland,” 220, quotes a newspaper source that asserts the weight was 1,238 pounds.
100. Pasley, “Cheese,” 36; Oberg, “Editorial Note,” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:253.
101. “Letter from Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson,” October 7, 1801, in The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Church-State Relations in the American Founding, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 526.
102. Ibid.; Lambert, Founding Fathers, 284–85.
103. Pasley, “Cheese,” 36, emphasizes the day’s importance.
104. “Draft Reply to the Danbury Baptist Association,” on or before December 31, 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:255 n. 2. Italics are mine.
105. “To the Danbury Baptist Association,” January 1, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 36:258.
106. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 226.
107. Ibid., 226–27.
108. Quoted ibid., 226.
109. Quoted ibid., 170–71.
110. Quoted ibid., 226–27.
111. Ibid., 227.
112. Pasley, “Cheese,” 80.
113. Leland, Writings, 255.
114. Ibid., 373.
115. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 212–13.
116. Leland, Writings, 213.
117. Ibid., 353–54.
118. Ibid., 355–56.
119. The phrase and source of contrast is that of William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), 195.
120. McLoughlin distinguishes Leland from Isaac Backus and most other Baptists, stating that Leland, “regarding separation of church and state … like Roger Williams, favored total separation, not sweet harmony [with Christianity] like Backus”; see McLouglin, New England Dissent, 2:292; Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Backus-Leland Tradition,” Foundations 22 (October 1959): 131–52. Philip Hamburger, however, who dubs Leland “Jefferson’s friend and ally,” disagrees directly but incorrectly with McLoughlin on Leland’s church-state separation position. Hamburger asserts, “Even Leland, however, did not clearly wish to separate church and state. Although, in attacking the existing connection between church and state, he used language that may, in retrospect, seem to come close to a demand for separation, he did not unequivocally go so far, and indeed, he typically demanded a religious liberty that remained unmistakably within Baptist and other evangelical dissenting traditions.” See Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), quotations on 165 and 169, respectively. In fact, Leland’s evangelical Baptist vision of an absolute separation of church and state connected him directly to seventeenth-century founding English Baptist precedents, such as those professed by Thomas Helwys. Leland’s church-state stance, while not representative of the majority of his coreligionists, did represent an important historical current in Baptist history. As Richard Curry Huff demonstrates, in challenging Hamburger’s position, Leland ultimately chose a “Church-State position that exceeds that of Thomas Jefferson’s, erecting such a high wall of separation that it ignores religion’s and especially Christianity’s vital role in the preservation of America’s liberties.” See Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 5. Huff designates Leland’s position an error. I contend that it was Leland’s absolute separation, following Jefferson, that allowed him to envision a religiously plural and politically equal citizenship for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics as well as all other non-Protestants.
121. Leland, Writings, 356.
122. Ibid., 358.
123. Quoted in Butterfield, “John Leland,” 213 n. 32.
124. Leland, W
ritings, 476.
125. Ibid., 477.
126. Ibid., 490.
127. Ibid. Italics mine.
128. Ibid., 187.
129. Ibid., 498.
130. Ibid., 187.
131. Ibid., 198.
132. Ibid., 295.
133. Ibid., 251.
134. Ibid., 121.
135. Ibid., 310.
136. Ibid., 404.
137. Ibid., 179; on Leland’s views of Catholics, see Hanson, Necessary Virtue, 218.
138. Leland, Writings, 671.
139. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 233.
140. Leland, Writings, 672.
141. Ibid., 691.
142. Ibid., 428.
143. Ibid., 724.
144. Ibid., 459.
145. Ibid., 503.
146. Ibid., 735.
147. Ibid., 96–97.
148. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 182–83.
149. Leland, Writings, 175.
150. Ibid., 118.
151. Ibid., 173.
152. Ibid., 174.
153. Ibid., 612.
154. Ibid.; Boland, “Render unto Caesar,” 148–49. Jefferson spoke about the emancipation of slaves, but feared violence or “convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race”; see Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 238.
155. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 241.
156. Quoted in McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:929. Leland’s position was so extreme that it “bordered upon solipsism,” according to Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 415.
157. Quoted in McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:929.
158. “In American religion, Leland, not Jefferson, represented the wave of the future,” argues Thomas S. Kidd, but he does not recognize Leland’s consistent insistence on exploding forever a Christian state, political equality for non-Christians, and religious pluralism in this prediction; see Kidd, God of Liberty, 208.
AFTERWORD: WHY CAN’T A MUSLIM BE PRESIDENT? EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEALS OF THE MUSLIM CITIZEN AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
1. Quoted in J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1770 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 111.
2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1911; repr. 1974), 5:356 n. 68.
3. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 492–93.
4. Ibid.
5. Farmer’s Museum or Literary Gazette (Walpole, NH), January 4, 1803, 4.
6. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–7), 10:378.
7. John Leland, The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland: Including Some Events of His Life, Written by Himself, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845; repr. La Vergne, TN: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011), 652.
8. Ibid., 38.
9. Kathleen M. Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 23.
10. For the argument that there may be “at least one uninterrupted chain of transmission of Islamic influence from the eighteenth century to the twentieth,” see Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185–200; quote on 186.
11. Ibid., 185–200.
12. Ibid., 154.
13. Quoted in Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 330–31.
14. Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 78.
15. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96.
16. Ibid., 96, 136.
17. Ibid., 293; see Jacob Rama Berman, American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 179–210.
18. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 152; quoted in Moore, Al-Mughtaribun, 45.
19. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 135–64.
20. Ibid., 96.
21. Ibid., 141. For other name changes, see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 4.
22. Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 23.
23. “Transcript of Civil Rights Act (1964),” Section 202, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=97.
24. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 153.
25. Ibid., 158.
26. The idea is GhaneaBassiri’s, History of Islam in America, 29–30, 380. For the most nuanced consideration of race as a challenging category for American Muslims, see Sherman A. Jackson, “Muslims, Islam(s), Race and American Islamophobia,” in Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 93–108.
27. Quoted in GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 159.
28. Quoted in Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 20–21.
29. Quoted ibid., 18–19; quote on 19.
30. Quoted ibid., 20.
31. Bret E. Carroll, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91.
32. Quoted in Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 22.
33. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas, 94. The Jewish population was 150,000 by 1860.
34. Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 5.
35. Quoted in Michael Beschloss, “FDR’s Auschwitz Secret,” Daily Beast, October 13, 2002, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2002/10/13/fdr-s-auschwitz-secret.html.
36. Quoted in Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 23.
37. Ibid., 1–42.
38. Ibid., 28, 42.
39. Ibid., 57–58; Bulliet, Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 6, emphasizes the acceptance of the term by the 1950s.
40. Bulliet, Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 6.
41. Quoted in Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 35.
42. Arthur A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition and Other Dissenting Essays (New York: Schocken, 1971), xiii; Bulliet, Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 8–9.
43. Moore, Al-Mughtaribun, 2–3.
44. Bulliet, Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 8–9.
45. This idea of a founding “Protestant promise” is Schultz’s premise; Tri-Faith America, 3–12.
46. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion, 102.
47. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 292–93.
48. The phrase comprises part of a book title by Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian” Country Became the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins E-book, 2007). Eck carefully surveys these non-Judeo-Christian American religious groups.
49. “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2007, http://pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-americans; GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 2 n. 1, based on the Pew findings estimates around three million; Eck, New Religious America, 2–3, suggests six million; John Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 221, offers the estimate of five to seven million. Oddly, Bret E. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas, 103, more than a decade ago estimated eight million.
50. “Muslim Americans: No
Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism. Section 1: A Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, August 30, 2011, http://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/section-1-a-demographic-portrait-of-muslim-americans/, 6, puts the total Muslim population at 2.92 million.
51. Sixty-eight countries of origin are mentioned by Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, 221.
52. “Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, August 30, 2011, 2.
53. Jane I. Smith, Islam in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 78–103. These indigenous African American movements included what most Muslims perceive as heterodox Islamic variants, including the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and, more recently the Five Percenters.
54. “Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, August 30, 2011, 2.
55. Smith, Islam in America, 2nd ed., 68–70.
56. Ibid., 70–75.
57. Lori Peek, Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 10.
58. “Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, August 30, 2011, 2.
59. Quoted in Peek, Behind the Backlash, 24–25.
60. Quoted ibid., 25.
61. Quoted in Bakalian and Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11, 186.
62. See Riad Z. Abdelkarima and Jason Erb, “How American Muslims Really Responded to the Events of September 11,” CounterPunch, September 7, 2002, www.CounterPunch.org/riad0907.html.
63. This “double pain” is recorded in an interview with an American Muslim; see Bakalian and Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11, 171.
64. Rick Hampson, “For Families of Muslim 9/11 Victims, a New Pain,” USA Today, September 2, 2010.
65. Quoted ibid.
66. Quoted in Peek, Behind the Backlash, 5.
67. I have re-created the list offered in Bakalian and Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11, 40. A similar list of violent events in the twentieth century is included in Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 111. Earlier, twentieth-century precedents are also found in GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 329–44.
68. Bakalian and Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11, 40.
69. Quoted in Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001), 4.
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