Community Centers and their Discontents

Its no surprise that as midterm elections in the United States are coming closer, that religion is again becoming a major fault line, mostly in terms of how to "treat" Muslims. For the past several years, an organization called the Cordoba Initiative has been making plans to create an interfaith presence in a Muslim context near the infamous site of the World Trade Center, a neighborhood where the president of this organization has been an imam (a prayer leader) for about 25 years. But's its not just New York City. Incidents of protest and vandalism have been reported elsewhere when concerning expansions or constructions of Islamic centers are on the political radar screen. In a rather notorious case, a white supremacist terrorist admitted to firebombing an Islamic center in Tennessee, receiving a lengthy Federal prison term.

As a rabbi pointed out on the Huffington Post recently, there's a great deal of confusion over claiming space as sacred. The claim is often repeated by detractors that Cordoba House would be built over the WTC site. In fact, its about two blocks away--a three-minute walk, near a strip joint and a porn shop. Like most of that part of Manhattan, it sustained a fair amount of damage in the September 11th attacks. Where do the boundaries of that space begin and end--and who owns them? Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and people of many other religious traditions all died in the WTC attacks. Boundaries about religion are always in contention and always subject to policing by interested parties. They shift too, depending on the political winds.

In this case, Islam is being used as a type of political shorthand for both 'foreign' and 'unAmerican.' This collective xenophobia can be broken down into several assumptions. Perhaps most importantly to this ethos, Islam is defined as completely alien to legitimate American culture, both in terms of history and any contemporary contribution. Of course scholars of American religious history have come to a different conclusion, identifying at least 20-25% of antebellum slaves as Muslims. As my own research as demonstrated, Islam has been a significant religious contributor to jazz music, both inside and outside of the United States. As a "foreign" element, it isn't necessary to be factually correct about it, any more than its important to be factually correct about Lord Hanuman in Hinduism.

Conversely, Islam is understood as not being able to be authentically practiced in the United States, since by definition it allegedly authorizes heinous acts without reprisal. Other common features tend to be predicated on these assumptions. For example, if Islam can be defined as foreign, even to the concept of religion itself, then it need not receive First Amendment protection as a religion. Foreignness is ambiguity---whether a religion, a nationality, or a "cult." The pink elephant in the room here of course is race. Islam is not biologically inherited--at least no more so than any other common religious tradition. But discussions of Islam in public media rarely, if ever center on any images other than angry, oppressive brown males of some kind. NPR's recent coverage of female prayer leaders in China is a noteworthy exception.

In the most extreme examples of this ideology, the boundary policing has assumed a conspiratorial air, in which rhetorical codes associated with U.S. President Barack Obama become woven into Islam. Connecting with many in the Birther community who think Mr. Obama is a foreigner secretly practicing Islam or having been raised as a Muslim (despite all evidence to the contrary), these reactionary activists work to inspire fear and paranoia, working a powerful mix of racism, imagery, and violence that looks very much like the Al-Qaeda propaganda videos they decry. It remains to be seen whether these tendrils of hate will persist in the public eye after the U.S. primary elections.

Turning Towards the Haitian Struggle

As you can see, I've taken some time off from blogging. Almost a year. Since last April I concentrated on finishing my PhD, with a dissertation titled Approaching the Sacred Grove: The Orphic Impulse in Pagan Religious Music. I've also taken up the Review Editor slot at The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Alongside my regular teaching responsibilities at Iowa State, I took an extra teaching opportunity at GrandView University in Des Moines, a small liberal arts college based in the evangelical Lutheran tradition. Part of the reason I took this additional teaching course is because my new daughter, Jasmine Marie, was born last November, and a new baby always takes some additional start-up funds, so to speaks.

As I was getting my courses underway for the term, the news of Haiti's earthquake came through and threw me for quite a loop. Haiti and Haitian religion, especially Vodou, has been an interest of mine for years. I even took a great course with Michael Largey, a Vodou scholar and ethnomusicologist at Michigan State on music and cultural nationalism. Ever since its inception as the first state in the Western Hemisphere born of a successful slave revolt, Haiti's legacy of colonialism has replicated itself in deeply entrenched socioeconomic problems, exacerbated by its treatment at the hands of many other countries. In many areas near Port-Au-Prince, and elsewhere, what was a very difficult situation has become much more so, and yet as always the Haitian people make do and endure, especially in the face of limited government ability.

The battle between Vodou and other forms of religion in Haiti have always been legendary. American conservative evangelicals like Pat Robertson behaved in a stereotypical manner, condemning Haiti's plight as the result of "devil worship." On the ground itself, Vodouisants and Evangelical Christians are both struggling to make sense of recent events and competing tooth and nail for very limited resources. Of course common misunderstandings about Vodou don't help. This natural disaster seems to come at a time when man Vodou congregations (or families of initiates) are banding together in a federation to protect their own interests. There has been some very good coverage of Vodou rituals, myths and symbols as a result of this, especially on American Public Media's Speaking Of Faith.

As an immigrant religion, there are prominent (if often hidden) Vodou communities in most large American cities. American Vodou already suffered a serious blow with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans, but one hopes that misguided fears over "devil worship' won't result in harassment for Vodouisants living in the U.S. after the earthquake.

When "Freedom Of Religion" Isn't

MSNBC is reporting on an issue that, like many issues in religion and culture, seems cut and dried to people of different perspectives and attitudes, but in fact is neither simple nor recent. The issue concerns an alleged head-on conflict between religious organizations and lesbigay people. Convention wisdom has these two groups of people at odds, as if religious people can all be lumped into "bigoted" and gay people into "secular." But as a fair amount of scholarship, music and film has shown, that is just not true. Many religious people are very welcoming toward same-sex relationships and orientations, and many gay people and lesbians are quite religious.

If that were the only issue at hand, this would a be merely a matter of citing some counterexamples and condemning the soundbite attitudes of popular news reporting. But there is a far deeper history here, one that finds many contemporary Protestant groups on the receiving end of a legal issue Protestantism once helped define.

In the United States, its common knowledge that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (as well as the some subsequent amendments) permits "Freedom of Religion" to all. As I have noted before, in the earliest days of the Republic, this was defined in terms primarily of religious "belief" and has remained such ever since. In the early days of the Republic, this distinction between religion and religious belief mattered little, as most public and elite culture was defined in terms of varieties of Protestant Christianity. Certainly the African indigenous religions of slaves throughout the colonial and early national times mattered little. The 20-30% of slaves who were Muslim, while often valued more locally, were also of no religious consequence for the breakaway British elites even as they provided capital for the new American institutions.

Unlike Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy (or even other movements such as Mormonism), Protestant Christianity has revolved around the concept, elucidated and emphasized by Martin Luther himself of Sola Fide ("Justification By Faith"). While it has variants among Protestants, a common theme is that the Christian's sin (or separation from God) is absolved through the death of Christ, the human and divine Incarnation that bridges the gulf of sin between God and humanity. Christ stands in for the sinner, who participates in the redemptive action ("justification") through faith in Christ. This Divine gift of grace is offered free, and cannot be earned through works or labor.


This controversial doctrine has remained a core teaching among Protestants (along with Sola Scriptura and others). The quality and nature of interior belief became the primary mode of distinction among different Protestants, although of course certain actions and church structures were consequences of these different beliefs. Religion itself in the Anglo-American tradition came to be seen as interior and private. Some have called this, appropriately, the religion behind the Constitution.

This did not happen immediately, nor without resistance. Especially when it came to Jews and Catholics in the American context, this definition of religion (as belief) affected them much more. Jewish, Amerindian and Catholic traditions have historically emphasized practice much more than belief. To be a good Jew or Catholic, one must observe the mitzvot, and participate in the sacraments. Nevertheless, by the time of Thomas Jefferson, the reach of law in restricting religion stopped only at the door of thought, and was still very much operative in matters of practice and action. Time and time again, from Mormons in the late 1800's to atheists in 1961, this definition has for the most part prevailed. Exceptions to these rulings have occurred, but most are very recent, such as the Hialeah decision concerning Santeria and animal sacrifice, and the religious use of hallucinogenic tea. Even the distribution of religious literature in certain circumstances has been prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention the wholesale disregard of Native American sacred lands at late as the 1980's.


Thus we have a clear and documented tradition up to the present day in which the legal system of the U.S. has affirmed most any type of belief, while often prohibiting actions interpreting as conflicting with other legal principles. In the case of the article from MSNBC, recent cited examples are all actions, rather than beliefs.

* A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney's costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple's commitment ceremony.

* A psychologist in Georgia was fired after she declined for religious reasons to counsel a lesbian about her relationship.

* Christian fertility doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient were barred by the state Supreme Court from invoking their religious beliefs in refusing treatment.

* A Christian student group was not recognized at a University of California law school because it denies membership to anyone practicing sex outside of traditional marriage.


All of these are actions. To the extent that religious action has received less protection in general, and the belief core of Protestantism affirmed as the definition of religion, all of these can be seen as potentially running afoul of Equal-Protection laws. Arguments from the viewpoint of religious liberty are likely to be less and less relevant, since none of the actions are protected as "religion."

The activities and outreach of these Protestant groups is thus being challenged through the very ideological framework promulgated by their progenitors hundreds of years ago. In ways that Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, and Amerindians have failed to accomplish in seeking legal equality for their religious cultures, gay and lesbian political actvists (wrongly assumed by many to be non-religious) may have finally brought some of those Protestant chickens 'home to roost.'

As a recent popular dystopian film character has noted: "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."