by Bruce T. Gourley
Published September 2010
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)
Near a strip joint, gambling parlor, and cheap tourist shops in a downtrodden neighborhood in New York City, a battle for the soul of a nation rages. From coast to coast and border to border, millions of Americans are talking about what is happening in what was once an obscure corner of the Big Apple, and many are outraged. Nudity, gambling, and crime, however, do not provoke the anger. Rather, a plan to expand a prayer room into a community center is driving the rage.
Despite being a secular, yet pluralistic nation established upon religious liberty and separation of church and state, the United States of America still struggles to honor her founding principles.
Disenfranchised, minority Baptists of the late eighteenth century triumphed over the majoritarian theocratic views and powerful influences of establishment colonial religion. Their victory shaped the new American nation, when in 1791 the Baptist vision found fulfillment in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. After nearly two hundred years of perseverance and determination in the face of persecution and on the receiving end of terrorist acts perpetuated by colonial Christian governments, Baptists breathed a sigh of relief as church and state were separated in America. Roger Williams’ early seventeenth-century call for a “wall of separation” between religion and government had finally come to pass on a national scale.
Even so, the law of the land proved difficult to fully honor. Many Protestant Christians in the early eighteenth century resented the nation’s secular foundation and resisted pluralism, stoking public anger against Roman Catholics in particular. Not until the mid-nineteenth century did the American nation fully extricate itself from theocratic laws at the state level. From the early 1800s through the Civil War era, a lack of private funding to build church buildings in the nation’s capitol resulted in some religious services being held in government buildings. And white Baptists in the South, upholding white supremacy and defending slavery of blacks as biblical and godly, anointed the ill-fated Confederate States of America as God’s chosen nation.
Yet in some respects, post-colonial religious tensions escalated following the American Civil War. In previous decades, Christians North and South respectively opposed and supported slavery on biblical grounds. While northern Christians won the public debate, southern white Christians retreated into an enclave of racially-defined regional faith that gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and resistance to the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement. From the era of Reconstruction into the 1960s, white southern religion hosted an ongoing terrorist campaign against African Americans.
Thousands of terrorist acts on the part of white Christians took the form of beatings, murders, bombings, rapes, and other atrocities against black citizens. Following their acts of terrorism, the perpetrators would return to their pulpits, deacons’ meetings, home Bible studies, and dinner-time prayers. And while some white citizens, during the century-long reign of terror, decried the violence and the killings, there were no calls to remove white Christians from American society or prohibit the construction of white Christian houses of worship.
And so we return to the current rage over plans to transform a New York City prayer room into a religious community center. The anger is stoked by well-known voices who don’t like our national heritage of separation of church and state, who do not believe in pluralism, and who are in seats of power and influence. The opposition is publicly led by a global media behemoth that conflates entertainment with news and considers itself the definer of truth, a corporation that falsely claims the community center is funded by Islamic terrorists, yet itself is (by its own twisted definition of terrorism) co-owned by an Islamic terrorist.
I am speaking, of course, of the proposed Islamic community center, to be built two blocks from the former World Trade Center, “Ground Zero” of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That Ground Zero is not visible from the site and that two mosques already exist in the vicinity are facts deemed irrelevant by detractors. Neither are they impressed with the fact that prior to 9/11, the 17th floor of the south Twin Tower was the site of a Muslim prayer room.
Contrary to common sense and truth, millions of Americans opposing the proposed community center desperately want to believe that all Muslims are terrorists. Baptists of seventeenth century England were likewise on the receiving end of slander and hatred, as majoritarian religious leaders and writers frequently sought to equate Baptists with the violence perpetuated by radical Anabaptists in the Munster Rebellion of 1534-35.
Whereas the printing press helped the seventeenth century religious establishment foster anger and hatred against the upstart Baptists, today’s Fox News fuels the anti-Muslim furor by calling the New York community center a “terror mosque.” And so the rhetoric of hate dominates public discourse, drowning out the reality that Fox’s co-owner is funding the Fox-labeled “terror mosque.”
In the broader picture, the Islamic community center is merely the latest, and currently the most visible, example of how religious liberty in the twenty-first century is controversial and even tenuous against the backdrop of terrorist fears. All white Christians in the South of an earlier era were not terrorists, nor are all Muslims today. A hundred years of white Christian terrorism in America did not lead the public to label all Christians as terrorists, nor did it lead to calls prohibiting the building of Christian churches or result in demands to demolish religious structures that housed terrorists (if such demands had been voiced and acted upon, perhaps half the churches in the South would have been shut down). Likewise, the fact that some Muslims today are terrorists is no pretext to push all Muslims out of America or prohibit peaceful Muslims (including the supporters of the proposed New York community center) from building houses of worship.
We are America, shaped by Baptist sacrifice and blood of old into a land that grants religious liberty to all and keeps separate church and state. We harbored our share of terrorists in our more recent history, including in many of our Baptist houses of worship. Yet we ultimately triumphed over the hatred and grew stronger for it. And if we, in the twenty-first century, are to grow stronger as a people and a nation, we must again triumph over the hatred in our midst.