Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (32 page)

Debate on the Constitution’s abolition of a religious test spanned one day, July 30, 1788. Speakers on that day included Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Baptists, among whom the notion of “true religion” remained a version of Protestantism. Nevertheless, some of these Protestants were able to discuss Muslims in a positive context even without setting aside the standard negative associations.

In all, Muslims were mentioned five times, with one additional reference to “the Great
Turk,” or Ottoman sultan.
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Judaism and Jews ranked only slightly ahead, mentioned seven times.
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But Catholicism inspired ten references, mostly to the pope and priests, an indication that this faith remained the source of the most immediate Protestant anxiety.
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In various recorded speeches, Muslims were classed twice with pagans, once with Deists, once with pagans and Jews, once with Catholics, and once alone.
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The possibility of a Muslim’s election to governmental offices was raised three times, as was that of a Muslim president.
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The connection between a
Muslim and the presidency occurred twice as often as references involving either Jews or Catholics.

Anti-Federalists strategically linked Muslims to Jews and Catholics, in both cases to define them as minorities to be excluded from equal citizenship and access to power. To the contrary, Federalists invoked Muslims to argue for the equality and inclusion of Jews and Catholics in emerging American ideals of individual rights. For both sides, Muslims were the linchpin, whether the argument was for or against the status quo of Protestant majority rule, for or against the Constitution’s abolition of a religious test, at a time when exclusionary religious tests prevailed in almost every state constitution.

The North Carolina debate on religious tests began just after the third clause of the sixth article of the Constitution was read, the Anti-Federalists having forced Federalists to debate each clause separately.
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Because James Iredell, the chief Federalist debater, paid a reporter to record the day’s speeches, a fascinating series of exchanges has been preserved nearly verbatim.
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The relationship between religion and political power in the Constitution provoked a serious and heated disagreement. Anti-Federalists expressed worry about losing not only their Protestant control but their very rights of conscience, in the event non-Protestants should come to power, because the state religious test of 1776 had enshrined political officeholding as the exclusive prerogative of free white men who could swear to “the Truth of the Protestant Religion.”
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The first Anti-Federalist to object to the Constitution was
Henry
Abbot (d. 1791), a Baptist minister. Born in London to an Anglican canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, as a teenager he ran off to America in the 1750s, settling in Camden County and teaching school.
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He possessed three hundred acres of land and six slaves.
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In 1758, he converted to the Baptist faith and was ordained by two elders. As an evangelist, Abbot made converts on both sides of Pasquotank River, from 1758 to 1764, when he was the pastor of the Shiloh Church, the first Baptist church in North Carolina. He supported American independence in 1776, joining several committees as a legislator, including the one that drafted a state constitution and bill of rights. He also introduced a bill to allow non-Anglicans to perform marriages, which became possible for
Baptists only after North Carolina’s split from Great Britain.
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Abbot is credited with authorship of the nineteenth article of the state declaration of rights, which affirms that “all men have natural and inalienable rights to worship almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience.”
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Having suffered keenly for his own religious liberty, Abbot was not about to risk it by supporting a Constitution with no protection for Protestant rights of conscience.
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Abbot represented as rampant among his Protestant constituents the fear that “should the Constitution be received, they would be deprived of the privilege of worshipping God according to their consciences, which would be taking from them a benefit they enjoy under the present constitution.”
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He also expressed anxiety that a federal government’s negotiation of treaties with foreign powers might cause Americans “to adopt the Roman Catholic religion in the United States, which would prevent the people from worshipping God according to their own consciences.”
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Abbot’s fears of Catholic domination, a standard Protestant anxiety since the Reformation, were coupled with the assumption that one variety of Protestantism would “be established” as the state religion of the United States. He proclaimed, “I am, for my part, against any exclusive establishment; but if there were any, I would prefer the Episcopal.”
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Baptists, he knew, had no chance, and so Abbot presumably preferred the Anglican (or Episcopalian) faith he espoused prior to 1776, over another Protestant option. The rights of non-Protestants to worship freely were not his concern.

Abbot would be the first delegate to introduce the possibility of Muslims as officeholders if the Constitution were to be ratified. The elimination of a religious test, “by many thought dangerous and impolitic,” presented the prospect that “pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans.”
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Abbot likely had no actual “pagans” in mind, making a classical allusion for rhetorical flourish; it would have seemed a witty remark to his listeners. The same absurdist humor inspired his mention of an oath sworn not on the truth of the Protestant religion but by the powers of “Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Proserpine, or Pluto.”
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Abbot’s reference to Deists, however, was more serious. Members of this group existed in America among the Founders, Jefferson being perhaps the most noted for his belief in a remote God of reason and a disbelief in miracles. In fact, Abbot and other Protestant delegates
would have regarded Deism as a far greater threat than atheism, since the latter commanded no public following in the period.
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Given a choice of pagans, Deists, and Mahometans, the latter at least represented no fanciful, long-extinct polytheism nor any population believed extant in the United States. Still, Muslims compared with Deists remained antithetical to Protestantism, as the Englishman Humphrey Prideaux’s attacks in 1697 suggest. Both would continue to be condemned as inimical to emerging American religious ideals, however little Islam was actually understood.

Were Muslims really ever supposed to be present in America? Outside Abbot’s mind and words, did the people he was referring to have any reality? No. Or none that Abbot’s audience would have been aware of. Nevertheless, the impact of this first reference to Muslims in the ratification discourse was not only to invoke the widely perceived foreign threat, but also to introduce a strange, inconceivable new category into American political thought: the Muslim believer as citizen, even as potential officeholder. No matter how far-fetched, how incendiary this was meant to be, the very mention of Muslims throughout the day’s debate endowed them with a reality Abbot’s listeners had never before been forced to imagine. His initial reference, built on the traditional fears of Islamic foreign powers, insinuated Muslims into the national argument, obliging the delegates to consider new categories of belief and inclusion in the young Republic. (He had earlier taken the same approach with Catholics, making the usual charge of their connection to foreign powers, but Catholics had a reality that Muslims did not.) The image of Muslims as citizens, a projection toward the perimeter of possibility, thus revealed new strategic possibilities for opponents of the Constitution. But moving a threatening population from the edge to the center of the national debate would have more than the intended consequences.

Through his arguments against religious tests, the Federalist delegate James Iredell (1751–1799), dubbed “the ablest defender of the Constitution,” became, by extension, the staunchest defender of the rights of Muslims.
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Born in Britain, he had found with the help of a relative a job as comptroller of customs for Port Roanoke in Edenton, North Carolina, a position he took after his father suffered a stroke.
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He would go on to study law under Samuel Johnston, his eventual ally during the
convention, establishing a successful legal practice in the colonial era, and being appointed a deputy king’s attorney in 1774. With Blackstone as his legal bible,
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Iredell held fast to certain “governing axioms,” understanding the law almost as a “science” and a “means to control politics.”
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Such temperate views informed political essays he published on the eve of the Revolution, arguing against a break with Britain. Iredell nevertheless finally chose the rebel cause, even though it cost him a sizable inheritance from an uncle.
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James Iredell, Federalist of North Carolina and “the ablest defender of the Constitution.” (
illustration credit 5.1
)

In 1776, Iredell drafted laws designing the state’s judicial system.
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The next year, he was elected by the general assembly to the superior court, serving as the state’s attorney general from 1779 to 1781.
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In 1787, the year before the ratification convention, Iredell was appointed by the legislature to revise the state’s laws, a task he wouldn’t complete until 1791.
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In the interim, in 1788, he responded to the Virginian George Mason’s objections to the Constitution in a series of essays under the pen name “Marcus,”
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becoming the chief Federalist delegate when reunited with Johnston.
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The two men were more than political allies; they were also kinsmen, Iredell having married Johnston’s sister Hannah in 1773.
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On July 30, Iredell attempted to calm Abbot’s fears about religious tests in a long-winded response that ultimately led back to the vexed matter of Muslims as government representatives. He began with a series
of historical examples, knowing that in Britain, Baptists like Abbot had been denied their liberty of conscience and civil rights by the very means he now supported. While treating Abbot’s anxieties with the utmost respect, Iredell nevertheless firmly argued that the new Constitution abolished the evil of intolerance and the mechanism for its enforcement.

That evil had recurred throughout history because, Iredell argued, “Those in power have generally considered all wisdom centred in themselves; that they alone had a right to dictate to the rest of mankind; and that all opposition to their tenets was profane and impious.”
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If the United States was to forestall wars of religious persecution, then potential citizens, Iredell argued, should be judged individually, not as part of an undifferentiated community. He used the term “toleration” to mean more than coexistence; it meant full equality before the law. This idea, enshrined in the Constitution, he asserted, set the United States apart from Europe and its failings. “America,” he declaimed, had “set an example to mankind to think more modestly and reasonably—that a man may be of different religious
sentiments from our own, without being a bad member of society.”
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Iredell’s ideals of toleration and universal rights were the very same as those in Locke’s 1689 treatise. The argument over the Framers’ intentions was already under way in America, and Iredell asserted that “the clause under consideration” was “one of the strongest proofs that could be adduced, that it was the intention of those who formed this system to establish a general religious liberty in America.” But as that point was lost on some, he went on to remind his audience of how badly many of them had fared thanks to religious tests in England: “What is the consequence of such in England? In that country no man can be a member of the House of Commons, or hold any office under the crown, without taking the sacrament according to the rites of the Church.” Though an Anglican himself, Iredell insisted that true religious belief was unintentionally undermined in this process, with the unscrupulous man assenting where the pious one refused: “It never was known that a man who had no principles of religion hesitated to perform any rite when it was convenient for his private interest.” A religious test was in fact no guarantee of government by a “true believer.” And so, Iredell would conclude, “the restriction on the power of Congress, in this particular, has my hearty approbation.”
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