Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (49 page)

He did not know that in the Islamic world there already existed a form of toleration for Christians and Jews. But he rightly understood that non-Muslims were obliged to pay taxes in support of the Islamic faith.

Leland’s disapproval was by no means limited to Islam. Like Jefferson, he held no high opinion of either Judaism or Catholicism, though he likewise defended the rights of their respective believers. During his time in Virginia, Leland had noted that neither group was numerous
enough to establish a place of worship: “There are a few Jews, but they have no synagogue, nor is there any chapel for the Papists.”
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He may have met members of both minorities but provided no details of any such encounters.

We do know he considered Jews as deicides, a standard Christian calumny, believing that “the Jews contrived [Jesus’s] death—slew him and hanged him on a tree; they meant it for an evil, but God meant it for good.”
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And that their villainy had precipitated the destruction of Jerusalem, because “they both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets—persecuted the apostles—pleased not God, and were contrary to all men. For their opposition to the truth, and malice prepense against the messengers of it … 
armies
 … 
destroyed those murderers, and burnt up their city.
”
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Leland’s condemnation of the pope similarly followed a standard Protestant template, but where the defense of individual Catholics was concerned he was ready to part ways with his brethren.
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During the 1830s, rising Irish Catholic immigration to the United States stoked Protestant fears and eventually violence. In 1834, the Presbyterian minister
Lyman
Beecher incited a Boston mob to burn down the Ursuline Convent, a Catholic girls’ school in neighboring Charlestown.

Leland would not remain silent. Acknowledging the truth that “Some men among us profess to be greatly alarmed at the spread of the Roman Catholicks,” he went on to attack anti-Catholic fearmongering throughout the country: “They say that there are six hundred thousand [Catholics] within the limits of the United States; all busy at work, like a worm under the bark of a tree, to sap our free government, and set up papal hierarchy and all the horrors of the inquisition.” To this conspiracy theory, Leland replied unequivocally that “no man who has the soul of an American, and the heart of affection for our democratic institutions, will either fear or wish to injure the papists.” Reassuringly he allowed that even if the number of Catholics were a million, it was unlikely of ever being a match either “by births or emigration” for fourteen million Protestants. Leland insisted that Catholic “freedom of religion is guaranteed to them in our constitution of government, and no benevolent man can wish to have them oppressed as they are in Ireland.” He also reminded American patriots, “The French Catholicks were great helpers to Americans in their struggles for independence, (Lafayette among the rest,) and now to deny them the
hospitalities of good friends would be base ingratitude.” He stressed that if Catholics “send their missionaries among those of a different religion to make proselytes, it is doing no more than Protestants do.”
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Unlike other Baptists, Leland didn’t approve the rising popularity of missionary societies generally.
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And unlike other Protestants, he concluded that if Catholics did somehow achieve a national majority, “they must of right have the rule; for no man who has the soul of an American will deny the maxim that ‘the voice of a majority is the voice of the whole.’ ”
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“There is nothing in the starry heavens—in the atmosphere, or in the productions of the earth, that marks one day in seven to be more holy than another,” pronounced Leland after a thorough examination of Old and New Testaments. For that reason, he, who had condemned government support for federal and state chaplains, also refused to accept the government’s right to mandate Sunday as the Sabbath, or to make laws concerning worship, behavior, or the nondelivery of mail on that day:

In showing that the Muslim, the Jew, and the Christian would inevitably end up at the same place at the same time, Leland hoped to demonstrate how their respective faiths might coexist despite differences. But the pluralist balance would not be achieved so long as the government endorsed one day of the week above another as holy:

The sanctification of time was for religions, not the state, to effect, and for the believer to observe, uncompelled by temporal authority.

Leland seemed uniquely able to see, imagine, and feel for others not of his faith—and he was no less well equipped to challenge those who were. He could turn the tables on Protestants: “Query: Are the Protestants in France as much abused by the Papists as the Papists are in Ireland by the Protestants?”
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Or he could hold up a mirror to Christians generally—“Since Christianity became national, Christian nations have been equally cruel and bloodthirsty, and more unjust and perfidious than Turks or heathens”
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—compelling them to see themselves as others saw them: “Accuse a Turk of any trick, he replies, ‘What do you think that I will lie and cheat like a Christian?’ ”
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Leland’s sense of justice was graced by a perfect symmetry: “The sybils of the heathens, the alcoran of the Turks, the tradition of the Jewish rabbis, the writings of the ancient fathers, the decrees of councils, the mandates of popes, religious creeds, and legislative acts to define and enforce religion, like broken china-ware, are worth what they will fetch.”
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He was equally impatient with all faiths interfering in government and of any government interfering in faith.

In Virginia in 1789, the Baptist General Committee passed a resolution that “slavery, is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and is inconsistent with a republican government; and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of every legal measure, to extirpate the horrid evil from the land.”
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It was Leland’s insistence that forced the approval of the resolution by his fellow Baptists, but by 1793 they would refuse to reaffirm it, deciding not to interfere in what they deemed a legislative matter.
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Now, even Baptists in the southern states, who continued to convert African American slaves to their faith, refused, with the exception of Leland, to support the abolition of
slavery. Leland wrote, “Though our skins are somewhat different in color, yet I hope to meet many of you in heaven; where your melodious voices that have often enchanted my ears and warmed my heart, will be incessantly employed in praise of our common Lord.”
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Like his commitment to religious liberty, Leland’s
abolitionism was absolute; in this he surpassed his hero Jefferson, who attempted to end the slave trade but never freed all of his slaves. In Leland’s eyes the treatment of African slaves, like that of
Native Americans, was unequivocally and essentially unchristian:

In decrying the occupation of Native American lands he echoed Roger Williams’s sentiments on the matter, unique in the seventeenth century.

Much as he considered slavery an institution “destructive of every humane and benevolent passion of the soul, and subversive to that liberty absolutely necessary to enoble the human mind,” Leland, like Jefferson, could not imagine a viable alternative: a free African American citizenry. He admitted that he found it difficult to “form any plan, even in idea, for their manumission; and to expose evil, without pointing out the way of escape” was no solution.
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In 1789, he also feared that any talk of freedom for slaves would only provoke masters to increase their abuse. He recorded an intense horror at the treatment of slaves he knew in Virginia.
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Toward the end of Leland’s life, the question of slavery remained pressing. He would refuse to endorse contemporary plans supported by Protestant missionaries to ship freed slaves to Liberia to spread Christianity. A return to Africa, Leland argued, would destroy slave families, many of whom he knew were “descended from American parents more than ten generations.”
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Thus he anticipated precisely what had happened to the former slave, the Muslim Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman. Ibrahima, who had agreed to spread Christianity and American commerce on his return to Liberia, quickly reverted to Islam, leaving a fractured family stranded on both sides of the Atlantic. The best Leland could
imagine was the creation of states for freed slaves “within the limits of other states.”
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A stunted, segregated future was the most this man of such remarkable moral imagination could conceive.

Leland, like Jefferson, composed his own epitaph: “Here lies the body of John Leland, who labored [sixty-seven years] to promote piety, and vindicate the civil and religious rights of all men.”
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The monument over his grave in Cheshire, Massachusetts, is framed majestically by the Berkshire Mountains but seldom visited. Ultimately, most of his fellow Baptists condemned Leland’s most cherished convictions: the absolute wall of separation between government and religion; his antimissionary and antisabbatarian stands; his abolitionism. These views his fellow Baptists denigrated as evidence of his “eccentricity.”
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But for his unwavering support of the equal rights of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews his own denomination labeled him an “embarrassment.”
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In his repeated articulations of the ideal American government, Leland sought in principle and in practice “to vindicate the civil and religious rights of all men,” not just of his fellow Protestants. That he never omitted to mention in his pleas for justice the rights of Muslims, who were not yet known to live in America, suggests the tenacity and absolutism of his principles. But it also reflects a certain fruition and ripening of ideas that had formed in extremely rarefied circles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Christian thought, not to attain legal codification before coming to the United States. While Locke believed Muslims should be tolerated and Jefferson defended their civil rights, enshrining them in state law, it was in the person of John Leland that profound religious sentiment came to the defense of religious freedom for all Americans. An untutored but effective communicator in person and on paper, Leland, though never using the word, demanded what would later be termed secular government, precisely for the sake of his faith and individual freedom.
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To reach this conclusion, Leland drew upon his own persecution to articulate a compelling new form of American evangelical empathy that embraced the political equality of Muslims as well as Catholics and Jews at a time when all three groups were despised in the United States. Leland’s devout Baptist evangelical faith supported uniquely American ideals of a religiously plural society long before this vision became a reality.