Comment From Professor Robert Calvert on my President Obama Blog

--
I agree that President Obama’s initial speech about the proposed Mosque (or Cultural Center) near ground zero was a mistake, but not, it seems to me, or not only, in the Tallyrandian sense.  I’ll argue that it was a political mistake, and in two senses, both compounded by inattention to the dual religious provisions of the First Amendment. 


First, and perhaps the more obvious, it was a political mistake in that his fervent defense of the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion provision, given the  circumstances, was easily made to seem exactly what Barack Hussein Obama, you know, that closet Muslim pretending to be a Christian and a native-born (i.e., real) American, would say.  One wonders just how much the “birther” movement relished what they’ve no doubt seen as his “coming out” speech. And it would be wrong to underestimate the number of ordinary Americans who have doubts about their president’s identity and commitments.


 So, we may conclude, his impassioned defense of religious freedom in this case was a political mistake if it costs him in 2012 or even this coming November 2.  We’ve certainly heard that the GOP will try to exploit his initial support of what is now called Park51, but also his “walk back” about the project the next day.  Surely Obama’s critics didn’t need such further “evidence” that he was “out of touch” with the American people.   This said,  let me add that inasmuch as no one would accuse Obama of committing any kind of crime through his defense of the First Amendment, or then his alleged waffling, it would be a stretch to call it Tallyrand’s kind of mistake – ill-considered though we can be sure his staff immediately told him it was.


Yet it was arguably a political mistake in a wider, broader, encompassing sense of political, a term in American political culture, I shouldn’t have to add, with nearly always a negative connotation.  The president above all others should regard himself as concerned with the common good, the public welfare, the national interest – i.e., synonyms for what in more elevated parlance is simply the political dimension of our lives, what Americans share in common.  That is to say, his initial obsession with “rights” and indifference to “wisdom” was a mistake in principle as well as in fact, potentially affecting adversely the health, coherence, and well-being of the polity itself.  The problem is that President Obama’s immediate audience as he defended the right to build that mosque was not the same as the one most attuned to his speech at Cairo a few months earlier.  I refer of course to his domestic audience, and more specifically to the undetermined number of Americans who distrust, fear, perhaps even hate Muslims – those Islamophobes aroused, often mindlessly, by this controversy. (There’s no agreement on how widespread anti-Muslim sentiment is.  Compare Time’s cover article for Aug. 30 with Jonathan Tobin’s article in the current Commentary.)  Indeed, it’s possible to imagine that one of Obama’s listeners most negatively energized by the perceived defense of American Muslims was the Rev. Terry Jones, that wildly irresponsible pastor in Florida who thinks “Islam is of the Devil” and who was planing a lot of Koran burning. (More about that pastor in a moment.)


To put this another way, I daresay the issue raised by the proposal to build that mosque was only incidentally about how property is to be distributed.  Moreover, with all due respect to Mr. Justice Souter’s analysis of the different levels and functions of government, I think the case is strong enough that building the mosque – there and now – is not only or essentially a local matter.  It’s no more local than was John Brown’s Raid; or the slaying of Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner; or the Kent State killings; or the assassinations of Lincoln, the Kennedys, and MLK, Jr.; or for that matter the stock market crash of 1929 in New York.  But I exaggerate.


My point is that you don’t have to be a Charles Krauthammer kind of conservative (see his series of articles in the Washington Post)  to understand that Ground Zero for countless Americans has become hallowed ground, upon which it would be a kind of political sacrilege for persons widely (if erroneously) perceived to be coreligionists of the 9/11 terrorists to build there a place of worship in the name of Islam.  Newt Gingrich’s tirades, yes, surpass even his standards of civility, but we know he speaks now, alas, for a lot of Americans.  Worse, this controversy could provoke exactly the kind of tension among American Christians, American Jews, and American Muslims it is the better part of political wisdom to avoid.  Surely we’ve had enough of the culture wars.


Only imagine what Obama might have said, behind closed doors,  to a gathering of a group of Muslims involved with the Park51 project:


“My fellow Americans: If you have pondered my two recent pronouncements about the building of a Mosque at Ground Zero you will have concluded, I’m sure, that I’ve handled this issue badly.  And I confess that I have.  I first seemed to be in solid support of the project, but then seemed unwilling to endorse its wisdom.  ‘Will the real Obama please stand up?’ I apologize for this evident confusion, for my conflicting messages.  What happened is that I found myself articulating two fundamentally opposing elements of American culture, indeed two very different if related conceptions of the First Amendment.


“In the first place, in my initial statement I gave voice to what I will call a rights-based liberal reading of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which reading is based on ontological and epistemological assumptions that are fundamentally anti-political.  On the one hand, the only honorable consideration is whether this or that group is being protected in its freedom, its Constitutionally guaranteed right, of religious belief and expression. Please note that this is fundamentally an individualistic or libertarian perspective, with groups taking the place of individuals and with no practical concern for what might result from such untrammeled freedom of religious expression – no concern for the whole of which the religious group is inevitably a part.   Such groups, in Aristotle’s terms, are not political animals.  Further, there is nothing to discuss or debate.  Such rights are absolute.  A key assumption of this rights-based defense of religious freedom is what I’ll call epistemic absolutism, the uncompromising certitude, in the case of the religious true believer,  that “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  And for those who don’t know the Truth?  Woe unto them, and to the doomed world they embrace!


“Now one doesn’t have to be what philosophers call a ‘consequentialist’ to find troubling such an absolutist conception of freedom, whether religious or any other kind.  This brings me to my second or follow-up statement about the wisdom of building the mosque in that place.  Before I came out with what was taken as my strong defense of your project I should have reflected further on the dual meaning of the First Amendment.  The fact is that in addition to the rights-based liberal interpretation, guaranteeing freedom of religion, the Amendment must also be taken to mean that we Americans are also in some respects assured a freedom from religion. Congress may not establish a religion. Nor must you be of any particular religion (no religious test) or any religion at all to hold public office.


“The American Founders knew about the religious wars of recent centuries and of their devastating effect on life generally, and civic life in particular.  And if Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes could cite a valid limitation of the freedom of speech (no shouting “fire” in a crowded theater), he might also have said that your right to swing your religious fist ends where my nose (whether differently religious or secular) begins.   Expanding this properly, we can say, underscoring a point made above,  that religious toleration cannot oblige us to tolerate any expression of religion that threatens the integrity of the polity or is contrary to the law established by the Constitution itself.  A regime of ordered liberty is the necessary condition,  the sine qua non, of each of those rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.


“Now permit me to apply these principles in particular to Islam in America.  Regard what I’m about to say as a series of “worst case scenarios” – I’m  not even suggesting that any of you would commit or defend such actions.  First, how should Americans and their government respond if, speaking of religious wars, neighboring Muslim communities in the U.S., one populated by Sunnis and the other by Shiites, begin warring with each other?  Or, second, how would we do if an especially devout Muslim community chooses to execute, by stoning, one of its members convicted, without benefit of a U.S. court, of adultery?  Muslim countries elsewhere in the world are, to say no more, divided over such issues.  We can safely say that non-Muslim Americans would not be.


“The main point here is that all immigrants to America of religious or cultural dispositions sharply different from the outlook of ordinary Americans have inevitably had to abandon in their conduct that part of their heritage that is radically at odds with American practices and beliefs.  Recall that the Supreme Court declared polygamy illegal (1879), even though Mormons generally believed it a religious duty to have more than one wife. To say no more, immigrants have had to adapt themselves, at a minimum, to the basic tenets of American law. This broadly is called “assimilation,” or, simply, “Americanization.”   Otherwise, it must be added, Americans are willing, if sometimes grudgingly, to tolerate cultural tendencies pretty much out of step with their own.


“Should any of you think I am overstating my case in these remarks, I urge you to delve into the history of Roman Catholic immigrants and their long and sometimes painful struggle to become accepted as “real” Americans while also wanting to hold onto their religious identity.


“I hope you also grant that I personally can identify with the cultural challenges immigrants to these shores have faced.  I can say this with complete confidence inasmuch as a distressing number of my fellow citizens insist on regarding me, their president elected by an enthusiastic majority of American citizens,  as not really “one of them,” thanks to my biography as a child, my middle name, and to the fact that my father was African.  I can well appreciate John F. Kennedy’s challenge in 1960 to prove to those Baptist ministers in Texas that his first loyalties were to his country, and not to the Pope in Rome.


“As your president I will do everything I can to ease your assimilation to your chosen country, while protecting your right to be practicing Muslims.  In return, I ask only  that you consider carefully and prudently both meanings of the First Amendment, your rights as well as your civic responsibilities as Americans, as you pursue your current project, and that you keep in mind that of necessity and by my commitment, I am president of all of the people.  Thank you.”

Robert E. Calvert
Professor of Political Science Emeritus
DePauw University
Greencastle, Indiana 46135
Office:  O'Hair House, U2
E-mail:  rcalvert@depauw.edu 
Ph. Office:  765-658-4802