Oct 13, 2014 4 min read

In the 1840s, anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in this country, fueled by a growing influx of Catholics from Britain, Ireland and Germany and culminating in riots in Philadelphia that led to the destruction of Catholic churches and homes and the loss of 16 lives.

Anti-Catholic animus lingered through the middle part of the last century, becoming a marquee issue in John F. Kennedy’s whisker-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. This overlapped with a strain of anti-semitism that kept Jews out of top-tier schools and white-collar professions and limited the number who could immigrate to this country.

We’d like to think we are better than that now. That we are more enlightened, less prejudiced and more inclined to assess people based on the “content of their character,” to use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, rather than the color of their skin, the deity they worship, or, increasingly, their sexual orientation. And in many ways that is true – the United States is a more pluralistic, more open, more meritocratic and accepting society than it has ever been. Barack Obama would almost certainly not have been elected president in 2008 had America not undergone this transformation.

But Obama’s opponents sometimes suggest darkly, and mistakenly, that the president is a Muslim, as if being of that faith is an indictment of his identity and automatically renders him unfit for office. It’s representative of an ugly breed of Islamophobia that has made itself felt in America since 9/11 and has taken on new virulence since the barbarians in the Islamic State have terrorized Iraq and Syria with torture, plunder, beheadings and other atrocities in their lunatic drive to wipe out the last couple of centuries and reinstitute a medieval caliphate.

Most thoughtful and reasonable people recognize that the Islamic State marauders and al-Qaeda acolytes are not representative of Islam as a whole. Far from it. The terrorists and thugs who pervert Islam to perpetrate fear and mayhem are a microscopic subset within a religion that contains 1.6 billion adherents, including 3 million in this country. The overwhelming majority are, like their Christian, Jewish, Unitarian, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Hindu and Zorastrian neighbors, interested in practicing their beliefs quietly, tending to their families and communities and getting on with their lives and work. They are not plotting to take over the world, forcibly convert nonbelievers or tear infidels from limb to limb.

But there are a disturbing number of commentators, mostly on the right but some on the left, who insist Islam is a “problem” and one glance through the Quran turns its readers into bloodthirsty fanatics. At the recent Values Voters Summit, Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and die-hard culture warrior, opined about a “foundational problem” in Islam and that “you don’t have any Baptist ministers going on jihad,” while U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann went a jaw-dropping step further, urging the president “declare war” on Islam.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, television host Bill Maher and author Sam Harris recently got into an on-air fracas with movie star Ben Affleck after Harris declared “Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas,” and Maher likened Islam to organized crime. Affleck correctly characterized their views as “gross” and “racist.”

If nothing else, we can take comfort in the fact that this too shall pass, just as earlier forms of xenophobia and discrimination eventually died out. But until that day arrives, it’s best to heed the wise words of Muslim American academic Reza Aslan: “Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is going to be violent. … People are violent or peaceful. And that depends on their politics, their social world, the way they see their communities, the way they see themselves.”