In response to the heinous, high-profile violence recently perpetrated by Muslim extremists, Franklin Graham is seeking to punish the future Muslim doctors, lawyers, professors, and business leaders studying at Duke University.
Muslim students had been invited to offer the call to prayer from Duke’s iconic chapel for three minutes on Friday afternoons. For Graham, this was not an offer of interfaith hospitality, but an act of surrender. He wrote on his Facebook page: “As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism.”
Waves of Graham’s followers protested to the university with anti-Muslim screeds, some issuing threats serious enough to prompt very real security concerns.
I happened to be speaking on the subject of religious pluralism at the University of Notre Dame (my father’s alma mater) when the Duke story broke. A Muslim student from Morocco wearing a green headscarf approached me with an exasperated “here we go again” look on her face.
“People keep asking me to apologize for these Muslim extremists and to explain why Islam seems to be such a violent religion,” she said. “But I have nothing to do with those extremists, and I don’t read the teachings of my religion as supporting violence, and I’m tired of talking about all of this. I’m here to study business, and what I really want to be talking about is entrepreneurial start-ups.”
Her statement highlighted the two errors being made by Franklin Graham. The first is to assume that all Muslims should be punished on account of the actions of an extremist. The second is assuming that the extremists represent the true teachings of Islam.
As I paused to light a candle and say a prayer at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, Notre Dame’s shrine to the Virgin Mary (highly revered in my Muslim faith), it occurred to me that I was at a leading institution of a community that knew a thing or two about religious prejudice. Indeed, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. said that anti-Catholicism was “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” For generations, Catholics in America suffered from the same erroneous logic now being leveled against Muslims. Referred to as “the Catholic menace,” they were regularly connected to violence committed by Catholics elsewhere, and Catholic teaching was frequently quoted selectively to make the Church look inherently dominating.
The most famous American Catholic to suffer from these prejudices was John F. Kennedy. And one of the leaders of the anti-Kennedy efforts was Franklin Graham’s father, Billy Graham.
In the summer of 1960, Billy Graham brought a group of American evangelicals together at a conference in Europe to plot a strategy to defeat Kennedy. It was a moment of inspiration for Norman Vincent Peale, who organized a follow-up meeting of American evangelicals dedicated to stopping Kennedy that fall in Washington, D.C. “Our religious freedom is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Peale told the 150 evangelical leaders present.
It seems ridiculous to us now that Catholics like Kennedy were being cornered and asked to answer for the actions of Catholic dictators like Franco, or explain why the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had called the separation of church and state a “shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism” in a 1948 statement.
But it is not so different than what Muslims are experiencing today.
Walking across campus at Notre Dame, I could not help but reflect upon the significant contributions that this and other Catholic institutions make to the country and the world. Catholic agencies comprise the largest nongovernmental health, education, and social-service network in the United States, serving Catholics and non-Catholics with equal grace. Where would America be if the anti-Catholic forces had succeeded in preventing such institutions from being built?
That Muslim student from Morocco at Notre Dame might start a business that employs thousands. Those Muslim students at Duke University may run for president, or get appointed to the Supreme Court, or start a major Muslim hospital that (like Catholic-, Jewish- and Protestant-founded hospitals) is inspired by its particular religious tradition to heal all. Universities play a central role in nurturing leaders for our diverse democracy. Asking Muslim students to answer for Muslim extremists and denigrating their religion is not just a violation of their dignity but a barrier to their contribution.
The Catholic story in America has a happy ending. Overt anti-Catholic prejudice has largely dissipated. Catholics sit in six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court and hold high political office without anyone raising Kennedy-era fears of a lackey of the pope occupying the White House.
Billy Graham was an important player in this change. Not long after Kennedy’s election, Graham was pictured bowing his head next to the new president at a prayer breakfast, he openly welcomed the ecumenical documents emerging from Vatican II, and proudly repeated what Pope John Paul II told him in a private meeting: “We are brothers.”
People change. Religions and interfaith relationships change. Countries change. On the question of the Catholic presence in America, Billy Graham certainly did, and America is stronger for it.
I wonder if, on the questions of Muslims in this country, Franklin Graham might change. America would be stronger for that, too.
Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit organization that works with college campuses on religious diversity issues.
