Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, is drawing criticism for remarks made earlier this month in which he appears to question whether Islam is a religion.
In a video clip recently made available online, Ramsey is asked during a campaign stop about his stand on “a threat invading our country from the Muslims.” After responding that he is “all about freedom of religion,” Ramsey adds, “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, or cult, whatever you want to call it.”
Ramsey also takes the opportunity to voice his dismay about the decision of the Rutherford County Planning Commission to allow the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro to construct a new facility, which Ramsey incorrectly calls a “mosque.” “I’m in the real estate business,” he says. “That’s a three-month process. They approved that in 17 days in Rutherford County.”
But a local television station reported, “The area the Islamic Center purchased . . . already had the correct zoning for a church [and] therefore did not need a public hearing before it was approved.”
In a response to Ramsey’s remarks posted on CNN’s Belief Blog, Boston University’s Stephen Prothero finds it ironic that, on Ramsey’s telling, “Islam, the world’s second largest religion, may not be a religion after all.” He writes:
Apparently, Ramsey, who began his pitch with a paean to “this free country,” believes that the free market does not apply to religion, or at least not to religions that do not meet with the approval of elected officials like himself. Which leads me to wonder, first, whether Christianity really is so weak in Tennessee that it needs the coercive power of the government to maintain itself, and, second, whether the commitment to limited government of Tennessee’s Republicans is so thin that it does not require the state to stay out of our individual decisions concerning where (and whether) to pray, and to whom.
The Murfreesboro controversy is one of several concurrent ongoing debates over the construction of Islamic centers in the U.S., ranging from the Cordoba Initiative’s proposal for a center near “Ground Zero” in New York to a proposal pending before the local planning commission for an Islamic center in Temecula, California.
In the face of Ramsey’s suggestion that Islam is not a genuine religion, and thus ineligible for First Amendment protections, it is tempting to side with Prothero: of course Islam is a religion! But is this, in the end, a straightforwardly factual question that religion scholars can answer?
In the United States, “religion” names a social status, which brings with it access to legal protections and social capital. To be a religion is, in at least one important sense, to be acknowledged as such. Is Islam a religion? The answer will hinge in part on how Americans respond to Ramsey’s suggestion that it is not.
As far as the First Amendment is concerned, whether Islam is a religion, or not, is a legal question, not an academic or social one.
That’s right, in the sense that whether or not a practice is eligible for constitutional protections is not a matter of public opinion. But of course the courts draw upon conceptual resources available within the larger culture. The implausibility of Ramsey’s suggestion from a legal standpoint stems in part from its mismatch with prevailing understandings of what constitutes “religion.”
Dr. Sullivan, you raise the point of what constitutes religion in your The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. I am struck by (1) Sullivan’s concern for what sort of practices can be “freely exercised” and protected in light of the First Amendment, which (as you demonstrate well) privileges Protestant modes of expression, and (2) Amesbury’s suggestion from earlier this year about the ‘denominationalism’ (or “Protestantization”) of other traditions in order to gain social and legal capital. For me the question becomes how are we as U.S. citizens understanding/accepting/rejecting Islam in light of the dominant Protestant paradigm of legal protection. Will it be the next member in the Judeo-Christian club?
As an interesting sidebar, check the title of this recent blog from Shazia Kamal: http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/print/3831/.
There is already much evidence of that acceptance, in my view, and also of the Protestant terms for that acceptance. Presidential commissions on bioethics, for example, etc. now routinely include a Muslim member. People speak of the Abrahamic traditions. One might say that Will Herberg’s book could be updated to be titled Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim!
I’ll confess, I was rather surprised by Ramsey’s remarks. I am not surprised by the (rather depressing) visible reaction against the construction of Islamic centers across the US, as Dr. Amesbury notes. What surprised me, instead, was that Ramsey sought to give credence to his remarks by denying the religiosity of Islam. After all, the history of the term “religion” is rather ambiguous. More often then not, the term holds fairly negative connotations. On one hand, many Christians (in a quasi-Barthian fashion) deny that Christianity is a religion, as though religions are human-made, restrictive and error-ridden institutions. On the other hand, some of the scientific materialists (like Sam Harris) deny that Buddhism is a religion in order that Buddhism “escape” their criticisms of religion. Neither tendency is particularly new, as, for example, even early western practitioners of Buddhism would claim Buddhism was a philosophy, a way of life, but certainly not religion (said with disdain, of course).
As a Buddhist, then, I have experienced first-hand the frustrations associated with the term “religion.” I recognize the problematic history of the word, and the dangerous ways it has been used to exclude as a social status, as Dr. Amesbury highlights. Still, on a very personal level, I always feel slighted when someone tells me Buddhism isn’t a religion. As I indicated above, in the case of Buddhism, they typically mean such as a compliment. And yet, I cannot help but feel insulted.
Perhaps this is exactly what you mean, Dr. Amesbury, when you discuss religion as social status. It certainly would be a slight to be unacknowledged. Still, I’m curious how you think the judged aesthetic popularity of denying one’s religiosity fits into this picture. If it is “hip,” so-to-speak, to claim one isn’t religious, even if one is Christian, aren’t Ramsey’s remarks not only out-of-touch, but politically/pragmatically ill-informed as well, since, I have to imagine, much of Ramsey’s constituency shares a distaste for the term “religion”? Or is this just a case of effective double-speak, where, in one case, the Christian “spiritual but not religious” is the ‘good’ kind of non-religiosity, while the Ramsey-claimed Islamic non-religiosity is the “bad” “cult[ic]” kind of non-religiosity? Perhaps another case of the ability to live a full contradiction in terms?
Or, to push further, if one accepts the aesthetic dimension to how the term “religion” is used in American society, it seems to complicate this debate further. After all, (not that Dr. Amesbury suggests such), religion wouldn’t just be a matter of social status, of “to be acknowledged as such,” but would also include sensibilities or “to not be denied as such.” Obviously, the two uses don’t perfectly overlap—after all, no matter how much a Christian denies her/his religiosity (as a measure of aesthetic taste), that Christian will still enjoy the benefits of the social status of being religious.
I do believe, however, that scholars have to get involved in these debates, if just for a simple fact (despite, as Dr. Amesbury points out, these are not straightforward questions). Non-Christians too often suffer from such “religious” contradictions. Recognizing this responsibility, as scholars (although it is not unique to scholars), to respond to these violent exclusions, is probably the easy part. Since I began this post with a confession, I’ll end with one; I confess that learning what to do with that responsibility is a much more difficult question.
Thanks, Drew, for these thoughtful and perceptive remarks. I think you are right: the term “religion” is extremely slippery and ambiguous. Since at least the nineteenth century it has been used both to “otherize” (as in the Orientalist view that “religion” is what allows the “East” to be contrasted invidiously with the supposedly more rational “West”) and to assimilate (e.g., “religion” conceived as the genus of which the “great world religions” are species).
This ambivalent history makes it possible to move back and forth between these various meanings (and their respective contrast cases), depending on the occasion. One can even play both games simultaneously—suggesting, for example, that Christianity is, so to speak, “above” religion, whereas Islam is “below” it (a “cult,” to use Ramsey’s language).
As Sullivan notes, Islam (conceived somewhat generically) is increasingly achieving recognition as a legitimate option within the framework of what one influential text calls “a new religious America.” But there are multiple national imaginaries, and the multi-religious one is contested on several fronts. Contemporary anti-Islamic sentiment is in certain quarters rather pronounced.
I agree that there is a role for scholars in these debates, which in my view consists partly in calling attention to the often problematic history of the terms in which they are framed.
I think an important concept people struggle with is that many organizations have religious elements that must be protected, but also commercial and/or political elements that need to be regulated.
Here are a few relatively simple rules for religious/non-profit status:
In other words, if protected and unprotected activities are integrated, protection should be lost for religious activity, not gained for commercial or political activity. There should be no circumstances under which political or commercial activity should receive religious protections.