Eloquent Incoherence

The Dennis Pragers and Virgil Goodes of the world would do well to note that the prospect of a Muslim attaining elected office was raised during the course of constitutional debates in the formative period of the United States. After the Constitutional Convention presented its draft Constitution to the states for ratification in 1787, the North Carolina state legislature debated the merits of a guarantee of religious freedom and a bar against religious tests as a condition to holding public office, provisions the Convention’s draft did not contain. Rep. Henry Abbot, a Baptist minister and a proponent of a religious freedom clause, observed:

The exclusion of religious tests is by many thought dangerous and impolitic. They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans [Muslims] might obtain offices among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans. Every person employed by the general and state governments is to take an oath to support the former. Some are desirous to know how and by whom they are to swear, since no religious tests are required–whether they are to swear by Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Proserpine [sic], or Pluto. . . I would be glad [if] some gentleman would endeavor to obviate these objections, in order to satisfy the religious part of the society.

State commissioner James Iredell (who would later serve on the United States Supreme Court) addressed the concerns mentioned by Abbot:

But it is objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for? This is the foundation on which persecution has been raised in every part of the world.

Governor Samuel Johnston elaborated:

Those who are Mahometans, or any others who are not professors of the Christian religion, can never be elected to the office of President, or other high office, but in one of two cases. First, if the people of America lay aside the Christian religion altogether, it may happen. Should this unfortunately take place, the people will choose such men as think as they do themselves. Another case is, if any persons of such descriptions should, notwithstanding their religion, acquire the confidence and esteem of the people of America by their good conduct and practice of virtue, they may be chosen.

This debate in the North Carolina legislature would play a pivotal role in shaping the notion of separation of church and state that would come to be a founding principle of American democracy. The legislature ultimately decided that a guarantee of religious freedom was a necessity, and North Carolina withheld its ratification of the Constitution on the grounds that it contained no affirmative declaration of rights. The Bill of Rights–and with it, the provisions guaranteeing religious freedom that would come to be known as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause–was subsequently added in response to North Carolina’s objections, and North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify on November 21, 1789. The rest, as they say, is history, though it seems to have escaped Dennis Prager and Virgil Goode.