A RELIGIOUSLY PLURAL AMERICA IS BENEFICAL AND JUST!

Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("Resistance to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the eighteenth century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a millennium of negative distortions of the faith's theological and political character. Given the dominance and popularity of the anti-Islamic representations, is was startling that a few notable American not only refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day when they would be citizens of the United States, with full and equal rights. This surprising, uniquely egalitarian defense of Muslim rights was the logical extension of European precedents . . .  . Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal at best. How, then did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights survive despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate of that ideal in the twenty-first century?" 'This book provides a new history of the founding era, one that explains how and why Thomas Jefferson and a handful of others adopted and then moved beyond European ideas about the toleration of Muslims. It should be said at the outset that these exceptional men were not motivated by any inherent appreciations for Islam as a religion. Muslims, for most American Protestants, remained beyond the outer limits of those possessing acceptable beliefs, but they nevertheless became emblems of two competing conceptions of the nation's identity: one essentially preserving the Protestant status quo, and the other fully realizing the pluralism implied in the revolutionary rhetoric of inalienable and universal rights. Thus while some fought to exclude a group whose inclusion they feared would ultimately portend the undoing of the nation's Protestant character, a pivotal minority, also protestants. perceiving the ultimate benefit and justice of a religiously plural America, set about defending the rights of future Muslim citizens." Id. at 4-5. Query: Is a twenty-first "pivotal minority" able to maintain and (re)invigorate America's principles surrounding religious plurality and nondiscrimination in immigration and citizenship on the basis of religious belief and national origin? Or will the fearful majority prevail though hate? America is not a "Christian Nation." It is a religious plural nation, and out to remain such!.).