ISLAMIC TRADITIONS AND CONSERVATIVE LIBERALISMS

"AMERICA WAS FOUNDED on Judeo-Christian principles — that's the basis of our laws, and people try to deny it," claimed Representative Mike Reynolds, author of a 2010 bill to ban the use of Islamic law in Oklahoma courts. Although midterm elections often seem unremarkable, the 2010 election was an exception, as various critics of the Cordoba House project — particularly Republicans on the far right and those catering to the Tea Party, a new right-wing political movement — tried to harness opposition to the so-called Ground Zero Mosque for electoral gain. Similar ballot initiatives appeared in over two dozen states during the next two years, with supporters frequently emphasizing that the use of Islamic law in the United States would violate America's "Judeo-Christian" heritage.

Use of the words "Judeo-Christian" to describe US history and identity is ubiquitous in American political rhetoric. The term is a seemingly timeless characterization of American society. Crucially, not only does the expression have a much shorter and more complicated history than its ancient connotations convey, but it is also often employed euphemistically to denote a Christian (and, more specifically, Protestant) perspective or position. As late as World War II, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman found their attempts to create national religious cohesion challenged by the fact that they could not get Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders to participate in interreligious endeavors, primarily because conservative Protestants refused to work with Catholics. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in contrast, the notion that the United States has a Judeo-Christian heritage was firmly cemented in the minds of conservative Protestants like Reynolds. Yet, despite this strongly stated conviction about the country's dual heritage, Reynolds clarified in his same comments the singular nature of the impulse that led him to introduce State Question 755: concern "about Christian values in our nation."

Evangelical politicians cited America's Judeo-Christian character as a reason why Muslims posed a national threat before the Ground Zero Mosque debate of 2010. For example, when the first Muslim elected to Congress — black American Keith Ellison from Minnesota — performed his oath of office with Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an instead of a Bible in 2006, Republican Congressman Virgil Goode warned that "we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon of freedom-loving peoples around the world."

It was in response to claims like these that Feisal Abdul Rauf promoted his narrative of Abrahamic (Jewish-Christian-Muslim) tradition after 9/11 and penned his 2004 book, What's Right with Islam. Although many advocates of interfaith cooperation echoed his narrative after 9/11, it was not always well received — particularly not after the Ground Zero Mosque debate. At a January 2012 campaign stop in South Carolina, for example, presidential candidate Rick Santorum not only spoke in terms of Judeo-Christian heritage, he pointedly excluded Muslims from so-called Abrahamic traditions and from the ethical lineage that stems from them. Equality "doesn't come from Islam ... It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," Santorum, a conservative Catholic, argued. (Muslims trace their religious lineage not through Isaac, but through Ishmael, Abraham's first son.)

Santorum was not Rauf's only conservative Catholic detractor. Newt Gingrich, another 2012 Republican presidential candidate, was a more prominent spokesperson for the anti-Muslim movement and against Cordoba House. Long active in trumpeting the nation's Judeo-Christian history, Gingrich led the Republican takeover of Congress on a "family values" platform in 1994. After he was charged with eighty-four counts of ethics violations, the former Southern Baptist retired from Congress in 1998 and pursued a new religious and political path: he converted to his third wife's Catholic faith and founded Gingrich Productions to promote his "vision of an America in which a belief in the Creator is once again at the center." This vision characterizes his 2010 film about the dangers of "radical Islam" called America At Risk: A War with No Name, as well as his 2010 and 2011 books, To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine and A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters.

Between 2010 and 2012, Gingrich went to extraordinary lengths to condemn Cordoba House and the larger Abrahamic vision of America it was to instantiate. Yet his rhetoric overstated his ideological differences with Rauf. Undoubtedly, he and politicians like Santorum are in many ways more socially conservative than the imam. Nevertheless, as I demonstrate below, both Rauf's and Gingrich's philosophies are liberal in terms of the Lockean liberalism evoked in the Declaration of Independence, of Progressive Era liberals who viewed Protestant America as the triumphant culmination of world history (a theme each modifies to include Catholicism or Islam), and of the post-Great Society neoliberalism that stresses individual responsibility, the privatization or repeal of state welfare provisions, and government involvement in the economy primarily on behalf of the market. This latter variety of market liberalism has often come to define the political perspectives of politicians and pundits like Gingrich — ones more commonly called "conservative."

Tellingly, although Rauf describes American society as "Abrahamic" and Gingrich insists it is "Judeo-Christian" in culture and origin, both define the nation's identity in terms of an exceptional "American Creed" based on US founding documents, fortified by religious roots and replete with economic implications. A closer look at this creed reveals the liberal philosophies of rights and neoliberal economic arrangements — including those in which religious organizations, rather than the state, provide community services — central to each man's story of American progress and uniqueness. Meanwhile, a closer look at the history that led them to write such narratives illuminates how the racialized themes of service and anti-socialism have been central to religious minorities' struggles for acceptance since at least the mid-twentieth century — but not in the ways Gingrich and Rauf suggest.

The American Creed: Common Ethics, Liberal Rights, and Liberal Markets

In his 2004 book, Rauf...