The better angels of our nature

My great-grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan back in the “good ol’ days” of the 1920s.

He was a Methodist minister in North Dakota; the focus of the Klan’s ire there was Catholicism, the faith of many central European immigrants who came to the Great Plains to farm.

He came to repent (more or less) of his bigoted zeal; it was the nature of the times, you see. The spreading of Catholicism by a large wave of central and southern European immigrants was seen as a threat to the American way of life — a white and Protestant way of life.

America was undergoing tremendous change in those days. More and more people were leaving the farm to take up jobs in urban centers, whose populations were exploding due to internal migration and external immigration. Then, as now, immigration was a hot topic. Congress passed immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 aimed at excluding Asians and restricting those mainly-Catholic immigrants from southern Europe.

Americans of northern European, Protestant descent feared being swamped by “alien” races and religious faiths.

If all that sounds familiar, it should. We are undergoing massive demographic and socioeconomic change again. That, to me, is at the root of the controversy over the so-called “ground zero mosque” (which is neither at “ground zero” nor a mosque). Our cultural anxieties have pushed the issue to the forefront of the national discourse.

On one level, it is easy to understand the reaction of those who oppose the Park 51 project. The World Trade Center site will always have profound symbolic meaning to Americans, like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor. People are sensitive — and should be — about such sites.

But an Islamic community center near (not at) the site is only an affront if you believe that Islam itself perpetrated the criminal acts of war that occurred there and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

That is fundamentally false. Islam did not attack America; 19 men, mostly Saudis, poisoned by hatred and a vicious perversion of Islam, attacked America, backed by a terrorist network that has also attacked and killed thousands of other Muslims in violation of the tenets of their own faith.

Do not forget that Muslim Americans were murdered in the September 11 attacks, too.
We must allow “the better angels of our nature” (to borrow Lincoln’s phrase from another time of bitter division and anxiety) to come to the fore on this issue. As my friend Andrew Gorayeb argues in an opinion piece in next week’s Nugget, our Constitution guarantees the right of worship (I would add the protection of the right not to worship as well) to everyone. The religious freedom clauses of the first amendment are a pillar of our national faith. This is a chance to live up to our highest ideals, rather than succumbing to our lowest passions.

There will always be those who profit from stoking our fears and resentments. The 20th century was rife with demagogues who focused that fear on the “other” in order to enhance their own power. It’s happening now.

But America is great enough to change — even at the price of excrutiating pain — and be better for it. We’ve done it many times before. By the 1940s, those Catholic immigrants my great-grandfather feared were an integral part of the fabric of the nation.

The cliched platoon from countless World War II movies revealed a truth: America was, indeed, made up of the tough Italian kid from New Jersey (John Basilone anyone?), the cocky Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen, the Pole from Chicago, the slow-talkin’, straight-shootin’ Georgia boy, the clean-cut college boy from New England.

Within a couple of decades, the black kid from Alabama was there, too, along with Latinos, Asians — even women.

The Park51 community center debate is a great opportunity to remind ourselves and the world of American exceptionalism. We made a choice more than two centuries ago to be a beacon of liberty in a dark world. We haven’t always lived up to our own standards, but always, eventually, those “better angels of our nature” have won out.

We set aside our fear and adapt to change and welcome people of all creeds and cultures to enjoy the blessings of liberty.

That’s how we roll.

Jim Cornelius, Editor