It’s true that our Constitution says that there shall be no religious test to hold political office in the United States. You can find this in Article VI:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
I mean, that’s not even in the newfangled Bill of Rights. It’s right there in the original Constitution, and so it ought to be as uncontroversial as any part of the Constitution can be. It’s nice of Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to remind Ben Carson of this because I get worried when stuff that shouldn’t be political suddenly becomes contentious. That leads to state-sanctioned torture, for example, and climate science denialism.
But I don’t think it’s crazy for people to feel uncomfortable about people of other religions becoming president of the United States. First, being uncomfortable is not the same thing as saying that a person is barred from even running for the office. Second, the same clause that gives people the right to run for any office regardless of their beliefs is a recognition that we don’t want our officeholders imposing their beliefs on us.
Some people questioned whether John F. Kennedy would be independent of the Vatican, and even I wondered exactly how the leadership of the Mormon church might influence Mitt Romney if he were to become our president. Islam doesn’t have the same kind of hierarchical and centralized political structure, but practitioners of the religion do typically follow one school of thought or another and there are leaders within each school or each community who can exert a lot of influence. At the extremes, you can find the situation that Ben Carson is concerned about where an individual Muslim will follow religious instruction that is inconsistent with the values in our Constitution. For example, if they are committed to following a higher law when their Islamic teaching comes into conflict with our secular laws.
Under the circumstances, it is not unreasonable to ask John Kennedy or Mitt Romney or some hypothetical Muslim candidate for the presidency how they personally understand these boundaries and to seek assurances that when they take their oath to support the Constitution that they will mean it in a sense that we can trust.
This isn’t bigotry, at least not by itself. It’s actually the opposite, in a sense, because what it seeks is assurances that one religious viewpoint will not take precedence over another.
This can seem kind of strained since we’ve lived for over 225 years with nothing but deists and agnostics and Protestants (and one Catholic) as our president and so it’s pretty clear that that faith tradition has had de facto precedence even if it hasn’t been articulated into formal law. You can always find a double standard without too much difficulty here because we didn’t ask Sarah Palin and we don’t ask Hillary Clinton about their ability to uphold our laws without undue influence from their religious instructors.
In principle, though, there isn’t a problem with asking that kind of question. After watching Joe Lieberman’s behavior (as a private citizen) over the Iran Nuclear Deal, I think it’s entirely reasonable to question whether he had the independence of mind to serve our country as vice-president or president, or if he was so wedded to his perception of Israel’s security interests that he couldn’t be trusted with our own. This isn’t in any way anti-Jewish, nor does it mean that all Jewish office seekers should be regarded with high suspicion. It just means that the electorate has the right to be concerned about such things and to seek answers about them.
In this limited sense, I understand why Ben Carson doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of a Muslim president, just as I understood it when some people didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of Romney as president. Where the bigotry starts, however, is when you don’t want to do the hard work of assessing an individual and instead want to go the easy route of just barring some religious minority from holding office at all.
This is the kind of laziness that led to the Japanese internment camps and that led to random acts of violence against Muslim-looking people in the aftermath of 9/11. Religious bigotry feeds off of precisely this kind of laziness and fear.
Political leadership of the positive sort is dedicated to helping people get beyond fear so that they can be decent individuals. Political demagoguery consists of fanning and exploiting fear so that distinctions disappear and fear can be redirected as hatred towards some largely defenseless group.
We know which camp Ben Carson is in. Unfortunately, he has a lot of company in the Republican Party right now.
