When a man identified as \u201cTommy\u201d pressed Abdul El-Sayed at a town hall in Caro, Michigan, to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, the Democratic Senate nominee answered without hesitation: yes. He then challenged the premise of the question, asking whether the man was assuming that, because he is Muslim, he must have \u201cdual loyalties.\u201d After the exchange quickly went viral across social media and news outlets, subsequent reports emerged revealing that Tommy was a former political staffer, adding another layer of political theater to an already charged interaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not running to be a Muslim senator,\u201d El-Sayed said plainly, addressing the crowd and the broader public watching the fallout. \u201cI\u2019m running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim.\u201d <\/p>\n
In making that declaration, El-Sayed was deliberately evoking John F. Kennedy\u2019s historic line delivered to a room of skeptical Protestant clergy in Houston in 1960. When those religious leaders wanted to know whether a Catholic president would answer to Rome, Kennedy famously replied: \u201cI am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party\u2019s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.\u201d<\/p>\n
The resonance of that historic moment spans generations, touching the personal memories of voters and observers alike. For many Americans, the specter of religious-based suspicion is not an abstract political theory, but a lived family experience. <\/p>\n
Reflecting on that enduring American dynamic, one observer recalled: I first heard that story when I was eight, sitting in the back of the car and flipping through a book about the presidents. When I got to Kennedy, my father proudly piped up that he was the first Catholic president. I could hear the joy in his voice, so I asked why that was special, and he told me the same story El-Sayed told this weekend, about a candidate who had to stand in front of his fellow citizens and assured them that his faith did not make him untrustworthy.<\/p>\n
My father explained that we lived in an America where too many of our neighbors looked at religious differences and saw a threat rather than something the country could be proud of. I still remember asking him, on that same car ride, whether he thought another Catholic would be president soon. He sighed, took a beat, did the calculus every parent does about whether to be honest with a child about a hard thing. My father said, \u201cPray to Saint Jude \u2014 that might be an impossible cause.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirty years later, when Joe Biden was elected as the nation’s second Catholic president, I reminded him of that conversation and heard him laugh over the phone. \u201cHonestly, it\u2019s a miracle,\u201d he said. \u201cChalk one up for St. Jude.\u201d<\/p>\n
Memories like this help us recognize an old accusation when it returns in a new form. Speaking to reporters in Flint the day after the contentious town hall, El-Sayed described the charge of dual loyalty as something with \u201ca long history in our politics,\u201d aimed persistently at people who \u201cmight pray a little bit differently.\u201d <\/p>\n
Kennedy made the exact same argument to those Houston ministers in 1960 by reminding them of their own American past. He pointed out that Virginia\u2019s historical harassment of Baptist preachers had directly led to Thomas Jefferson\u2019s groundbreaking statute of religious freedom. Furthermore, he warned that while a Catholic might be the primary target of suspicion that particular year, in other eras of American history it had been Jews, Quakers, and Baptists who bore the brunt<\/p>\n
of public distrust.<\/p>\n
El-Sayed essentially asked the man in that Caro town hall to cultivate the same kind of historical memory that Kennedy asked of those Protestant ministers back in 1960 \u2014 a willingness to recognize that the religious freedom so many citizens take for granted today was originally won by people whom their own forebears once distrusted and marginalized. The country\u2019s commitment to pluralism and religious liberty has been extended slowly and unevenly over the centuries, often only after communities on the outside insisted repeatedly and courageously that they belonged.<\/p>\n
Remembering both parts of that complex history \u2014 the long record of suspicion and the parallel record of Americans who kept pushing past it \u2014 is what prevents either narrative from passing for the complete story. The burden of suspicion has predictably moved from one community to the next across the span of American history. Those of us whose families once lived under the weight of that suspicion have a particular calling to speak up when it lands on someone else, even if we share little in common, disagree on deeply important policy matters, or pray a little differently.<\/p>\n
Standing together in defense of civil liberties does not mean endorsing a candidate, nor does it require Michigan\u2019s diverse Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities to set aside the very real, sometimes painful disagreements that are straining their relationships during this election cycle. But it does mean flatly refusing the premise that an individual\u2019s faith is evidence against their love of the country or their worth as a full and equal citizen. <\/p>\n
El-Sayed told the man in Caro that the United States Constitution is \u201cthe guiding light\u201d for him, and he asked his interlocutor to consider why he was asking the question in the first place. What conclusions, El-Sayed challenged, had the questioner jumped to based solely on the unexamined assumption that a differing creed means a person doesn\u2019t value being a citizen in the same way?<\/p>\n
Yet, there is genuine encouragement to be found in how these stories have played out before. When I was eight years old, my father couldn\u2019t honestly say whether another Catholic would ever be president again in our lifetimes. By the time one finally was, the old, persistent question about whether a Catholic would answer to Rome had largely fallen away from national discourse. <\/p>\n
History does not offer any absolute promises that the specific brand of suspicion El-Sayed faced this weekend will fade in the exact same way. However, history does show that it certainly can. Bigotry and political suspicion tend to fade fastest when people are willing to pause and ask themselves the very same probing question El-Sayed put directly to the man in Caro.<\/p>\n
When someone\u2019s faith makes us wary or uncomfortable, it is worth pausing to examine what we actually know about that person as an individual. It is equally worth remembering that community after community, once asked to prove its fundamental loyalty to the American experiment, has gone on to help shape what loyalty and patriotism to this country truly look like today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When a man identified as \u201cTommy\u201d pressed Abdul El-Sayed at a town hall in Caro, Michigan, to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, the Democratic Senate nominee answered without hesitation: yes. He then challenged the premise of the question, asking whether the man was assuming that, because he is Muslim, he must have \u201cdual loyalties.\u201d After the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[518],"tags":[770,1562,1558,1564,1569,520,1568,1570,519,522,1565,1566,1560,1571,1563,1561,1559,521,1567],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interfaith-family-ethics","tag-abdul","tag-confronts","tag-democratic","tag-dual","tag-echoing","tag-family-ethics","tag-hall","tag-historical","tag-interfaith","tag-interfaith-parenting","tag-loyalty","tag-michigan","tag-nominee","tag-precedents","tag-questions","tag-sayed","tag-senate","tag-spiritual-diversity","tag-town"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}