No Religious Test? (op-ed)





Right after Senator Obama announced his candidacy for president a rumor spread that he was a Muslim. (The internet magazine Insight claimed that the Clinton campaign told them Obama attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, of course, the Clinton campaign denied the allegations.) But the falsehood was all that was needed for fringe members of different Christian denominations to lose faith in Obama’s presidential qualifications. 


Obama supporters rejected the Muslim label and reinforced their candidate’s Christian assertions. But Obama supporters never attempted to silence the Muslim accusations by asking the Islamophobic accusers: So what if he is? Or what difference does it make? They didn’t bother to point out that Article VI of the constitution states no religious test shall be required for office holders. Why not? Because the constitution doesn’t restrict the opinion held by the public, people are prejudicial.


In 1928 republican Herbert Hoover was elected president. The race wasn’t close. The landslide was blamed on “three P’s: Prohibition, Prosperity, and Prejudice.” Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith was the first catholic presidential nominee and Protestants feared a catholic president would take direct orders from the Pope. The next year the stock market crashed. Catholics were relieved Smith lost. They felt if he was president the great depression would have been blamed on Catholicism.


In 1960 John F. Kennedy confronted the same anti-catholic climate. He addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association and said, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or other ecclesiastical source … I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end … Where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind … This is the kind of America … I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a divided loyalty, that we did not believe in liberty, or that we belonged to a disloyal group.”


Kennedy’s speech was effective.


In 2008 Obama also delivered a speech to secure the democratic nomination. After the Muslim rumor Obama had to distant himself from anti-American comments made by the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, the church Obama attended for twenty years, and he had to disassociate himself from the church’s philosophy of Black Liberation Theology.


Liberation theology originated in Latin America within the Catholic Church in the 1950’s. It was a moral response to poverty with an emphasis on social justice. Many Americans that religiously opposed communism dismissed liberation theology as Christian Marxism. (Black Liberation Theology had the same focus but it originated as a counter to Black Muslims proclaiming Christianity as the white man’s religion.)


Meanwhile during the republican primary presidential candidate Mitt Romney wasn’t even considered by some voters because of his Mormonism. According to a 2008 poll 29 percent of republicans said they would not vote for a Mormon and Evangelicals simply called Mormonism heretical.


Now in 2015 republican presidential candidate Ben Carson stated he would not advocate for a Muslim to be in charge of the country because Islam is inconsistent with the constitution. These anti-Muslim comments have attracted the largest amount of contribution toward Carson’s campaign.


Back in 1960 Kennedy said, “When the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been … A Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian …Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you.”



First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 9/30/15