The Problem with Prejudice

POPE FRANCIS arrived in the United States amid a flurry of talk about Muslims. There was Ben Carson’s statement that he would not want a Muslim to be president. There was The Donald’s promise that a Trump administration would look into the supposed network of Muslim terrorist training camps in the United States. And there was young Ahmed Mohamed in Texas, who got suspended from school and shackled in handcuffs when his science project was mistaken for a bomb. Maybe the police were concerned that he’d designed it in one of those fictitious terrorist camps.

It appears that many Americans are in a panic about the prospect of a Muslim takeover.

Domination by a foreign religion is an old anxiety in America. As we hang on every word Pope Francis utters, it is interesting to note that for much of our history a driving fear was that Catholics would amass significant political power and the pope would fly his flag at the White House. 

“Our freedom, our religious freedom, is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Norman Vincent Peale warned in September 1960 about John F. Kennedy’s candidacy.

With 30 percent of Congress now claiming to be Catholic, six Catholics sitting on the Supreme Court, several Catholics occupying high office (including the vice president, the secretary of state, and the speaker of the House), and a pope with much to say about major policy issues, that particular apocalypse appears to have arrived.

Mostly, it has been met with applause. The papal flag was indeed flying at the White House during the pope’s arrival ceremony—several thousand of them in fact, more than a few in the hands of the many non-Catholics in attendance. Recent surveys show that Catholics, along with Jews and mainline Protestants, are among the most well-liked religious groups in the United States.

How did Catholics go from suffering what historian Arthur Schlesinger called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people” to being widely embraced and influential?

Largely I think it is because there is a wide recognition that Catholics make a positive impact in the United States. Some of the country’s best universities, including Georgetown and Notre Dame, are Catholic. There are hundreds of Catholic hospitals, thousands of Catholic elementary and high schools, and countless Catholic social service agencies, almost all of which heal, educate, and help a substantial number of non-Catholics.

WE LAUGH WHEN we think about past fears that such institutions were Trojan Horses carrying the scourge of popery, but consider for a moment what might have happened if the forces of anti-Catholic prejudice had won. The Catholic contribution to America—all those schools and hospitals and universities—might have been blocked.

Now imagine if Ahmed Mohamed’s clock had not somehow become a national scandal, and if he instead had served out his three-day suspension from school in disgrace, suffered the Islamophobic taunts that would have most certainly followed, and decided that nurturing his scientific talents and contributing them to the world was simply not worth the trouble.

The problem with prejudice is not just the way it violates the dignity of the targeted individual or community, but also the barrier it erects to their contribution, especially the kind that are the lifeblood of any democratic society. 

Every inspiring sentence the pope speaks ought to remind us of what we might have missed if the anti-Catholic prejudice of the past had prevented his presence in America, and what we might be losing out on now if we allow other forms of bias to fester.