Obama to visit a mosque, and wade into war over Islam

Editor’s Note: Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of “Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) —

When President Obama travels to the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he will be doing more than making his first presidential visit to an American mosque. He will be wading into a culture war over Islam that has been raging in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Is Islam a religion of peace, as President George W. Bush said at the Islamic Cultural Center of Washington six days after 9/11? Or is it, as evangelist Franklin Graham has argued, a “very evil and wicked religion”?

Is the United States a mult-religious nation of “Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers,” as Obama said in his first inaugural address? Or is it a Christian nation that should temporarily bar all Muslims from entering the country, as GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has proposed?

Finally, is Obama, as roughly half of Republicans now believe, a Muslim masquerading as a Christian?

For a while after 9/11, it seemed as if the nation’s informal religious establishment, which had previously morphed from Protestant to Christian to Judeo-Christian was poised to become “Abrahamic,” embracing Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three branches of a common faith.

But the love-bombing eventually gave way to fear. And terrorist attacks at Paris and San Bernardino seemed proof to many of Ben Carson’s claim that Islam is “inconsistent with the values and principles of America.”

Threats, harassment, vandalism at mosques reach record high

Today many conservatives see tolerance as a Trojan Horse smuggling jihadis into the heartland. Some even claim that Islam is not entitled to First Amendment protections because, as televangelist Pat Robertson has argued, “Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination.”

America’s Islam wars go back much farther than 9/11, however.

During debates over the Constitution, proponents of a religious test for federal office said that the absence of such a test would make it “most certain that Papists may occupy [the presidency], and Mahometans may take it.”

During the rough-and-tumble election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson was accused of being a secret Muslim. “No one knows,” wrote the Connecticut Courant, “whether Mr. Jefferson believes in the heathen mythology or in the alcoran (Quran).”

In our 19th-century anti-Mormon culture war, the specter of Islam loomed again. In this, the broadest assault on any religion in U.S. history, the governor of Missouri issued an order to exterminate the Mormons and the U.S. Army was dispatched to quell them. Presidents denounced them in State of the Union addresses.