Award-winning religion reporter Richard Ostling recently noted a “neglected story” from 2018, namely the November 29 signing of the American Charter of Freedom of Religion and Conscience. This deeply flawed document, “at 5,000 words needlessly repetitive” in his description, includes several nefarious exponents of political Islam in an initiative that will ultimately do little to promote freedom.
The charter correctly emphasizes that religious freedom is a “fundamental right grounded in the dignity of the human person” and correspondingly notes the 1776 Declaration of Independence with its expression of natural law. America’s founding document is part of the “great tradition of freedom-loving peoples and their ringing declarations” such as the 1215 Magna Carta and the 1791 United States Constitution. This tradition evinces that “Americans’ political commitment to the Republic is rooted in deep pre-political conviction.”
The charter notes that religious freedom “has played an irreplaceable role in the story of our nation” and created “social capital…vital for human flourishing.” Correspondingly, the charter lauds the religious leadership in American reform movements, such as those against slavery and segregation. The charter thus announces its “distinctively American,” character while its authors universally “commend the vision, principles, and goals of the Charter to other nations.”
Yet the leadership of a prominent conservative Montana evangelical church (they believe in “young-Earth creationism” and that “Roman Catholicism is a counterfeit Christianity”) scorns the charter’s underlying ecumenical universalism. The church’s popular website Pulpit and Pen (PP) criticizes the fact that the charter “places oppressive religions like Islam in the same category as Christianity and credits them all with equal contributions to the American way of life.” While the American abolitionist and civil rights movements drew heavily upon Christian faith, the charter’s general terms are “gutting America of its theological underpinnings, minimizing its Christian heritage.”
The 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville provides compelling witness for PP’s valid observation that “America’s commitment to Christianity is responsible for its national exceptionalism.” American “pre-political” human rights values come from the “uniquely Christian doctrine” of mankind being made in the “Imago Dei.” By contrast, as the esteemed Catholic intellectual Robert Reilly has lucidly analyzed, Islamic orthodoxy’s denial that humanity shares a divine likeness has resulted in Islamic denigration of the human reason that underlies free societies.
Notwithstanding the charter’s prioritization of “pluralism” in America and abroad, observes the Christian commentator Cody Libolt, “some cultures are better than others.” The charter’s citation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) among freedom’s “ringing declarations” ignores the fact that the UDHR resulted from centuries of human rights advocacy in which Christians were preeminent. All the other “ringing declarations” merely represent the “great tradition of freedom-loving peoples” in Anglo-American culture.
PP rightfully suspects that certain charter language would prevent policymakers from exercising precisely such necessary cultural awareness with respect to Islam. The charter vaguely opposes “any governmental policy that would discriminate against individuals or groups based on their religion.” The charter further condemns “rhetoric and actions by governmental leaders and others that demonize individuals or faith communities” or that “hold entire faith groups collectively responsible for the evil deeds of a few.” As PP observes, the charter apparently targets “policies like that threatened by President Trump” to “place a temporary moratorium on immigrants from primarily Islamic nations who want to destroy the United States.”
Review of the charter’s Muslim signatories only confirms PP’s wariness towards multiculturalism. Both Mohamed Magid and Sayyid Syeed, a man who wants to “to change the constitution of America” that is so praised by the charter, have not-so-“freedom-loving” pasts, as evidenced by both men’s leadership of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). This Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-derived organization and terrorism-financing unindicted co-conspirator demonstrated its continuing Islamic supremacism at ISNA’s 2018 annual conference with a rogue’s gallery of jihad terrorism apologists and Israel-haters.
Likewise Eftakhar Alam and Anwar Khan represent Islamic Relief USA, the American branch of another global MB organization known for antisemitism and terrorism support. Omar Suleiman’s apologetics for honor killings and sex slavery, along with his vicious antisemitism and Islamic myths that deny Jewish Temple Mount history, hardly befit the “dignity of the human person.” The Shiite Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini is similarly anti-Semitic, as indicated by his Dearborn, Michigan, Islamic Center of America hosting Louis Farrakhan as well as a 2010 memorial service for Hezbollah leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
“Free exercise of religion and conscience requires other fundamental rights also guaranteed by the First Amendment, including the freedoms of speech,” the charter proclaims, yet its Muslim signatories have consistently belied this sentiment. Al-Qazwini called in 2012 for censoring the internet film Innocence of Muslims as a form of incitement, while Suleiman has aided Google’s suppression of “Islamophobia.” Maha ElGenaidi wrote to Stanford University about her horrified opposition to a 2017 lecture by the “well-known national fomenter of Islamophobia,” Jihad Watch’s own Robert Spencer.
Similarly, Princeton University Muslim Life Coordinator and Chaplain Imam Sohaib Sultan tried to stop a 2009 address by the Egyptian-American Muslim convert to Christianity Nonie Darwish. His fellow signatory Asma Uddin once promoted the deranged leftist Israel-hater, academic fraud, and “Islamophobia” scam artist Nathan Lean at a Washington, DC, event by the Rumi Forum, part of the shadowy Islamic Fethullah Gülen network. She has correspondingly downplayed Islamic sharia law’s dangers and has wrongly argued that state law prohibitions on judicial application of foreign laws like sharia in violation of constitutional rights would ban private Islamic religious arbitration.
The Muslim charter signatory Usra Ghazi’s speech raises troubling questions of its own. She once responded to the internet sensation of a woman who wrote about concealing her Muslim identity to other Muslims, because she feared their condemnation for wearing traditionally non-Islamic female attire such as shorts. Ghazi argued that such “chastisement comes from a place of love” and is “taking really literally and personally the Koranic commandment [i.e. Quran 3:110] to enjoin good and forbid evil for the sake of the salvation of other Muslims.” While under the law in free societies such as America, she may debate such Islamic hijab dress codes for women, other women globally know from bitter personal experience how oppressive such Islamic enjoinment can be.
The charter proclaims with sacral invocations a religious freedom “commitment that is, at its heart, covenantal, based on a solemn and binding promise between citizens as embodied in the U.S. Constitution.” Yet the charter’s Muslim signatories inspire little confidence that they will embrace any such solemn commitment and its Western moral and theological underpinnings. By contrast, these dubious individuals will benefit from the legitimacy of associating with such a lofty-sounding charter and its implied opposition to “Islamophobia.” However, the charter will provide less benefit in protecting the religious freedom concerns of the charter’s often naïve non-Muslim signatories, as a forthcoming article will analyze.