Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (33 page)

Iredell’s assertion “that a man may be of different religious sentiments from our own, without being a bad member of society” would normally have been understood as a call to toleration among Protestant denominations.
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There was no strategic need to press his arguments further, and he could have ignored Abbot’s initial reference to Muslims. But he deliberately focused on it, invoking their potential as elected officials. Locke’s famous phrase cited by Jefferson in 1776, that “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion,”
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fairly echoes in Iredell’s speech:

With these two sentences, conflating Locke and Jefferson, Iredell overturns the standard American thinking about Muslims. In an instant, they become imaginable not as brigands or interlopers but as members and leaders of American society, deserving, irrespective of their religious convictions, equal representation under the Constitution. With no Muslims believed to exist then in America, Iredell could have made the point against religious tests without bringing them to the heart of constitutional debate. Abbot mentioned Muslims first, but his plan was to exclude them and provoke his listeners. Iredell, however, without immediate strategic necessity, defended the rights of Muslims in his principled, theoretical defense of all believers.

Iredell asserted that the exclusion of Muslim rights, if countenanced, would become emblematic of religious persecution, with the possible result that “the best men” of the country were kept from office while the truly unscrupulous, including “the worst part of the excluded sects,” would affirm religious conviction they did not possess and find their way to power.
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Being a consummate politician, Iredell also found a way to appease his Anti-Federalist opponents by qualifying his principled calls for Muslim inclusion. “But it is never to be supposed,” he assured his listeners, “that the people of America will trust their rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own.”
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Most would have been ready to believe as much, rendering
Iredell’s plea for Muslims more a matter of high principle than practical politics.

Those on his own side would have seen it that way: Federalists may have supported political equality for all religions, but they too adhered to the limits of the Protestant status quo. And so it was perfectly plausible that Iredell should advocate equal rights for Muslims only to wave away Muslim equality in America as illusory. He could plausibly claim to be offering them no realistic place in the American polity, even as he seemed to include them within a new definition of American political equality.

Not unlike Jefferson, Iredell believed that religion was a private matter, one in which the federal government should not interfere. And like Locke, he saw no justification in divine authority for religious compulsion or persecution:

Acceptance that Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world, Iredell thought, was the best way to promote a bright future for Protestant Christianity in the United States—one without government interference.

As Iredell began to observe, mention of Muslims also evoked similar fears of Catholics among the Anti-Federalists. In fact, Catholics were deemed the most menacing non-Protestant part of the population, their numbers estimated at twenty-five thousand, with most situated in
Maryland.
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Memories of “anti-Protestant plots,” as well as England’s conflicts with Catholic France and Spain, had fed anti-Catholic sentiment in America from the beginning, so that “by the 1700s every governor sent out to royal colonies … received instructions to allow Catholics no liberty of conscience, which literally meant that they were forbidden to express themselves as Catholics in those provinces.”
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Later, even the one state founded by Catholics, Maryland, would order them disarmed “when war threatened[,] and denied them entry into the militia.”
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The question of potential Catholic access to
political power, long denied them by pervasive religious oaths, provoked Protestant delegates in predictable ways in the North Carolina ratification debate. What those with pronounced anti-Catholic prejudice among the delegates could not predict was that James Iredell would find a novel and hilarious method to attack what he believed to be their groundless anxieties.

In defending the abolition of a religious test, Iredell had to address these sentiments toward an actual segment of the population, and he did so by means of an absurdist critique, ridiculing talk of a “Popish plot” to capture the office of president of the United States. Iredell described a pamphlet he claimed he had read that very morning “in which the author states, as a very serious danger, that the pope of Rome might be elected President.”
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At first he seemed in earnest: “I confess this never struck me before; and if the author had read all the qualifications of a President, perhaps his fears might have been quieted.”
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The Constitution’s ablest defender then launched into a recital of the steps necessary for an American to assume the mantle of both pope and president:

Then he delivered the coup de grâce. “It would be still more extraordinary if he should give up his popedom for our presidency,” he mused, before finally allowing that “it is impossible to treat such idle fears with any degree of gravity.” The danger of a
pope as president was no more imminent than the election of “one of the kings of Europe.”
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Earlier in debate with Abbot, Iredell had been obliged to rebut claims that were Catholics to become government officials they could make treaties with Catholic powers, resulting in the establishment of that religion. A little later he offered what would be the day’s only favorable mention of Catholicism, observing, with respect to the growth of tolerance in Europe, “In the Roman Catholic countries, principles of
moderation are adopted which would have been spurned at a century or two ago.”
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His words did not prevent other Anti-Federalist delegates from wishing that “the Constitution excluded Popish priests from offices.”
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Ultimately, Iredell could not dispel the single most horrific prospect, that of an eventual Catholic president.
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In Iredell’s view, the real danger for the new Republic was not in the ascent of non-Protestants but in the rise of the sort of oppression the nation was founded to escape; for this reason, the omission of a religious test in the Constitution was “calculated to secure universal religious liberty, by putting all sects on a level—the only way to prevent persecution.” It was of a piece with the other founding principles: “This country,” Iredell argued, “has already had the honor of setting an example of civil freedom, and I trust it will likewise have the honor of teaching the rest of the world the way to religious freedom also.” The lawyer and believer then pronounced his benediction: “God grant both may be perpetuated to the end of time!”
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Iredell went on to address other practical limitations of oaths based on religion, particularly in the case of Jews. They seemed less threatening to the Anti-Federalists, having, unlike Catholics and Muslims, no perceived claim on the help of a foreign power. And they were far fewer than Catholics, the Jewish population being estimated at no more than two thousand in 1776,
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with most concentrated in the coastal towns of Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; New York City; Philadelphia; and Newport, Rhode Island.
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But with religious oaths typically sworn on the New Testament, Jews were excluded from holding office. It was certainly so in Iredell’s own state, though he chose not to emphasize that. Instead he noted that the practice had already presented a problem in British courts when it came to swearing in not only Jews but others he termed “heathens.” In the case of the former, at least, a practical accommodation was made:

What was important to consider was the “form of an oath,” which “according to the modern definition” was “a solemn appeal to the Supreme Being, for the truth of what is said.” The essence of the oath’s
value was not merely the oath taker’s belief in God, but also his expectation of “a future state of rewards and punishments,” designed “according to that form which will bind the conscience most.” Warning against the consequences of “narrow notions,” Iredell pled for those “many virtuous men in the world” who were neither Jews nor Christians, having “had not an opportunity of being instructed either in the Old or New Testament, who yet very sincerely believed in a Supreme Being, and in a future state of rewards and punishments.” To whom might such a definition have referred? Muslims, at least theoretically, although he did not name them, instead merely reminding his listeners that “there are few people so grossly ignorant or barbarous as to have no religion at all. And if none but Christians or Jews could be examined upon oath, many innocent persons might suffer for want of the testimony of others. In regard to this form of an oath, that ought to be governed by the religious person taking it.”
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The lawyer’s strategy bears remarking: The oaths of non-Protestants were often necessary to do justice in the law courts. If admissible there, how could they reasonably be excluded for other official purposes? They could not, and so having defended the rights of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews, Iredell went on to include the “heathen” among those capable of being sworn; the lawyer adduced a chancery court case from “forty years ago” involving “an East Indian,” or Hindu, whose “answer upon oath to a bill filed against him was absolutely necessary”:
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According to the
Laws of Manu
, the ancient code of law for Hindus still relevant under British rule, touching the foot was a common
gesture in India, not in court cases but as a show of deference to elders, teachers, and those of higher castes.
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Iredell argued that since “this great case” involving a Hindu, “it has been universally considered that, in administering an oath, it is only necessary to inquire if the person who is to take it, believes in a Supreme Being, and in a future state of rewards and punishments.” And so his proposed reliance on whatever “will bind his conscience most” had a legal precedent. He argued that there was no need for elected and appointed officials of the U.S. government to swear by whatever they believed about any one deity—or the next life—but only to uphold the Constitution.
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The issues of religious belief and a future state of rewards or punishments were thus simultaneously stricken as incentives to tell the truth by government officials.

Iredell’s staunchest ally was also his brother-in-law, Samuel Johnston. An Anglican like Iredell, he had been elected governor in 1787, having moved to North Carolina from Scotland with his family when a relative of his had been appointed governor.
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He studied at Yale, but left without earning a degree, returning to settle in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1753. An early subscriber of the Revolutionary cause, Johnston would help draft a state constitution in 1776.
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Probably the richest man at the convention, he owned over eight thousand acres and ninety-six slaves.
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