story based on religious dicrimination
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American Muslims face fear, uncertainty, discrimination
On a chilly November evening following this year’s election, the Muslim Students’ Association at the University of Michigan held their nighttime prayer in a main square on campus. The visible location for the prayer was intended as a response to a series of hate-related incidents at the university directed at Muslim students. The group called on allies on campus to help, and they did. Hundreds of students and faculty formed a human chain surrounding the group, to both protect and show solidarity with their classmates. It was a beautiful moment of unity, but also a frightening indication of where we are.
How did we get here?
The rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign seems to bear some of the responsibility. He ran on a platform that included a call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, a proposal BJC Executive Director Brent Walker referred to as “un-American, unworkable, counterproductive and embarrassing” in December 2015. Trump followed that idea with plans for religious profiling of American Muslims, including the surveillance of mosques, as a law enforcement technique that we “have to start thinking about as a country.”
Trump said he thinks that “Islam hates us,” and he asked in campaign speeches for Americans to “[i]magine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God … .” It should be no surprise that American Muslims – and other Americans – fear his presidency may pit their faith and their country against one another.
But the current rise in anti-Muslim hostility did not begin with the 2016 presidential campaign. The Justice Department reports that claims of religious discrimination in local zoning decisions have been increasing steadily since 2010. An FBI report demonstrated that religion-based hate crimes rose 23 percent between 2014 and 2015, with the number of anti-Muslim incidents spiking even more dramatically over that span.
A poll released in January revealed that, while 82 percent of Americans believe it is “important to protect the religious freedom of Christians in this country,” only 61 percent say the same of Muslims. Indeed, Gerald Harris, editor of a Georgia Baptist newspaper, wrote that American Muslims are not entitled to religious liberty benefits at all, a position that Walker noted was “contrary to more than 400 years of Baptist history” in a response this summer.
If there is good news related to this troubling trend in recent years, it is that religious liberty advocates have been galvanized to defend the rights of minorities and to work together to enhance communication across religious lines.
The Baptist Joint Committee is part of the Know Your Neighbor coalition, working with several other organizations to foster interfaith dialogue and understanding. In July, the White House invited the coalition to participate in an event releasing new federal policies aimed at combating religious discrimination