Catholics, Muslims, and American History

These images were first shown to me in a presentation by a University of Chicago professor, Alex Barna, regarding historical stereotypes and their relation to the current negative Islamic stereotypes. What struck me about the two images was that they were expressing the same negative stereotype using the same symbolism, but they were created roughly 100 years apart and address two totally different groups.

The first image depicts the Statue of Liberty with a Catholic clergyman as lady liberty and he stands on a bed of skulls. The second image depicts the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a burqa. Both warn of the impending invasion and take over of American values by a certain religious group. Having grown up in Chicago where almost all my neighbors are Catholic, anti-Catholicism in the United States is completely foreign to me, but there was a time in our history when Catholicism was seen as a threat, some argued we couldn't let Catholics into the government otherwise the Pope and Rome would eventually take control of the United States. This situation is eerily similar to the current movements in 13 states to ban the use of Sharia (Islamic law) in American courts. This article is somewhat biased, but it echoes my views. Fears about Sharia overtaking the American judicial system are completely unfounded. Sharia has many different interpretations and we can rest assured that no one will be sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery in the United States, just as they are not in many Muslim countries.

I think it helps to think about our Islamophobia in the context of the anti-Catholicism that used to be rampant in the United States. A lot of our fear and misconceptions come for a general ignorance about Islam, but having much more exposure to Catholicism, it seems absurd to me that people were ever afraid of Catholic invasion. The Pope has yet take control of the United States and I'm sure he does not plan on it. It is harder to dismiss Catholics as all a bunch of fundamentalist crazies because we know more about them. Now if we take a step back, we see that history is repeating itself, but this time people are screaming about a Muslim invasion. In this blog post by Americans for an Informed Democracy, they do a fantastic job of discussing a variety of factors that have contributed to anti-Muslim sentiment as well as a brief history of it. It cites media, politicians, and the $40 million efforts of seven anti-Islam organizations as some of the major causes for our misunderstanding of the faith and its follwers.

We seem to always have a scapegoat. What we as a society claim are their faults don't change much, and neither do the threats they pose. We merely put a new outfit on the Statue of Liberty and warn our fellow Americans of the new impending invasion.