Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [127]
In 1791, the First Amendment was adopted, formally prohibiting Congress from establishing a national church and protecting the free exercise of religion. Eight years later, in amazing language for the time, the United States announced to the world in the Treaty of Tripoli, “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tran-quility of Musselmen [Muslims].” Again, many colonists were aghast at the “rebellion against God” by public officials. Opponents of the Constitution predicted with horror that a papist, Jew, or Mahometan might become president.
The Founding Fathers were unflinching in their defense of a secular Constitution. George Washington, while believing that churches fostered moral character, proudly urged the rest of the world to follow the American model. “The citizens of the United States of America,” he wrote, “have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience.”
Perhaps most striking—and what sharply distinguishes America's first president from Cyrus the Great or even William of Orange—was Washington's view that religious liberty was a fundamental right, not just a favor granted by those in power. In his own words, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”7
Of course, even after 1791, many people in the United States did not actually enjoy full religious freedom in practice. For one thing, the First Amendment originally applied only to the federal government. A number of states, mainly in New England, continued to have established Protestant churches; some even had compulsory churchgoing requirements. In addition, most of the original American states limited voting rights and the right to hold public office to Christians. It would take a few decades before these last vestiges of established churches were eliminated.
But the bottom line is this: From its birth, the United States was founded on the Enlightenment principle of religious tolerance, which it inherited from Holland and Britain but then expanded and extended. By the end of the eighteenth century, no rival power on earth was more religiously tolerant than the United States.
Religious tolerance, however, is not to be confused with racial tolerance. With only a few arguable exceptions, all the Founding Fathers suffered from the blinding racism of their time. It probably never occurred to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that freedom of religion might extend to their black slaves. As late as 1813, records show slaves on Southern plantations born with the traditional Muslim names “Fatima,” “Saluma,” and “Otteman,” but renamed “Neptune,” “Plato,” and “Hamlet” by their owners. Under the “enlightened” United States Constitution, Native Americans and slaves had essentially no rights at all.8
For reasons that we may never fully understand, skin color and intolerance have often been closely related. We saw this in Great Britain's attitude toward its nonwhite colonies, and western Europe continues to confront the painful realities of racism today. In America's case, race-based discrimination has characterized the entire history of United States immigration and assimilation. The original colonists and the Founding Fathers of the United States were all of western or northern European descent. The more a new wave of immigrants looked and acted like them, the more they