Nativism sweeping the US

Opinion: August 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Two millenniums ago, an itinerant young Galilean teacher with a fondness for parables told one of his audiences that no sensible person ever would pour new wine into old wineskins. The skins, after all, would burst, and ruin would follow.

It’s an apt metaphor for this increasingly frenzied and foolish moment in our history. Rising tides of anti-Muslim hysteria and animosity toward undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Latinos (the bitter new wine), have conjoined and are forcing us toward an eerie recapitulation of the Nativist movements (the dreary old skin) that roiled our nation’s national and state politics for more than 120 years. Ever since 9/11, a sensible rejection of Salafism and other variants of politicized Islamic neo-fundamentalism has been given way in many quarters to a generalized antipathy to Islam itself. Step by step, that prejudice is migrating into the political mainstream, a process that has accelerated with the controversy over a proposed Islamic study center a few blocks from Ground Zero.

Last week, for example, Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis at the American Family Association, wrote that First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom do not apply to Muslims and that no more mosques should be constructed anywhere in America. As he told a reporter for a leading political website (talkingpointsmemo.com), every single mosque is a potential terrorist training center or recruitment center for jihad and thus “you cannot claim First Amendment protections if your religious organization is engaged in subversive activities.”

Values Voters Summit

Fischer is hardly a figure from the fringe. He will be speaking at next month’s Values Voter Summit — his organization is one of the event’s sponsors — along with GOP presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

There were vulgar Nativist firebrands from the 1840s forward who indulged in hysteria about Catholic and, later, Jewish and Orthodox Christian immigrants. More influential, and insidious, were what might be called “reasonable Nativists,” like the otherwise admirable John Quincy Adams, who were too fastidious for overt bigotry but argued more in sorrow than in anger that immigrants who believed what Catholics believe simply couldn’t be assimilated into the United States because their fundamental beliefs were foreign to our values.

Obviously, if you really thought the millions of Catholic immigrants pouring into the United States lived their lives in full conformity to every papal tic and dictate, there was reason for concern. In fact, Catholic parishes across the country, particularly under Irish-born pastors, became powerful educational forces, inculcating American notions of middle-class respectability into new immigrants. Patriotism was preached from those pulpits far more often than any papal bull. Similarly, recent studies have shown that young American Muslims whose families are formally affiliated with a mosque are far less likely to flirt with any form of radicalism than those without that connection.

The notion is ludicrous that the legions of Americans who profess Islam and go about their daily lives exactly like the rest of us somehow are hanging on the latest fatwa from some benighted Wahhabi imam back in the Middle East.

Nativism was one of our history’s most painful chapters. Reliving it would be torture.

Timothy Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.