In October 1995, just months after graduating from law school, Suhail Khan moved home to San Jose. One day, taking the local paper out of its wrapper from the driveway of his parents’ home, he found himself stunned by the story splashed across the front page. Longtime US congressman Norman Mineta had announced that he was resigning his seat in thirty days. Mineta, a Democrat, had lost his powerful position as chair of the Transportation Committee in the Republican revolution of 1994, and had decided that taking a job as a corporate lobbyist for Lockheed Martin would be more fruitful than being in the minority.1 The article listed a number of prominent Bay Area Democrats who would likely compete for the seat. Toward the end, somewhat offhandedly, it suggested that there might be a Republican candidate as well—Tom Campbell.
That name rang a bell for Suhail. Campbell was a professor at Stanford Law School and a state senator. Suhail knew the name from California state Republican circles. Campbell had a reputation as a man guided by principles, not partisan ideology or personal ambition. Among other things, Suhail had always respected that he didn’t take political action committee money.
Suhail, who had attended law school at the University of Iowa, was hoping to turn his familiarity with that all-important early caucus state into a position with a Republican presidential candidate. He’d been having promising conversations with staff in the Bob Dole campaign, but the possibility of being involved in a race in his home district intrigued him. He called Stanford Law School to see if he could get through to Campbell. After being transferred around for a while, he finally heard Campbell’s voice on the other end of the line. Suhail explained that he’d read the Mercury News article and that he’d like to find out more about Campbell’s campaign. Campbell said that he’d read the same article and was intrigued by the possibility himself.
“You mean you haven’t announced that you’re running yet?” Suhail asked, a little surprised.
“Mineta’s announcement shocked everyone. I haven’t even had time to decide whether I want to run, let alone announce it to a newspaper,” Campbell explained. He had spent much of the morning trying to get through to his wife, who was in Russia at the time. He took down Suhail’s number and said he’d get back to him if he chose to get into the race. Suhail had been around politics long enough to know not to wait by the phone.
Born in Colorado and raised in Northern California by Indian Muslim immigrant parents, Suhail traced his interest in politics back to both his parents’ influence and to a chance moment in American television. As a kid, he happened to be watching Schoolhouse Rock on the day the animated educational show for children had a civics lesson. “I’m just a bill,” sang a rolled-up piece of paper on the steps of Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC. Suhail remembers the cartoon well—the American flag waving over the portico of the Capitol, the description of American government and democracy, the whole song the rolled-up piece of paper sang. And he remembers thinking to himself, “I’m going to be a part of that someday.”
Suhail traces his inspiration for joining the Republican Party to an even more unlikely source: the University of California at Berkeley. Suhail enrolled there in 1987, when he was seventeen. “There were a bunch of policies—local and campus ones, mostly—that I found well-intentioned but ineffective,” he said. “Rent control was one; affirmative action was another. On one level, they made sense to me, but in the final analysis, I thought they did more harm than good. And in some cases, they were just downright contradictory. For example, at the same time there were these huge pro–affirmative action protests at Berkeley, there was a cap on the number of Chinese students there. No doubt blacks have experienced terrible discrimination in America, but so have Chinese Americans. It seemed illogical to aggressively recruit one group based on the idea of redressing past wrongs while limiting another that had also experienced discrimination.”
Suhail laughed when he talked about having joined the Berkeley College Republicans, aware of how oxymoronic the phrase sounds. And indeed, it was the smallest college Republican group at any university in California. Not long after joining, he was given a leadership position. By the time he left Berkeley, Suhail had grown the Berkeley College Republicans into the largest such campus group in the state. His success on campus led to Suhail being offered a staff position in the California Republican Party, where he worked on the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988. When I asked him his core reason for being a Republican, Suhail answered simply that America should rely on the entrepreneurship and goodness of its citizens, not on the well-intentioned but ineffective policies of government agencies, to be a great society. It wasn’t just a political idea, he pointed out, but a religious one as well. Islam emphasizes humankind’s agency and virtue. We ought to have a society that frees up those qualities.
It was one of the connections he felt with Tom Campbell. “He’s a very devout Catholic, although he never wore it on his sleeve,” Suhail told me. “He went to Mass several times a week and took part in all kinds of Bible studies. But more importantly, he was the kind of guy who wanted to live a life that lived up to the ideals of his faith. He wanted to look himself in the mirror every morning and feel like he was doing that.” Suhail had gone to Catholic school in the Bay Area, attended both Catholic Mass and jumma prayers at the mosque each week, and knew well the resonances between the traditions. Neither Campbell’s Catholic faith nor Suhail’s Muslim faith played much of a role in the campaign. Suhail couldn’t remember anyone in the California Republican Party ever asking him about Islam, much less his faith being a problem.
Campbell won the special election big and decided to take one person from his campaign with him to DC: Suhail. When he arrived, Suhail was the only Muslim congressional staffer on the Hill. He would pray in the corners of empty rooms and offices, sometimes even in stairwells or hallways. Campbell discovered him doing so one day and told him, “You can always pray in my office.” When a second Muslim arrived on Capitol Hill—a staffer for Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., a Democrat from the South Side of Chicago—the two of them would pray together in Campbell’s office.
Many congressional offices look like shrines to the current occupant. Signed pictures of the official with baseball players, rock stars, celebrities of all sorts are stuffed together on the walls as a way to exude an aura of importance, as if the office itself isn’t enough. Campbell had none of those. “The guy was just focused on his job,” Suhail said. “It made him very hard to buy gifts for.”
When Mother Teresa came to DC, Suhail felt like he had his chance: “She embodied Campbell’s vision of selfless service, rooted in the Catholic faith.” Suhail bought a picture of her, waited in line to get it signed, and offered it to Campbell. It was Suhail’s way of thanking the man who had given him his shot in national politics, and for expressing respect for what Campbell held most dear. Campbell put it up in his office. One day, Suhail came into the office and saw something taped to the picture. It was a verse from Surah Miriam, a passage from the Qur’an on the holiness of the Virgin Mary. It was Campbell’s way of thanking Suhail.
Suhail was overjoyed at having a place besides stairwells and hallways in which to make his daily prayers, but jumma on Fridays was another matter altogether. It wasn’t a problem to get the time off from work—Campbell had stated that he would not hold staff meetings on Fridays at midday. But Campbell’s office was too small to host a Muslim khutba, or sermon, or anything close to a congregation. Suhail and his Muslim friend on the Hill started carpooling to a mosque in downtown DC. Soon, other Muslim federal employees heard about the Muslim caravan and asked to join in. Two people became eight, then ten, then twelve. Suhail was happy for the growing community of Muslims, but as soon as the numbers hit about twenty, they decided the caravan was becoming too cumbersome.
Suhail suggested finding a regular place in the Capitol building itself. “I lived a block away from it at the time,” he told me. “It’s this towering, beautiful, imposing structure, made of cast iron. It’s a symbol of American democracy. It was important to me that building stood for the principles it was built on—equality and freedom. I thought, ‘What better way for the Capitol to feel alive than to have federal employees of a religious minority praying here, openly and proudly.’ ” They approached the House chaplain, who immediately suggested the House chapel for their Friday prayers. The only problem was the chapel had wooden pews bolted to the ground, meaning there wasn’t enough space for Muslims to perform their prayers. They were going to have to find someplace else.
One of the quaint relics of American politics is that the Speaker of the House controls the rooms on the House side of the Capitol. Suhail knew it was going to be a long, hard road to convince the Speaker to assign a room for weekly Muslim prayers. Space is short in the Capitol, the request list for it is long, and there are a lot of powerful people on that list. Suhail strategized about the coalition he would build, thinking through the various heavies he would bring in to lean on the Speaker and the number of meetings it might take. He told his Muslim friends that he doubted they’d get the space weekly. The likelihood was a monthly jumma on Capitol Hill, and Suhail estimated it could take up to a year to finalize.
Somewhat randomly, Suhail found himself standing next to the Speaker at a reception and decided, “Why not introduce the idea now?” “Mr. Speaker,” he began and, in a crowded room, to the soundtrack of clinking cocktail glasses, he described the growing number of Muslim federal employees and the ins and outs of Muslim prayer practice. The Speaker nodded and listened. “How many people are we talking, total?” he asked.
“About thirty,” Suhail replied.
“What kind of room setup do you need?” the Speaker asked.
Suhail explained how Muslims pray on carpets, facing toward Mecca, and assured the Speaker that his group would take full responsibility for moving the tables and chairs around as needed, and put them back when they left. “I’d like to schedule a time to speak with you about this more fully,” he said. And then he quickly added, “I’d like to bring in some others as well.”
The Speaker waved him off, replying that such a step wouldn’t be necessary. Suhail and his fellow Muslims would have their weekly prayer space. Moreover, the Speaker would arrange for the building staff to set up the room properly. “As long as I’m Speaker, you’ll have space for fifty every Friday afternoon,” he assured Suhail.
Suhail remembers a journalist from Turkey visiting Washington, DC, on assignment, and coming across his group of American Muslim federal employees holding jumma prayers on Capitol Hill. “The guy couldn’t pick his jaw up off the floor,” Suhail said. “I mean, he was just stunned. At that time in Turkey, which is a majority Muslim country, you couldn’t show any sort of religiosity in public buildings, not even wear a headscarf if you were a Muslim woman who covered. They were scared of the majority religion, let alone minority communities. The fact that the United States—a country with a Christian majority—was giving a group of Muslims official space to pray in one of the symbols of its democracy was simply too much for him.” Suhail paused and then continued, “That’s America, that’s what this country is about, that’s what the world should see when they see us.”
The journalist asked him who had made the decision to give the Muslims the space to pray. Suhail told him: the Speaker of the House, a man just after the vice president in the succession to the presidency, a Republican from Georgia who had engineered his party’s takeover of the House of Representatives after forty years of rule by Democrats, a former history professor named Newt Gingrich.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois during the years Suhail Khan was looking for space to pray in the Capitol, running with a politically active and progressive crowd. The name Newt Gingrich was generally preceded by a series of expletives and followed by the time and place of the next protest. We called Gingrich’s Contract with America the “Contract on America” and made all kinds of off-color jokes when Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House because of a sexual relationship with an aide in his office. In his television appearances back in the mid-1990s, Gingrich had struck me as mean not just in policies but also in personality—always wearing a scowl, generally pointing a finger (literally and figuratively), frequently looking like he wanted to take a swing at whoever was interviewing him, and maybe some of the audience members as well. But Gingrich never struck me as religious mean. Guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were religious mean. They didn’t want to just punch you, they wanted to smite you. Gingrich had never been particularly connected with that crowd. His issues were fiscal—balanced budgets, lower taxes, welfare reform—and he spoke about them primarily in terms of national strength, not Christian values.
Frankly, I’m not proud of my stridency back then. My college roommate actively avoided me, leaving our dorm room early and coming back late, because he knew I could barely take two breaths without emitting a volley of invective on the fundamental brokenness of American politics. Gingrich, more often than not, was the centerpiece of those tirades. A few years later, my views having moderated and my networks expanded, I was having dinner with a friend who worked at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank in Washington, DC) who casually mentioned that Gingrich was based there. I’d forgotten about him by then, figuring that he’d gathered whatever scraps of dignity he could salvage after his much-publicized affair and resignation and retreated back to Georgia to teach history at some college way out yonder. “Oh, no, he’s still around,” my friend said, a wry smile playing on his face. Apparently, Gingrich had gone through something of a transformation, one centered on religion. He’d recently married Callista Bistek and was showing serious interest in her Catholic faith. He was also playing a hugely influential role in conservative circles, advising Republican politicians, raising money for conservative causes, and continuing to be an indefatigable idea factory. But Gingrich, as my friend pointed out, had always seen himself as a front man, and it was unlikely that he was going to stay behind the scenes forever. “You’ll be hearing from him again” was my friend’s guess.
For a conservative politician seeking to reintroduce himself to the broader American public, the Cordoba House controversy was like a fastball down the middle of the plate. An anti-Muslim movement had been growing across America in the years after 9/11. Anti-Muslim websites like Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs were receiving hundreds of thousands of hits a month.2 Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! for America, whose purpose is to root out Muslim influence, boasts five hundred chapters around the country.3 Anti-Muslim authors like Robert Spencer had several books on Amazon’s Top 25 list on Islam and were regularly invited to be guests on respected talk shows. The core message of the industry of Islamophobia was simple and clear: Muslims are preparing a takeover of America because their religion requires them to. There is no such thing as a good Muslim. There is no such thing as moderate Islam. They are not like us. They are against us. We have to stop them now.
Their talking points co-opted key Muslim concepts in an attempt to masquerade as educated. To them, dawa did not mean education about Islam; it meant domination. Sharia was not simply Muslim law, a system with strong analogues in Judaism and Catholicism; it meant the public stoning of women in summer clothing—better stop it before it comes to your Oklahoma town! Taqiyya was not a minor Islamic practice allowing Muslims to dissimulate when someone seeks them harm; it was a core feature of the faith that requires Muslims to lie about their true objectives. The only Muslim groups with similar interpretations of such Islamic concepts were extremists. And so a peculiar partnership emerged: on matters of Islamic doctrine, Pamela Geller agreed with Osama bin Laden.
The industry of Islamophobia had slogans and campaigns, speakers and authors, policy papers and websites, organizations and networks. It was a civil-society movement waiting for its moment and its champion. They had been building the wave for years, their efforts crested with the Cordoba House controversy, and Newt Gingrich was only too happy to ride it.
Gingrich was everywhere during those weeks, providing red-meat sound bites on television, writing about the controversy for newspapers, making it part of his policy speeches at think tanks. The political webzine Talking Points Memo called Gingrich “the nation’s spokesperson for Islamophobia.”4 The issue was perfect for the former Speaker of the House—it allowed him to play populist and professor, to show off his PhD in European history and his heartland patriotism. There he was on Sean Hannity’s show saying in an August 2010 interview, “This is purely and simply an anti-American act of triumphalism on the part of a radical Islamist who is going to go around the world and say, ‘See, the Americans are so dumb that after we destroy two of their greatest buildings, they allow us to build a mosque near there, and that tells how weak and how ignorant Americans [are].” On Fox & Friends that same month, he compared Cordoba House’s proximity to Ground Zero to Nazis putting up a sign next to a Holocaust memorial. In the Washington Post, Gingrich offered a history lesson: “Cordoba House is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain—the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.” Each of these lines was quoted hundreds if not thousands of times on websites, in speeches, at rallies. Gingrich was both supplying ammunition for the movement against Muslims in America and leading the charge. After a decade in the political wilderness, Newt Gingrich was out front again.
Ever the wily politician, Gingrich accurately predicted that the Cordoba House issue was likely to disappear as quickly as it had arrived, a phenomena produced by a 24/7 cable news machine seeking a controversy in the notoriously slow-news weeks of late summer. The anti-Muslim sentiment would continue to simmer, but would require a new hook to stay in the spotlight. It didn’t take Gingrich long to find it. In a policy speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he spoke darkly of the infiltration of sharia law into the United States. Gingrich claimed that any activity that facilitated sharia’s advance should be stopped. He chose to single out the growing industry of sharia financing: “Teaching about sharia financing is dangerous,” Gingrich claimed, “because it is the first step toward the normalization of sharia, and I believe sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it. I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”5
Like his statements on Cordoba House, Gingrich’s comments about sharia were quoted repeatedly by the press and became a rallying point for the anti-Muslim movement across America. They were widely credited with the movement to ban sharia law in Oklahoma, a referendum that passed with 70 percent of the vote in a state where sharia law was never proposed and Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the population. Knowing that he’d struck political gold, Gingrich continued his campaign. At the Values Voter Summit, he received a standing ovation when he called for “a federal law that says sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.” To commemorate the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Gingrich wrote a piece in which he warned of the presence of stealth radical Islamists: “In addition to the violent Radical Islamists who would use force to destroy America, there are stealth Radical Islamists who use our political system and our commitment to free speech and liberty to undermine our democracy through infiltration, intimidation, and propaganda. Both the violent Radical Islamists and the stealth Radical Islamists represent a mortal threat to the American system of Constitutional Law and political freedom.”6
The great scholar of religion Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that the most useful lens through which to view the intersection of religion with politics in American history is irony. Irony allows you to look at situations that might be considered tragic and find the comedy, to view instances that might initially cause you to laugh out loud and pause to locate the deeper meaning. Irony can be defined as the “apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous.” It is at work when “virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue.” And, above all, Niebuhr emphasized, “The ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic one by the fact that the person involved bears in it some responsibility for it.”7
When it comes to Gingrich and irony, it’s hard to know where to start. There are ample examples, both personal and political. As he was lecturing salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners on fiscal prudence, he maintained a half-million-dollar credit line at the jewelry store Tiffany’s. The extramarital affair that drove Gingrich from office in the late 1990s was in full (ahem) swing at the same time he was spearheading impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for the president’s liaison with Monica Lewinsky. He publicly railed against the mortgage giant Freddie Mac for its role in the mortgage crisis but happily accepted over $1.5 million in consulting fees from it.8 But the ironies layered in Gingrich’s dealings with Islam take the cake, not just for what they say about the former Speaker, but about what they illustrate with respect to the intersection of religion and politics in America in the early days of the twenty-first century.
As his conversation with Suhail Khan suggest, Newt Gingrich was a friend to Muslims long before he was a friend to Muslim haters. Not only did he provide Muslims a space to pray inside the US Capitol in the 1990s, in the early 2000s Gingrich attended meetings of the Islamic Free Market Institute, whose mission was to promote education about sharia-compliant banking and finance among Americans, supporting a practice that he called a mortal threat to freedom a few years later. But back then, Gingrich saw a political opportunity in the growing Muslim population. According to someone present at one of the meetings, Gingrich “was very positive, very supportive. His whole attitude was that Muslims are part of the American fabric and that Muslim Americans should be Republicans.” Gingrich’s overtures were well received by some segments of the American Muslim community. In 2007, a group called Muslims for America wrote in its newsletter that Gingrich should be nominated for president, stating that “unlike other politicians, Gingrich doesn’t see us at war with Islam.”9
In his 2006 New York Times best seller Rediscovering God in America, Newt Gingrich wrote, “It is a testament to the genius of the Founding Fathers that they designed a practical form of government that allows religious groups the freedom to express their strong religious beliefs in the public square—a constitutional framework that avoids inter-religious conflict and discrimination.”10 He referenced the philosopher Michael Novak’s insight that reverence for God and fidelity to core principles had given rise to both remarkable religious diversity and inspiring religious tolerance in America. He quoted Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that religion in America played a key role in supporting civic institutions. And he spoke proudly of the American tradition of according respect to all religions.
This all makes Gingrich sound like the man Suhail Khan came to Washington to work for, Tom Campbell. Both were Republicans who viewed religious pluralism as a central element of American greatness, and who found ways to extend that respect in both their personal and professional lives. It was thanks to Campbell that Suhail had a space for his private prayers in the Capitol, and thanks to Gingrich that Muslim federal employees had a space for their congregational prayers. Suhail viewed these gestures as entirely consistent with Republican Party values—equal freedom for all groups and the welcoming of faith in the public square. In addition to party affiliation and agreement on the role faith should play in America, Gingrich and Campbell have, as of 2009, something else in common: a church.
Newt Gingrich can be seen most Sundays sitting in a pew awaiting the noon mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a Catholic church in northeast Washington, DC, watching his wife Callista sing in the choir. When they are on the road, whether they are in Des Moines or Costa Rica, he and Callista find a local Catholic church to attend. Gingrich has written about “the beautiful experience” of listening to “Amazing Grace” being sung in Chinese at Mass in Beijing, of “marveling . . . at the historic truth of the church” on his first visit to St. Peter’s Basilica, of the comfort he takes in being surrounded by two millennia of church history and teaching. He describes Pope Benedict XVI’s 2008 visit to Washington, DC, as a turning point for him. Gingrich attended the private vespers service Benedict presided over with the US Conference of American Bishops and found himself awed by the pope’s very presence: “Catching a glimpse of Pope Benedict that day, I was struck by the happiness and peacefulness he exuded. The joyful and radiating presence of the Holy Father.” It was the event, Gingrich said, that moved him to formally convert to the Catholic faith.11
The Catholic leader Gingrich speaks most passionately about is Pope John Paul II, calling him “one of the most consequential figures of our lifetime.” He and Callista cohosted a film about John Paul II’s life and took it on tour around the country. The message of the film focuses on the impact of faith in the world, using the example of John Paul II’s role in liberating Poland and defeating communism through the power of freedom through faith. It’s a message that Gingrich believes America needs now more than ever. In Gingrich’s comparison, contemporary America, like Communist Poland, has banned school prayer, knocks crosses off public spaces, and considers it more acceptable to be an atheist than a Christian.12
Gingrich rarely used his Catholic faith as a reason to bash Muslims. The Catholic Church, at least since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, has been quite clear on its respect for other world religions, especially Islam and Judaism. In fact, the man Gingrich called “one of the most consequential figures of our lifetime” was also the man who built powerful bridges between the Catholic Church and Muslim communities around the world. When Pope John Paul II went to Morocco in 1985, he was the first Holy Father to visit an officially Islamic country. In his address to thousands of young Muslims in the stadium in Casablanca, he said, “We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God.”13 Six years later, John Paul II was the first pope to visit an Islamic house of worship, the Umayyad mosque in Syria, where he paused to pray before a memorial to John the Baptist, an event televised across much of the Muslim world. There were symbolic events like two World Peace Prayer Days held at Assisi, and there were scholarly bridges, like the ties between Catholic scholars at the Vatican and Muslim scholars at Al Azhar. In other words, it is Catholic theology to build bridges with Muslims.
And it is a fact of American history that for much of our nation’s past, the Catholic Church was viewed as a seditious force and the Catholic masses were referred to as “the Catholic Menace.” As a former professor of history, Gingrich knows as well as anyone that we live in a unique time in America, a time when he can speak openly about the beauty he finds in Catholic ritual and the admiration he has for Catholic leaders, and feel confident that his faith will not only be accepted but will also be viewed as a political asset. In past eras, such statements would have earned Gingrich the reputation of being a stealth agent for the Catholic hierarchy, a tool of foreign elements, of using America’s freedom of speech and open political system to threaten that very system. “The deepest bias in the history of the American people” is how historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. referred to our nation’s history of anti-Catholic prejudice. In short, once Gingrich would have been accused of the very crimes he accuses Muslims of now.
Had Gingrich been walking a village green in any city on the Eastern Seaboard during colonial times, he might have come across a “Pope’s Day” celebration where the effigy of the Holy Father was burned, children sang anti-Catholic songs, and adults toasted the overthrow of “the Beast” prophesied by the Book of Revelation. Gingrich could not have pursued a political career in those times, because in many of the colonies, Catholics were forbidden from holding public office, even from serving on juries. In fact, had Gingrich been searching for a place to celebrate Mass in Lower Manhattan through most of the eighteenth century, he would have come up empty. In the same area where Gingrich registered his opposition to Cordoba House, priests were subject to arrest and Catholics were effectively barred from practicing their faith. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that the first Catholic parish, St. Peter’s, was established, and even then Manhattan residents demanded that the church be built outside of the city limits. There were concerns that foreign money from the enemies of New York was involved, and indeed King Charles III, of Catholic Spain, made a $1,000 contribution, a royal sum two centuries ago. On Christmas Eve 1806, in one of the many demonstrations outside of St. Peter’s, the building was surrounded by people enraged by the service of “popish superstition” occurring inside, otherwise known as Christmas Mass. Dozens of people were injured and one died in the riot.
In the nineteenth century, as Catholic immigration to America swelled, the anti-Catholic movement grew and got more organized. The best-selling books, the high-profile speakers, and the growing civil-society organizations like the American and Foreign Christian Union had a clear and compelling message: Catholicism was a foreign and seditious force on American soil whose purpose was to convert the masses to an evil, lustful religion. America is by nature free and open; Catholicism is inherently authoritarian and dominating. If allowed to grow, it would replace the American government with the Catholic hierarchy and plant the flag of the pope at the White House. The Catholic strategy of domination was to spread through its institutions—its schools, its churches, its hospitals—each one a Trojan horse carrying the hateful faith inside.
There were slogans and campaigns, speakers and authors, organizations and networks, policy papers and that era’s version of websites—tracts. Had Gingrich been browsing in a bookstore at that time, he would have seen a best seller called The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk on prominent display. The book chronicled the life of a Protestant teenage girl captured by Roman Catholic clergy and forced to do their bidding. The confessional was a place where priests raped nuns, the convent a place where the children of these unions were buried after they were baptized. The mother superior explained to poor Maria, “Their little souls would thank those who kill their bodies, if they had it in their power.”14 Awful Disclosures, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was one of the best-selling books of antebellum culture.
Lyman Beecher, one of the most respected Evangelical figures of his era, was also one of the most prominent speakers on the anti-Catholic circuit. On August 10, 1834, Beecher gave a series of sermons in Boston churches, claiming that “the principles of this corrupt church are adverse to our free institutions” and using as a prime example the Ursuline Convent in nearby Charlestown. Had Gingrich been in Charlestown twenty-four hours later, he would have watched the crowds burn the convent to the ground.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a political party emerged to ride the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment that the civil-society movement had expertly cultivated. It was commonly called the Know Nothings because its members, when asked what they knew about the party’s workings, would say, “I know nothing.” In 1854, this party so dominated American politics that it elected seventy-five people to Congress, and legislatures in several states were composed almost entirely of Know Nothing politicians. Politicians who were running unopposed on the ballot would find themselves defeated by write-in candidates affiliated with the Know Nothings. Abraham Lincoln observed, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”15
The Know Nothings sought to prevent Catholics from establishing their institutions and influence in America. If they had won, it wouldn’t simply be Catholics who suffered. The 573 Catholic hospitals in the United States, which treat over 85 million patients a year, might not exist. Nor would the 231 Catholic colleges and the 7,000 Catholic elementary and secondary schools, which educate over 2 million students a year, a third of whom are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Catholic Charities USA provides social services for over 10 million people a year. Almost all of these institutions—hospitals, schools, colleges, social-service agencies—serve people beyond the Catholic community. In fact, that is part of how they understand their mission: Catholics for the common good. It is a system of service so large and impressive that, without it, American civil society would literally be unrecognizable.
The Know Nothing Party, like the headlines around Cordoba House, faded as suddenly as it arrived. But anti-Catholic prejudice remained an American hallmark well into the twentieth century. There were the hateful hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and the bigotry that helped defeat a Catholic candidate for president, Al Smith, in 1928. Most famously, there was the movement against another presidential candidate who happened to be Catholic and faced a highly organized opposition largely from Evangelical Protestants in America: John F. Kennedy. I have no doubt that Gingrich studied that election closely. But unlike his fellow Republican Michael Bloomberg, Gingrich didn’t take away a deep sympathy for those who suffer religious prejudice. Instead, he learned the tactics of the perpetrators.16