A couple of weeks ago a right-wing activist tried to heckle the Democratic candidate for Senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, at a rally. It's fair to say that it didn't go as he expected. He asked El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed did so without missing a beat, and asked the guy, Thomas "Tommy" Teepell, why he'd asked the question. Teepell replied that he hadn't heard him disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed did so again, then pressed him on why he'd asked the question - had he asked everyone in his own life if they disavow the Muslim Brotherhood? Teepell simply repeated that he hadn't heard El-Sayed disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed rolled right over him (rhetorically) as he stood there with no more to say for himself.
El-Sayed draped himself in the Constitution, in freedom of and from religion (I give him credit for the latter, for rejecting an evergreen right-wing shibboleth), invoked John F. Kennedy, who'd also been interrogated on potential dual loyalty because of his Papist faith. Kennedy's answer, El-Sayed declared, was that he wasn't running to be a Catholic president, but to be a president who happened to be Catholic. El-Sayed then asked Teepell if he was religious, and Teepell declared that he is a Christian. "So I'm going to ask you," El-Sayed continued: "Do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?" "I do not," Teepell replied. "So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me." The audience cheered, and Teepell skulked out of the room. El-Sayed's team posted a video of the exchange online, and it got millions of views - ten million on his X acccount alone.
I thought El-Sayed handled himself well, declining to indulge in the usual liberal oh-how-can-you-say-such-awful things approach or flailing around helplessly as though no one could ever have imagined that someone would be so mean to him. As he says in the video, this wasn't the first time he'd had to answer such a question, so of course he was prepared. He might also have pointed to the Constitution's prohibition (Article 6, Clause 3) of religious tests for public office, though that's exactly the kind of thing right-wing Christians want to get rid of.
El-Sayed has also replied cleverly to Donald Trump's pretending not to be able to pronounce his name: "He says the name just fine when he’s begging the Qataris for a personal jet or the Saudis for funding for his son-in-law’s private equity firm. Wonder what’s changed?"
I was a bit put off by El-Sayed's paraphrase of John F. Kennedy's 1960 response to accusations of dual loyalty: "I happen to believe I can serve my nation as President - and I also happen to have been born a Catholic." It's not that important, but there's a difference between "happen to have been born a Catholic" and "happened to be Catholic." Religious affiliation is not a trivial accident, it's a lifestyle choice, and when I think of the hushed awe religious belief enjoys in this country it seems disrespectful to religion to speak of it as if it were the result of a roll of the dice of no more importance than, say, skin color. El-Sayed reduces it to how he prays. I don't know how he'd react if someone said that his "faith" is just a skin-deep affectation. I know that his wife wears a headscarf, so I suspect that religion is taken just a bit more seriously than "happens to be" inhis household. I don't feel threatened by his religious affiliation, since he's just adopting -- assimilating, if you will -- American liberal discourse on religion, which treats religious affiliation both as a profound personal mystery and as a skin-deep consumer brand choice.
Then I saw this post from El-Sayed's campaign account:
This is a rhetorical move I'm all too familiar with from my fellow-boomer right-wing Facebook friends. If Americans would spend more time on their knees, we'd be so much better off and we wouldn't have all this division and crime and twerking! I pointed out to one such person that America is and has always been a religion-crazed country, more than most nations outside of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and that this was even more true when we were slaughtering Indians and selling slaves south to hellholes. The Confederacy was an explicitly Christian nation. But leave ancient history out of it. Right now the people who talk most about turning America back to God are pushing all kinds of hateful agendas. Her response: the people in the past were thinking as men think, not as God thinks. And if more people were on their knees today, "we wouldn't be having this conversation." Oh, I think we would, though if she were on her knees she wouldn't be posting theocratic bullshit on Facebook, would she?
I think El-Sayed is equally full of shit. If there's one thing that Washington DC doesn't lack, it's faith in the corridors of power. I suppose that he would reply that what Washington has isn't real faith, not the right kind of faith -- just like my racist boomer friend thought. It's also what many liberal Democratic Christians say, like this person responding to another El-Sayed performance: "This is the way. Just as James Talarico is taking back Christianity and refusing to let the religious right define it, we need to take back capitalism and refuse to let corporatists define it." It's not up to the government or government officials to define Christianity, but even a lot of my fellow atheists think they know what Jesus really taught and what Christianity really is, and that our government should reflect that. This is why I distrust Talarico and other liberal Christians who are waving around their religiouis beliefs on the campaign trail. Even if they happen to be right about what Jesus really taught, his teachings aren't the law in this country, thanks to the Constitution El-Sayed invoked to Thomas Teepell. I don't live in Michigan or Talarico's Texas; if I did, I would vote for them, but they're not making me feel very good about that decision.
