Well, can you be a faithful Christian and a loyal American? How about a faithful Jew, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Wiccan, or …?
For anyone with a particular religious faith — or any sort of personal moral code — there may come a time when that interferes with one's relationship with one's nation. When the civil law says one thing, and one's conscience another. That's certainly not just true for Muslims — consider the number of "conscience clauses" that Christian groups are seeking for laws that conflict with their faith (on gay marriage, on contraception, on abortion).
Identity with one's religious group first, one's nation second, is not a Muslim monopoly. Indeed, any good Christian must believe the same thing. The difference is, Christians who really worry about this sort of thing from Muslims assume that America = Christian, and so don't see it as something they need to worry about (except when those Un-Christian Un-Americans take power, but that isn't a matter of opposing America, but the Secular Atheists Who Are Ruining Her — i.e., True Christians = True Americans and vice-versa).
Motes and beams … #ddtb
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Christian Religious Identity vs. Muslims | Faith in Public Life
The core lie underlying the recent rise of Islamophobia is the claim that Muslims' loyalty to their faith makes them untrustworthy Americans. As we've tracked in the past, Anti-Muslim commenta…
The author asks:
So why don’t pundits and politicians consider American Christians’ allegiance to their faith as a threat to American democracy?
Because they’re blinded by their own cultural assumptions. Perry, Bachmann, and Gingrich all have such proclaimed allegiances to their Christian beliefs that I, and others, DO consider their adherence to it as a threat to deomcracy in the US. Oh, that and their allegiance to wealthy persons and corporations.
A similar question has long been asked about Catholics and their allegiance to the Pope. I can see that if one felt that one's allegiance to one's religion was greater than one's allegiance to one's country, then one would suspect that others hold the same view, and if one was concealing such an ordering of allegiances, it might seem like a good tactic to try to expose others' concealed allegiances. It seems to me that there is good reason to think that many people of many different faiths hold such an ordering of allegiances. If the following two conditions held for a particular faith, this would become a politically relevant issue to me: (a) there are enough members of the faith who are more loyal to the faith than to the country to pose a real threat to the country, and (b) the interests of members of that faith are significantly different from those of other citizens of the country. I think Christianity meeds the first condition but fails the second since there's little reason to think that the interests of Christians (or Catholics) diverge significantly from those of other citizens at this time. I think the interests of a very small number of Moslems diverges significantly from those of most citizens, but their numbers are so small that they do not pose a significant risk to the country. Thus, I think this is not a politically relevant issue now, but could become one at some time in the future, under the right conditions. However, I also think those conditions are unlikely to hold, and so I think it is unlikely that this will ever become a politically relevant issue.
Well, to be honest, I would expect most true believers of their religion to hold a higher devotion to it than that of their country. Otherwise, what's the point?
That said, the question becomes, so what? Unless, as you put it, the interests (and obligatory actions) of the faith are a threat to the commonwealth, then it's not an issue.
It's not clear to me at all that the interests and obligatory actions of Islam in general are more of a threat to the nation than the interests and obligatory actions of Christianity (of most flavors), or Judaism, or Hinduism, or most faiths, since there is a general congruence between most religious virtues and most civil virtues.
There are some exceptions — folks who through their faith seek to corrupt our current national culture, to impose a brutal theocracy upon our people that will control their lives and crush their spirits. The truly scary thing about this insidious threat is that some of them are running for the GOP nomination …