ABP's Rob Marus reports on a meeting this afternoon at the Department of Justice in which religious leaders including the Baptist Joint Committee's Brent Walker met with law enforcement officials to discuss the recent rise in anti-Muslim violence and rhetoric.
Baptist and other religious-liberty leaders met with Department of Justice officials to urge them to act quickly, according to a press advisory about the meeting, “to protect and preserve religious freedoms and the rights of all Americans, including millions of Muslims, to live and practice their faith freely, without fear of violence or intimidation.”
The leaders — including Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who serves as president of the Interfaith Alliance — are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to lead a coordinated response to the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment.
If the American people can't or won't speak with one voice in condemnation of acts of intimidation and violence against a religious group, then just how committed to freedom are we? The last few weeks have been truly disappointing for the widespread, high-profile voices of fear and intolerance. We have certainly seen acts of domestic terror against houses of worship in the past – from church burnings to synagogue vandalism. Those cowardly offenses though have come from extreme fringe groups of hate, widely condemned, virtually alone in their destructive viewpoints.
Recent acts – including arson and gunfire at the site of a Tennessee mosque construction site, and the stabbing of a NY City cab driver merely for confessing his Muslim faith – have seemed to emerge from a religious bias with disturbingly strong popular support today, riding a wave of powerful media outlets questioning all of Islam, and prominent national figures banging the drumbeat of hostility toward a religion they distrust and paint as somehow less than American, even while it is practiced peacefully by millions of our fellow citizens.
Those voices foment all of the dangerous divisions that led our country to enact strong legal protections for people of all faiths in the first place. Our law enforcement leaders must have the will to preserve and enforce those principles when necessary. And our religious leaders should demonstrate the strength to stand up for the religious liberty – indeed, the freedom to worship without intimidation – of Muslim-Americans in the face of these threats. If we don't speak up for them, who will speak up for us when we need it? Kudos to Brent Walker, Welton Gaddy and the others who joined in this effort.
