On Muslim Presidents and American Dreams

Ben Carson’s discomfort with the idea of a Muslim President of the United States has gotten lots of media coverage lately. His comments made me think back to my high school history course. (I had a good teacher, the author of this book.)

I remembered that John F. Kennedy had dealt with similar misgivings about his religion — Catholicism. America was much different in 1960. Being a Catholic wasn’t necessarily an okay thing to be in the national political culture of the time. There had never been a Catholic President, and many Americans wanted to keep it that way.

Kennedy addressed the issue head on:

But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in — for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in…

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

How soon we forget. It’s not just that we’ve forgotten 1960, a time before most of us were born — we’ve forgotten 2012. I’m pretty sure we were all there.

Just the other day, about half of America voted for Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon. Being a Mormon today is arguably more out of step with mainstream culture than being a Catholic was in 1960. Notably, Mormons failed to make Kennedy’s cut. He contemplated Jews, Quakers, Unitarians, and Baptists, but made no mention of Mormons. Had he himself been Mormon, I don’t think he could have won the office. Muslims also failed to make Kennedy’s cut. No one was thinking about Muslim Presidents back then.

The problem with Carson’s misgivings about a Muslim President is that it’s based on stereotypes about Muslims. Now, as a social psychologist, I have no problem with stereotypes as such — a stereotype is just the probabilistic categorization of people based on what facts we know about them. Many stereotypes are true, if by true we mean accurate in the probabilistic sense they are used.

For example, if I said “Most Mexicans are Catholic”, yes, that’s a stereotype, and it’s true. Stereotypes are sometimes rational and functional, and it’s unfortunate that political ideologies have distorted our grasp of social realities by stigmatizing stereotyping. Humans have to make inferences and use categories to successfully navigate reality — that’s what it means to use our brains, to be human in one major respect.

So what’s wrong with Carson using stereotypes about Muslims in this case? After all, his stereotypes might be accurate in that he’s referring to the content of Islam — what Muslims believe. If we’re going to have a civilization, we need to be free to evaluate all schools of thought, including religions. We should be free to criticize any creed, whether Kant’s or Muhammad’s. The problem is that Carson is talking about a hypothetical President, and Presidents are individuals. How a person interprets and relates to his religion is very complex. Moreover, Presidential candidates are not people we need to judge in a hurry.

Stereotypes and similar heuristics are useful when you have to make a quick judgment based on little information, especially when you have to make lots of those judgments over time. That’s because stereotypes are based on statistical probabilities or group averages. So if you were paid to stand at a corner and guess the religion of everyone who walked by, you’d be smart to tag all the Mexicans as Catholics (unless they were wearing kippot.) That would give you pretty good accuracy for that group, and earn you the most money.

When interviewing someone for a job, or evaluating a candidate for office, forget about stereotypes. Now you have rich information. For example, you don’t need to use stereotypes about Asians and math — you can just look at the person’s SAT scores or math courses, or give them a test tailored to the statistician job or whatever it is. That’s much higher quality information than national average test scores for different ethnicities.

And a Muslim running for President… You get to spend some time with that person, given that they’re running for President. You’re going to know a lot about them, more than you know about almost anyone. They will share their ideas, policies, and values with you. Whatever concerns you have about the tenets of their religion — and how they interpret or embrace those tenets — are likely to be addressed head on, just as they were with Kennedy.

It’s trivially easy for me to imagine that, looking back in 2100, America’s greatest President could have been a Muslim. When it comes to individuals, all bets are off, and the kind of Muslim who would run for President in the near future is likely to be exceptional in a number of ways we’d prize. Being Muslim would be a burden, because many Americans share Carson’s misgivings, so realistically any Muslim whose candidacy gained traction would likely be someone who had compensated for his or her religion by being excellent in other dimensions.

Therefore, a Muslim President might be especially likely to be good. This comes with a large caveat — the assumption that “good” here is adjudicable, and not merely a matter of shared ideologies. The people most qualified to be President never seek the office, so how good Presidents are is constrained by the range of people we select through our bizarre election and media processes. If anyone were to turn our circus upside-down, don’t be surprised if it’s a non-traditional candidate, someone outside of the political power culture — that includes people who don’t like speeches, don’t like lying, and quite plausibly, a Muslim.

José L. Duarte recently defended his doctoral dissertation in Social Psychology at Arizona State University. You can email him at jose.duarte@asu.edu.