Religious bigotry drives US national unity and governs diversity.

Evidence

When contemporary anti-Muslim bigotry is viewed in the larger context of the history of religious and racial prejudice in American politics, instructive patterns emerge that have gone unnoticed in the public square because most Americans have sought to understand the violent events like 9/11 and the bigotry against Muslims in terms of religion. The lesson in this history is that bigotry and prejudice have played a central role in US history as a means of controlling racial and religious diversity and building national unity. Today, Muslims may be targets of this pattern of democratic governance, but with tomorrow’s crisis, it may be another group. Some American Muslim organizations are even keen to discover this other group, to push it on the national stage, and to shift the target away from American Muslims; they routinely make a point of publicizing and condemning acts of violence committed by fundamentalist Christians as acts of terrorism. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 300

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School claim that indifference to victimization, not overt bigotry, enables fascism — the reader’s project on the frightened subject relocating blame.
• SEED: The observation that Muslim organizations deflect by publicizing Christian terrorism is a ready angle on how victim groups participate in scapegoat dynamics.