The First Amendment’s local organizing space lets minorities mature before politicization threatens them.

Evidence

Because of its prominence in America’s national narrative, the politicization of religion has not been solely a means of exclusion; it has also served as a means of assimilation, at least for white non-Protestants. The First Amendment allows religious minorities to organize and to establish themselves locally in this country, long before they appear on the national radar. By the time their presence could be politicized as a subversive threat, they usually have developed enough roots and means in the United States to be able to defend themselves against such attacks, and they often do so by reading themselves into America’s political narrative in terms of constitutional freedoms. We saw this occur with American Muslims during the controversy surrounding the building of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, two blocks away from where the World Trade Center stood. American Muslims stepped onto the national media and political circles asserting their right under the First Amendment and in the process defining religious liberty for the nation as a whole. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 279

Categorization

• XREF: The assimilation-through-constitutional-claims mechanism echoes the Frankfurt School’s observation that liberal legal forms protect minority liberty beyond capitalist needs, and offers a counter-structure to the exclusion pattern in the previous passage.
• QUESTION: The chapter notes Muslims’ situation ‘is not identical to’ Jews and Catholics — but stops short of saying how. Worth chasing what distinguishes the Muslim case in the author’s own terms.