Kelsey Piper@KelseyTuoc
I think the discussion around this keeps unhealthily conflating two different things.
America was founded by weird Protestant splinter groups fleeing oppression, and protecting religious freedom is in fact fundamental to what it means to be an American. There is very little more American than deciding everyone else is doing religious practice wrong and moving out to the middle of nowhere to do it according to your own deep principles. I think that many American groups that are not specifically Christian (or whose Christian-ness is contested) should be understood as inheritors of this tradition.
But this commitment to religious liberty and to pluralistic tolerance of a wide range of different practices only functions if there is a bedrock, shared governing ethos that allows us to navigate these object-level disagreements. That ethos - the defining thing that it means to be American - includes freedom of religion, the commitment that everyone else's right to their beliefs must also be defended, and defended even at significant personal cost; freedom of speech, an understanding that you have the right to offend and no right not to be offended, a deep suspicion of state exercises of power; commitment to equality under the law and to the idea that much of virtue must be defined and pursued outside the law.
It makes no sense to demand people assimilate in the food they eat or the clothes they wear. It is downright unAmerican to insist that people assimilate by adopting an existing American church instead of by following in the deep American tradition of freedom of conscience. But it is absolutely necessary that everyone adopt - 'assimilate to', if you'd like - the underlying commitments that make America the world's most successful pluralistic society.
Nothing I've said here disagrees with Hamid's column; I think in many ways it's the exact same point he's making. The examples he gives of not assimilating are examples of not secularizing - for example, not accepting gay marriage, or not thinking that it's good for women to work outside the home. Those are the kinds of disagreements the American project can endure and does endure every day.
But I think that people often talk past each other when it comes to assimilation, in a way that makes "we should stop expecting assimilation" a statement that'll sow enormous confusion.
I think there's some of this confusion in Hamid's observation that Muslims say 'homosexuality should be discouraged by society' at a much higher rate even than Republican Americans.
Does every American have the absolute right to practice a faith that teaches their super loving perfect god will torture me eternally because I have a wife? Yes. I will defend their right to do so, whether that faith is Christian or Muslim.
Do they have the right to try to use the state to impose that view - say, by making it harder for me and my wife to own property, get custody of our children, leave our possessions to each other, etc.? I would argue that they do not!
I know a lot of people opposed to gay marriage. Some of them are deeply and fundamentally committed to the American vision of pluralism, and some are not. The ones who are not are far, far scarier. If someone is a sincere pluralist, it is not threatening at all for them to believe that homosexuality is gravely evil; if they're not, then it's really quite a big deal.
So the more that immigrants assimilate on the important stuff - the conviction that they may not use the state to impose their religion and it would be abhorrent to try, that other people have the right to believe differently, that people have the right to deconvert - the less of an issue it is if they have different views from mine on the object-level stuff.
But when someone says "immigrants don't need to assimilate", I don't know whether they mean "immigrants do not need to agree that it is the absolute right of every individual to deconvert from Islam and go around vociferously criticizing it in a strident and offensive way" (immigrants, like all Americans, do need to agree on that) or if they mean "immigrants do not need to agree on whether homosexuality is sinful" (certainly true).
Or more generally, whether people talk about the importance of assimilation some mean, "you need to have the same views as me", and some mean, "you need to be essentially persuaded of the pluralistic American project and willing to sacrifice to protect it where it protects views you disagree with". The first is bad and the second is just true.
Now for the good news: The data says that in fact Muslim-American immigrants are assimilated in the important sense - opposing political violence at higher rates than other groups, believing in freedom of speech and religious liberty. Hamid references that very data! But he should say clearly "this is good" rather than "this is unnecessary", and then point out that this (good) assimilation is why we can all graciously live alongside one another while our views vary greatly, and why we are able to sustain a society in which it is not an emergency that my neighbors think my lifestyle is sinful.
