This commentary was originally delivered at Washington National Cathedral on Feb. 24, 2026.
(RNS) — There was a snowstorm the night Roger Williams fled Salem. He was sick and alone, a Puritan minister cast out by the Puritan theocracy for his diverse opinions. He stuffed his pockets full of corn paste and headed south into the forest. The snow drifts were piled above his head. Rough men with murderous eyes were close behind. He survived because native tribes sheltered him.
Who were these people who saw a man by the side of the road and stopped to take him in? What beliefs inspired them? What names of God guided them? What rituals gave them comfort?
Roger Williams hungered to know. This is why he had defied the Puritan magisterium. Of course there were an expanse of cosmologies in God’s expansive cosmos.
That journey marked him forever. As he shaped the state of Rhode Island, he built it on the foundation that people of “other worships” could be “peacable and quiet Subjects, loving and helpful neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill government.”
I like to think that when Roger Williams told his story in later years he ended it by saying, “Go and do likewise.”
This is the prologue to American greatness. To be a heritage American means to embrace the diversity of our sacred union.
In the dead of the night, in the mouth of a cave atop a mountain called Hira, a merchant named Muhammad prays and fasts in observance of the month of Ramadan (already sacred in the historic culture of the region). Suddenly, a mysterious force wraps him tightly and issues a command: Iqra, recite.
Words come pouring from his mouth, words that will one day be viewed as holy and eternal and universal. But at the time he trembles in fear. He returns to the person he trusts the most in the world, his wife Khatidja. “Cover me, cover me, cover me,” he says, and tells her the story of the force, of its grip, of the command.
Khatidja intuits that something very special has happened, but she cannot say what. Her cousin, Waraqa, is learned in the Scriptures. She believes that he will know.
Waraqa lives like a hermit in the desert. On a Sunday afternoon, Khatidja brings Muhammad before him. The monk is blind. He leans on his staff, feels Muhammad’s face with his knobby fingers, listens quietly to the story of the mysterious force on Mount Hira. He does not speak for several minutes. And when he does, he kisses Muhammad on the forehead and whispers: “Verily, the Prophet of your people has arrived.”
Muhammad never returns to the mountain. He will live the rest of his life amongst the diverse peoples of the Arabian peninsula, building an ummah, a sacred union.
Native tribes help a Puritan minister build a state on the foundation of interfaith friendship. A Christian monk recognizes the beginning of Islamic civilization. A cosmic line across time and space connects the journeys of two sacred unions.
In 1657, the leaders of New Amsterdam give an order to banish Quakers. They may not proselytize. They may not preach. They may not pray. No one can house them. No one can help them.
The law is applied with brutal force. When the English Quaker Robert Hodgson persists in the practice of his faith, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant has soldiers chain him to a wheelbarrow and whip him within an inch of his life.
A group of men in the hamlet of Flushing, on Long Island, feel a duty. Most were Calvinists, none were Quakers. They believe the pen of mercy might defeat the sword of cruelty.
They write: “The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extends to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam … our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us.”
They remonstrate to build a sacred union.
The leaders of the city of Mecca try threats, they try boycotts, they try bribes. Still, the message of monotheism and mercy draws followers. The Muslim community grows. Muhammad’s enemies are desperate. They attempt an assassination. A group of two dozen young men, representing each of the clans of Mecca, would surround the Prophet Muhammad and stab him simultaneously.
Like Roger Williams fleeing through the woods, Muhammad flees across the desert to the city of Yathrib, where the tribes are fighting and seeking a peacemaker.
The first person to catch a glimpse of the Prophet on the horizon was a rabbi. Mukhairiq points to Muhammad and his two companions riding through the desert, like the three kings from the East come to herald the good news. The children of Yathrib lay palm fronds on the path before them. They promised to rename the city after Muhammad: Medina, the city of the Prophet. They began to sing.
The full moon has ascended to illuminate and redeem us … Our hearts overflow with grateful hope
Not long after he arrives in Medina, the Prophet witnesses a minor dispute descend into a full-scale, clan-versus-clan brawl. Ancient vendettas are invoked. Lines are drawn in the sand, and crossed. The cold civil war has become hot.
The constitutional convention of Medina meets in the home of the rabbi. Seventy leaders gather. The Prophet offers an agricultural metaphor as guidance: mithaq, plaiting soft blades of different grasses into one strong braid. The diverse tribes of Medina must be like this. The elders converse. The Prophet distills general principles: Diversity is a treasure, identity is a source of pride, equal dignity is the baseline, faith is a bridge, the common good is the north star.
Once the constitution of Medina is signed, the Prophet receives a revelation from God: “This is your (sacred) union, a unique collective, and I am your God who watches over you — so remain filled with hope.”
It was not Arabian clans in conflict in 18th-century Virginia, but Christian sects. Baptist preachers were regularly beaten and jailed by other Christians. James Madison was not a Baptist — in fact, he was not especially devout at all. Standing 5-foot-4, refusing to kneel during services, declining confirmation in the Anglican church, Madison became an evangelical about other people’s rights and the nation’s higher purpose. He dreamed a democracy that was both diverse and united.
Like the Prophet Muhammad at the constitutional convention of Medina, Madison argued in the constitutional conversations that shaped the United States for a political architecture that affirmed freedom and encouraged cooperation. In Federalist 14, he wrote: “Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens …”
In August 1790, President George Washington was received in Newport, Rhode Island, by the warden of the Touro Synagogue, Moses Seixas. Seixas had high hopes but sought assurances. New orders had not always been kind to Jews or other religious minorities. Seixas presented Washington with a letter and a challenge: The Constitution is a prophecy; would he fulfill it?
Washington responds with these words: “The government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves good citizens. … May the children of the stock of Abraham sit in safety under their own vine and fig and let there be none to make them afraid.”
It was a solemn promise from the highest human office, with God as witness: All would be welcome and protected in the sacred union of the United States of America.
In the year 630, the Prophet reenters Mecca as a conqueror. Not a drop of blood is shed. “Today is the day of amnesty,” he declares. The people who had banished him eight years earlier, sent armies after him three times since and attempted to assassinate him — all forgiven.
Muhammad tells the elders of Mecca that they still have positions of honor in the city, but membership in the leadership council must now be open to people of all tribes and ages and women as well as men. He dictates over 80 letters and sends messengers on horseback to deliver them to diverse religious leaders across the region. He tells the Christians of Najran that their faith is respected and their churches would be protected. He says to the Magi of the Zoroastrians that their fire temples would come to no harm and that they may practice their rituals in security. He rises in respect when the funeral of a Jew passes by.
There were a small number of new rules everyone had to follow: No more burying girl babies alive, no more human sacrifice, no more selling slaves. As if to demonstrate how diverse the leadership of the new order would be, Muhammad instructs Bilal, an African and former slave whom Muhammad had set free, to climb up on the Kaaba, the structure built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, and sound the call to prayer.
Less than a month after declaring “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln came to Chicago to celebrate Independence Day. From the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel, in a time of national turmoil over slavery and immigration, Abraham Lincoln said to the gathered crowd:
We are now a mighty nation, we are 30—or about 30 millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about 82 years … We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for …
We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors —among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian … If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” … and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
We are taught in the Quran that God created human beings with his breath and gave us both a purpose and a gift. The purpose: Be God’s abd and khalifa — his servant and representative — on creation. The gift: to speak the names of things.
Today, to fulfill our duty to God and our sacred union, it is proper to say aloud the names of some people who are no longer able to strengthen it:
Asif Amin Cheema, owner of Best Sub #2, described by his daughter as gentle and patient. Deported.
Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, 9 years old, en route to Disney World with her family. Detained.
Renee Nicole Good. Poet. Mother. Dead.
Alex Pretti. Mountain biker. VA nurse. Dead.
Let us pray:
O Allah, O our Lord, Thou art the peace, and from
Thee is the peace, and to Thee returneth the peace, O
our Lord, give us life of peace, and usher us in the
abode of peace. Blessed Thou art, our Lord, the Most
High, O the Lord of Majesty and Reverence.
(Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Original Source: