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By Faisal Kutty
Lawyer and Law Professor
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As Americans celebrate the nation's 250th birthday, there will be no shortage of speeches about freedom, pluralism, and the enduring promise of religious liberty.
Few expressions of that promise are more powerful than George Washington's 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in which he declared that the United States would "give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
More than two centuries later, it is worth asking how well we are living up to that ideal.
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On the fourth Friday since the deadly attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, I attended prayers at an LA mosque where five armed guards stood watch over more than a thousand worshippers. Families arrived with children, friends greeted one another, and volunteers directed traffic. The security presence seemed almost routine.
Three weeks earlier, while visiting from Canada, my daughter accompanied me to Friday prayer. As we approached the mosque, she stopped and photographed a security guard wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying what appeared to be a semiautomatic rifle.
"Is this normal?" she asked.
The honest answer is, yes—and that may be the most troubling part.
The San Diego attack left three people dead, including a security guard who reportedly died protecting worshippers. More than 130 children were on the property that day.
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According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, it may be the first ideologically motivated lethal attack on a U.S. mosque this century—a grim milestone that brings America closer to the deadly mosque attacks seen in Christchurch, New Zealand and Quebec City, Canada.
The Islamic Center was hardly unprepared. The institution had reportedly received federal and state security funding and were equipped with surveillance cameras, fencing, bullet-resistant glass, trained personnel, and emergency protocols. Yet tragedy still struck.
Those measures may have prevented an even greater catastrophe. But San Diego underscores how routine extraordinary security precautions have become at American houses of worship.
Nor is this challenge unique to Muslims.
This is not a challenge unique to Muslims. Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Hindu, and other faith communities have all faced deadly attacks, threats, and vandalism. Across faith traditions, the same question persists: how do you keep houses of worship open and welcoming without leaving them vulnerable?
Security is expensive. Every dollar spent on guards, cameras, and threat assessments is a dollar unavailable for education, charity, counseling, or community programs. I was reminded of that as I dropped money into the donation box after prayer. Since the attack, I have doubled my contribution to help cover added security costs. I did so willingly. Yet it is telling that houses of worship increasingly raise money for protection rather than service.
According to the Muslim Public Affairs Council, attacks targeting Muslims have increased elevenfold. Yet researchers at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute estimate that more than 80 percent of anti-Muslim hate-bias incidents go unreported, suggesting the problem is far larger than official statistics indicate.
Fear rarely shows up in government data. It appears instead in everyday calculations: parents wondering whether it is safe to send their children to classes, worshippers scanning their surroundings before entering a house of worship, and community leaders debating whether they can afford more security.
Security funding matters. California's chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has questioned whether Muslim-serving institutions receive their fair share of nonprofit security grants despite rising threats. But the larger question is not how much security funding religious institutions receive. It is why so many increasingly need it.
Since 9/11, Muslims in America have lived under heightened scrutiny. Mosques have been surveilled, vandalized, threatened, and occasionally attacked, while anti-Muslim conspiracy theories have migrated from the fringes into mainstream discourse. Most people exposed to such rhetoric will never commit violence. But rhetoric helps define who belongs and who is viewed with suspicion. Violence rarely emerges in isolation; it grows in climates where fear and dehumanization become normalized.
The San Diego attack and the need for armed guards did not occur in a vacuum.
As America marks its 250th anniversary, we should celebrate the nation's achievements. But anniversaries are also moments for reflection. San Diego is a reminder that the challenge is not simply how Muslims protect mosques, but how America protects religious freedom itself.
The challenge confronting mosques today affects houses of worship across America. The more religious communities feel compelled to fortify themselves, the further we drift from George Washington's promise that this nation would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
A quarter millennium after the nation's founding, the question is not how many guards, cameras, or security grants houses of worship need. It is why so many Americans increasingly feel they cannot worship without them.
Faisal Kutty is a professor of law at Southwestern Law School, affiliate faculty at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, and a contributing editor for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs*.*
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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