A horrifying byproduct of a contentious election season is the spike in Islamophobic rhetoric and violence against American Muslims. FBI data show violence against Muslims now verges on immediately post-9/11 levels. Multiplying examples of harassment, intimidation and threats now fill news feeds. Despite Muslims’ being part of the American story since before the founding itself, many have long felt rejected and fearful in their own country and most feel more so now.

This should concern every American and every member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in particular. Religious minorities in the United States by turns have felt compelled to remind fellow citizens that religious liberty is the inheritance of every American, even members of unpopular minority faiths. Historically, anti-Mormonism, like anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism or Islamophobia, represented an ugly political sensibility as surely as it reflected deep religious antagonism. To intimidate Mormons or to oppose their religious movement, critics routinely invoked shameful rhetorical and political polemics: They stereotyped Latter-day Saints as being all alike (and thus all potentially dangerous), they argued that what appeared to be “religious” in the LDS community was a façade hiding something sinister, and they argued for collective guilt should individual Saints be found in error.

Latter-day Saints are prone to adopt cultural biases like any other group of Americans, but this painful history of persecution at times has sensitized us to the plight of other religious minorities or prompted vocal advocacy of broad understandings of religious freedom.

LDS founder Joseph Smith Jr., for instance, taught, “If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a Mormon I am bold to declare before heaven that I am just as ready to die for a Presbyterian, a Baptist, or any other denomination. It is a love of liberty which inspires my soul.”

Months later, he told a private council: “We act upon the broad and liberal principle that all men have equal rights, and ought to be respected, and that every man has a privilege … of choosing for himself voluntarily his God, and what he pleases for his religion … hence the importance of thrusting from us every spirit of bigotry and intolerance towards a man’s religious sentiments.”

Those notions had been put into practice earlier in LDS Nauvoo, Illinois, where a municipal statute mandated religious liberty, including provisions protecting then-unpopular Roman Catholics and “Mohammedans” (a common 19th-century American term for Muslims).

In the 20th century, the LDS First Presidency named Muhammad among various world religious leaders who had “received a portion of God’s light” and had been given “moral truths … to enlighten whole nations."

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University proudly publishes masterworks of Islamic philosophy and theology in its Islamic Translation Series, as both monuments of Islamic culture and as treasures within our shared history of world civilization.

The patterns of religious bigotry are clear enough. When the president-elect suggested during his campaign that future immigration policies might incorporate a religious test for Islam, warning bells should sound not just for Latter-day Saints but for every American.

To be fair, the president-elect has since modified his original sentiments to emphasize “territory” rather than religious identity. However, since the first naturalization bill in 1790 restricted potential citizenship to “free white person(s),” American immigration practices have sometimes reflected our worst biases and fears. And when the president-elect’s close advisors propose the possibility of a Muslim “registry” in the U.S., or of an NSEERS-like database that would track immigrants from Muslim countries, there should be no mistaking the disturbing precedents involved — from European anti-Semitism to American internment policies during World War II.

An effective national security or anti-terror strategy need not stigmatize or antagonize a global faith community. Americans of all political parties should decry stereotyping and notions of collective guilt for what they are.

J. Spencer Fluhman, Ph.D., is executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. Dr. Fluhman’s opinions are his own and should not necessarily be attributed to the Neal A. Maxwell Institute or to Brigham Young University.