Discussion Group Report

"In January 2002 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a major speech so sweeping and extreme in its contempt for democracy, and so willfully oblivious to the Constitution's grounding in human rather than divine authority, that it might well, in an era when American secularists were less intimidated by the forces of religion, have elicited calls for impeachment," says Susan Jacoby in her book, Freethinker. She describes in the chapter with the same title as this article the pummeling that reason is receiving presently by the religious right.

Scalia upholds capital punishment to the point of upholding state laws that permit the execution of minors and the mentally retarded. The death penalty, he says, does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment because executions were not considered "cruel and unusual when the Constitution was written. It could be imposed not only for murder but for many other felonies like horse thieving. Under this line of thought courts should feel free to hand down death sentences for grand theft auto, the modern equivalent of horse theft.

The real underpinnings of Scalia's support for the death penalty, argues Jacoby, are to be found, not in constitutional law, but in the justice's religious convictions. He believes that the state derives its power not from the consent of the governed--"We, the people"--but from God. God has the ultimate power of life and death, and therefore lawful governments also have the right to exact the ultimate penalty. Democracy, with its pernicious idea that citizens are the ultimate arbiters of public policy, is responsible, he says, for the rise of opposition to the death penalty in the 20th century. "Few doubted the morality the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings," Scalia noted in his speech. He would have been accurate to point out that most subjects in absolute monarchies also supported the right of kings to torture and impose the death penalty by drawing and quartering. Like many conservative politicians he supported his argument by pointing to the evangelist Paul: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but that of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive unto themselves damnation. Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil." Scalia went on in the speech to imply that the New Testament justice is morally superior to "Old Testament vengeance": the divine authority claimed by Scalia for the death penalty is not the law of Moses but Christian (conservative Christian) doctrine.

The fact that Scalia's radical speech attracted little public attention is one measure of the religious right's success in placing liberals and secularists on the defensive--and the cowardice of politicians who fear being maligned as antireligious when they stand up for separation of church and state. The justice's extremism lays bare the messianic radicalism at the heart of the current assault on separation of church and state; it is intended to undermine all secularist and nonreligious humanist values. For the religious right, governmental power is one more mechanism, along with institutions of education, communications and finance, for advancing their values within society.

The White House Web site offers a long list of "do's and don'ts for faith-based organizations" attempting to negotiate the ever-expanding array of grant possibilities for religious organizations. Heading the list is abstinence education, the pet program of those who oppose birth control and abortion and insist that preaching chastity is the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Fifty-six years ago Justice Hugo Black asserted, "Jefferson's metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a 'wall of separation,' not of a fine line easily overstepped." The White House's checklist inviting churches to begin feeding at the federal trough does not even acknowledge the existence of a line, much less a wall.

Jacoby feels it is a measure of the intimidating power of religiously correct rhetoric that so many Democrats have jumped on to the faith-based bandwagon. Al Gore in 2000 told reporters he would precede every major executive decision with the question, "What would Jesus do?" His running mate, Joe Lieberman¸ pooh-poohed First Amendment concerns.

Religion is so much a part of the public square that a majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist for president. Important factors in the rise of religious correctness are right-wing money, political clout and the larger American public's unexamined assumption that religion is, and always will be a benign influence on society. The extreme right has exploited that assumption brilliantly.

Embattled secularists have done a particularly poor job of educating mainstream religious believers about the religious right's effort to vitiate the First Amendment. A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that 70% of Americans support faith-based funding for social services but that 80% opposed tax support of religious organizations that hire only members of their own faith. Yet Bush told federal agencies that religious groups could qualify as public contractors even if they refuse to hire workers of other faiths. One reason he felt free to do this may have been the near-total absence of press coverage highlighting the kinds of reservations expressed in the Pew poll.

Fanatics throughout history have always been convinced of the virtuousness of their visions. The fundamental issue is whether fanatics possess the power to pursue their particular religious/political vision with devastating consequences for those who do not share it. It is precisely because secularists do understand the power of religion, and the possibility that any intensely felt drive for righteousness may overwhelm dissenters in its path, that they insist on the fundamental importance of separation between church and state. But it is not enough that they speak up in defense of the Constitution; they must also defend the Enlightenment values that produced the legal structure crafted by the framers. Their case must be made on a broader plane that includes the defense of rational thought itself. The need for a strong secularist defense of science is especially urgent today, as many of the anti-secularist right's policy goals are intimately linked to an irrational distrust of science and scientists. There is a particularly strong connection between the revival of antievolutionism since 1980 and the political attack on separation of church and state because the Christianization of secular public education has long been a goal of the forces of conservative religion. Indeed the teaching of evolution is often cited by right-wing politicians as a major cause of school violence. Soon after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School Representative Tom DeLay of Texas (now House majority leader) suggested that the theory of evolution, which places humans within the animal kingdom, is responsible for influencing children to behave like lower animals.

Secularists frequently present themselves, and are perceived by others, as a cool lot, applying intellectual theories to social questions, but ignoring the emotions that move religious believers. Yet it is crucial, says Jacoby, for today's secularists to find a way to convey the passions of humanism as Ingersol once did, to move hearts as well as to change minds. They must present their faith, not as a defensive response, but as a robust creed worthy of the world's first secular government. They have trouble deciding what to call themselves today. It is time, Jacoby proffers, to revive the evocative and honorable freethinker, with its insistence that Americans think for themselves instead of relying on received opinion.