Discussion Group Report

"Four score and 15 years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and founded not on the authority of God but on the rights of humankind and the bedrock of human reason. Now we are engaged in a crucial test to determine whether a nation so conceived as the first secular government in the world can endure." So Susan Jacoby began a speech at the Freedom from Religion Foundation convention in Madison, Wisconsin, on October 30, 2004. A copy is found in Freethought Today, December, 2004.

She said Americans are woefully undereducated about the secular side of the nation's heritage, beginning with the rationalist Enlightenment values that shaped the revolutionary generation. Nearly four years into a presidency that has mounted the most radical assault on the separation of church and state in American history, she said, secularism is in even greater trouble in the United States.

It is ironic, she continued, that this situation would occur when people around the world are witnessing extraordinary and terrifying new demonstrations of the power of religion to do harm when it is united with political and state power. The Taliban reduced Afghanistan to a near-medieval society. Both Islamic and Jewish fundamentalists played a role in sustaining the seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East. It is difficult to negotiate agreements when representatives of each side are convinced that God himself has given them the right to occupy the same piece of land. A celibate pope in Rome declares that condoms do not discourage the spread of AIDS, a belief that is medical nonsense.

The framers of the American Constitution protected government from religious interference by prohibiting any religious test for public office, omitting any mention of God from the Constitution, and reserving supreme governmental authority for "We the People." And separation of church and state also protects the church from governmental interference in church governance. What an achievement in a world not far removed from a time when Protestants and Catholics massacred one another over doctrinal differences and a world in which Christians were still massacring Jews for the crime of deicide?

The fundamental question, one that was not joined in the 2004 presidential campaign, is why on earth would we want to change an arrangement that has served both religion and government so well for more than two centuries? "Why," Jacoby asks, "are Americans and their elected leaders not proclaiming from the rooftops that secular government, coupled with complete religious liberty, is the cornerstone of a decent society? Why do we tolerate the preaching of a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, who bases his support for the death penalty on his belief that government derives its power not from men but from God--and since God has the power of life and death, so too should governments? Why are we still fighting fundamentalist Christian attacks on the teaching of evolution in American public schools--nearly 150 years after Darwin?...

"Where is a modern candidate with the courage of Abraham Lincoln, who when ministers in his home town of Springfield, Ill., called him an 'infidel' and excoriated him for not joining any church, replied that he would make haste to join a church--if he could only find one that did not require belief in elaborate supernatural doctrines and instead simply preached the word, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself?'… Where is a candidate with the forthrightness of John F. Kennedy, who in his 1960 speech to the Houston ministers famously declared, 'I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.'"

It is too easy to blame financial and political power of the religious right exclusively for the demonization of American secularism. It evades the role of larger forces in American society and absolves secularists themselves of their responsibility to educate the public about the neglected noble secular heritage of this republic.

An essential factor in the stigmatization of secularism is the larger American public's unexamined assumption that religion per se always exerts a benign influence on society. The ultra-conservative apostles of religiousness have exploited that assumption brilliantly and tarred opponents of faith-based adventurism as enemies of all religion, as relativists, which is an unfairly demonized word. It takes a drastic example of religion's potential to do harm, as in a Christian Scientist's denial of a blood transfusion to his dying child or the transformation of a plane into a lethal weapon in the name of radical Islam, to shake the American faith in religion as a positive social force.

The problem is not religion as a spiritual force, but religion melded with political ideology and political power. Since the religiously correct do not acknowledge danger in mixing religion and politics, evil acts committed in the name of religion must always be dismissed as the dementia of criminals and psychopaths.

"What America lacks today," says Jacoby, "is a public figure who talks about the danger of religious interference with government in the uncompromising terms used by Robert Green Ingersoll, the foremost exponent of freethought and the most famous orator in late 19th century America… He declared that the founders 'knew that to put God into the Constitution was to put man out.'"

Actually many Americans today do retain a healthy respect for everything that the separation of church and state has given our country. The highly respected Pew Forum on Religion found in a 2001 poll that, while 70% of those questioned endorsed tax support for faith-based social services, 80% would exclude religious organizations that hire only members of their own faith. Yet George Bush pushed ahead with executive orders exempting church groups from the usual prohibitions against religious discrimination in hiring.

"Candidates should not try to hide their support for separation of church and state, but should proclaim it on every possible occasion," Jacoby argues…"As anyone with a scintilla of historical memory knows, fundamentalist white southern Protestants were the strongest supporters of segregation in the 50s and 60s…King and other African-American ministers were able to use their moral values for social action precisely because their churches were independent of government control. Would they have been free to do so if they had been dependent on faith-based funding that came from the government?"

Ingersoll quoted what he said was "the best prayer I have ever read," Lear's soliloquy on the heath when he stumbled upon a place of shelter. The prayer ended, "…And show the heavens more just." Jacoby said of these words that they are "the essence of the secularist and humanist faith here on earth, and it must be offered not as a defensive response to the religiously correct but as a robust and ardent creed worthy of the first secular government in the world."