The presidential campaign this year, as it did four years ago, has become too focused on the religious beliefs of candidates. While religious beliefs should be respected, they should not become core issues as they have for increasing numbers of Americans, most visible among the supporters of Huckabee and Romney.
I would word our situation today less as secularism becoming a taboo subject and more that religion, in the eyes of candidates and the media, has become an important, high-profile political issue that runs the risk of compromising our secular tradition.
While many Americans might want to see religious values present in our society, it is primarily the Christian Religious Right or fundamentalists (similar to the Muslim right) that tends to have a binary view of the world, a world in which religion is pitted against secularism. Rather than understanding secularism as a separation of church and state intended to avoid any single state religion and provide space for belief as well as unbelief, the Christian Right sees secularism as anti-religion, as a godless ideology and threat. Thus, as a 2006 Gallup World Poll discovered (see John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think), despite the fact that in the United States church and state are separated by law, a majority (55%) of Christians favor the Bible as a source of legislation: 46% say the Bible should be “a" source, and 9% say it should be the "only" source of legislation.
Given America's multi-religious society, which has been made even more religious in recent decades by the increased presence of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs, it is important to American pluralism that we reclaim the center, re-appropriate an awareness of and value America's secular tradition.
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