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To claim that America is a Christian nation because Christianity is the religion of the majority is as idiotic as it would be to claim that America is a white nation because a majority of its citizens (albeit a shrinking majority) appear to be white. No, wait--there are still troglodytes who rant about America being a "white Christian nation."
In nearly every interview about my book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism,I am asked whether I am an atheist or an agnostic. The bias--a profoundly American bias--implicit in this question is that only an "unbeliever" would want to write a historical work about the secular influences on the founding and development of our nation.
Since the beginning of the Bush administration, we have witnessed -- and are still witnessing -- the reprehensible results, affecting a wide variety of what are literally life-and-death issues, of a governing philosophy that exudes absolute contempt for the separation of church and state.
Since I do not believe in any supernatural being, I have nothing to say about prayer. The National Prayer Breakfast, however, is another matter.
Can you be a "good Jew" and not support every action taken by the Israeli government? You might as well ask whether you can be a "good American" and not support every U.S. government action.
First, the Muslim religion and Islamist fundamentalism as a religio-political force are two different, though related, entities. Muslims, like all religious believers, vary enormously in their attitudes toward violence, interpretations of their sacred texts, respect or disrespect for secular government, and openness to secular knowledge.
Predictably, obituary writers are already portraying the Reverend Jerry Falwell as a more respectable figure than he was. Ah, what a beautiful tradition it is to speak no ill of the dead!
The frequent references to their personal faith as a rationale for public policy by all of the Democratic candidates this year is straight out of a playbook by political consultants who, for the past four years, have repeatedly told Democrats that they must make every effort to take back the pious religious high ground from Republicans.
By all means, bring on the pagans with their gods and goddesses. The more the merrier. If my tax dollars must be used (and it seems that in America, they must) to pay the salaries of military chaplains who believe in just one god, I have no objection to paying chaplains who believe in more than one god.
This ignorant brouhaha over the opening of the Senate by a Hindu prayer is worth discussing only because it shows how many Americans know nothing about their Constitution and its separation of church and state.
John McCain, who was baptized, raised, and educated (at an exclusive private school in Alexandria, Virginia) in the Episcopal faith but recently declared himself a Baptist in a transparent effort to pander to a heavily Baptist South Carolina primary electorate, is hardly in the best position to make informed judgments about who is or is not well grounded in any religion. (Read more about McCain's rationale for suddenly declaring himself a Baptist in my Sept. 24 post on The Secularist's Corner .)
Why wouldn't the world benefit from an alliance between science and those forms of religion that regard the stewardship of the earth as a moral obligation? Indeed, the preservation of the environment for future generations is both a moral and a practical necessity--something that intelligent, decent people of any faith or no faith can and must recognize. If we fail to rise to the challenge, we will cease to exist as a species.
Philosophical questions about the ultimate compatibility of science and religion are really irrelevant here. At some point, faith always accepts the supernatural in ways that evidence-based science does not, but that certainly poses no barrier to cooperation between science and religions that also embrace secular knowledge. The broadest possible participation is necessary if we are to save our planet from the dangers of global warming; the heedless use of toxins associated with rapid industrialization (China being one of the prime examples); and, above all, our own greed.
Mitt Romney's Mormon religion has never been a disqualifier for the presidency as far as I am concerned. Why should I be any more concerned about a president believing that an angel named Moroni handed down golden tablets to the founder of his religion in the 19th century than I am about a president believing in a religion founded on the idea that a god-man rose from the dead 2,000 years ago? What does disqualify Romney in my view is that he is yet another right-wing religious candidate who wants to further erode the barrier between church and state.
I don't want to hear a word--not one bloviating word--about any candidate's personal "moral values." Self-assured, decent people don't feel obliged to assure the voters of their decency. Their values are evident from the way they live and the policies for which they have worked. By their fruits ye shall know them. (You don't have to consider the Bible to be the word of God to recognize its great lines--especially in the King James version.)
One of the few good things to be said for the inordinate length of the primary process is that in due course, a man who has received a huge amount of press coverage--a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who seems both humorous and "authentic"--reveals himself to be a humorous and authentic ignoramus. That is precisely what happened when Mike Huckabee suggested that we "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." (Huckabee also revealed himself to be as ignorant about lucid sentence structure as he is about constitutional history.)
What secular ideas? The very word "secular" has been demonized and written out of America's acceptable political vocabulary. The Republican Party has been in thrall to the religious right for nearly two decades, and an increasingly vocal religious left has now convinced Democratic candidates that they must frame their ideas in terms of faith in order to sell themselves to the American public.
I am tempted to ask whether the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has been sampling a bit too much communion wine lately. Seriously, the archbishop's suggestion that British law should, in certain instances, recognize the authority of Islamic religious courts is the most politically destructive, anti-secular, and legally indefensible statement by a western religious leader in recent history.
Apart from obligatory allusions to the God who has blessed America (mazel tov, Irving Berlin, your royalties are still rolling in) and a general tendency to be photographed making speeches in churches whenever possible, I do not think that faith has played a large and explicit role in the Democratic primary, which has now boiled down to a contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. That will probably change in the general election, because John McCain, in order to propitiate the angry Republican religious right, will probably have to start engaging in the politics of making the Democratic Party sound like the Party of Satan.
Oh no! Not On Faith too! These questions about what Candidate Jesus might stand for have no business in our presidential election. Any candidates, liberal or conservative, who have managed to convince themselves that their policies would have been endorsed by Jesus are unfit for any public office.
The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?
I wrote a very different post about this question before Barack Obama made a major speech on race relations at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday. I still think that the inflammatory racial remarks made by his pastor, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pose a significant problem for his campaign--even though Obama has said clearly that he does not agree with these views. But the main point made by Obama in his eloquent speech is that the nation is being held back by the rage of many black Americans at this country's history of slavery and discrimination and the rage of many whites at what they view as "special preference" for blacks based on that history. Both may be understandable, Obama suggested, but both are unproductive.
The Question: John McCain's spiritual guide, televangelist Rod Parsley, calls Islam a "false religion" that should be "destroyed." Should McCain renounce Parsley? Will Islam be an issue in this year's U.S. presidential election?
If I hear one more word about candidates' "spiritual guides" and the utter nonsense spouted by so many of these ecclesiastical and televangelical nitwits, I will be tempted to write in the name of someone--anyone--who has the guts to stand up and say that conscience is, and should be, our only guide.
The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?
The most significant fact about modern American Catholicism appears in a recent report on the changing U.S. religious landscape by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although 31 percent of Americans were raised as Roman Catholics, only 24 percent consider themselves Catholics today. One in ten adult Americans--a stunning figure--have left the church for another religion or have abandoned organized religion altogether. The saying, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," a favorite maxim of the nuns in the parochial schools I attended, is no longer true.
The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?
One could hardly expect the head of the Roman Catholic Church to take any other position. Union of church and state was, of course, the ideal situation--from the church's point of view--in pre-Reformation Christian Europe. But Americans were an overwhelmingly Protestant people at the time of the revolution, so the Constitution's separation of church and state was a huge help to both Catholics and Jews in the young republic. Americans' prejudice against "papists" in the first half of the 19th century was much stronger than anti-Semitism (a first in western history), and Catholicism could never have flourished if that prejudice had been bolstered by a state-established Protestant church.
The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?
I was not present at the National Press Club when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke on Monday, but I have read the full text of his remarks--and I can recognize an egomaniac, black or white, when I read one. For Wright to say that an attack on him is an attack on the entire black church is utterly ridiculous, and it plays in the mainstream white press only because so many white journalists--and I mean both liberal and conservative journalists--are so ignorant about African-American religion that they think of it as a monolith. Wright represents the "black church" in the same sense that Rod Parsley, John McCain's wacko spiritual adviser, represents the "white church."
I have always insisted that too many Americans mistakenly equate evangelical Christianity with fundamentalism. The basis of evangelical religion since the 17th century has always been a personal relationship between God and man, unmediated by ecclesiastical hierarchies. Fundamentalism, by contrast, insists on a literal interpretation of the Bible. While all fundamentalists are evangelicals, not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. I have often used former President Jimmy Carter as an example of an evangelical Christian who is not a fundamentalist, given that he has repeatedly opposed fundamentalists who want to keep Darwin's theory of evolution out of public schools. The "Evangelical Manifesto" issued last week in Washington suggests that I may have been wrong in my analysis of the relationship between evangelicalism and fundamentalism.
I must admit that my first reaction to the California Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was a profound sense of irritation at the timing. As someone who wants more than anything to see the Republican Party lose the presidential election, I can only shudder at the injection of what ought to be a non-issue into both California politics and the national race for the presidency. Mortgage foreclosures at an all-time high? Americans and Iraqis still being killed with no end in sight? Americans losing their health insurance at record rates? Forget those trivialities. The religious right will be babbling once again about God having created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve or Madam and Eve, and candidates will be forced to answer an unending stream of questions about this nonsense.
Barack Obama had no choice but to resign his church membership, after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's fiery comments about race were followed by a gadfly Roman Catholic priest's mockery of Hillary Clinton from the same pulpit. (I'll bet that Pope Benedict XVI disapproves of that priest too.)
This entire episode, like John McCain's disavowal of an endorsement by a sleazy televangelist who considers Hitler a hunter sent by God to return the Jews to Zion, is a case study in the danger of mixing religion with politics. If we were to hear a tape of every sermon delivered in churches attended by any of the candidates over the past 20 years, I venture to say that we would find a great many additional priests, ministers, and rabbis who have said something offensive to some segment of the American electorate. That is exactly why candidates should stop all of their sanctimonious talk about faith and why the public should return to the better angels of our national traditions, which treat faith as a private matter between an individual and God.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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