Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (2 page)

• Unlike nonprofits, churches don’t have to file 990 forms (a basic financial disclosure). Thus, their finances are the most secretive of any so-called charitable organization. For-profit businesses, of course, must file detailed tax documents. So must 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Because the finances of religious organizations are akin to the proverbial black box, it is difficult to even find out whether something improper has occurred.
  
• Only a “high-level” IRS official can even authorize an audit of a religious organization. Meanwhile, the rest of us—whether individuals, for-profit businesses, or secular nonprofits—can be audited by any old IRS bureaucrat.
  
• Religious groups can legally give tax-free housing allowances to so-called clergy (some of whom just might be family), allowances that are not counted as income, exempting the housing from taxation.
  

To return to my opening theme, Faircloth leaves us in no doubt that the Founding Fathers established a nation that should forever separate state from church. Every American child knows this, or at least used to know it (the Texas Board of Education’s 2010 decision to question the separation of church and state in the state’s social-studies curriculum awaits a more charitable interpretation than I can muster). By sage design, the United States was to be kept free of religion’s suffocating foot so as to give breath to individual conscience. By putting into practice this cherished ideal, the United States civilized humankind. Other countries followed suit with their own secular constitutions, including, notably, France, Turkey, and India. If America, the world’s standard-bearer of secular governance, allows fundamentalists, tipsy with faith, to erode the wall between church and state, whither the world?

Faircloth paints a sobering picture, but fortunately, as anyone who has heard his speeches knows, he also has an inspiring and invigorating vision to offer. His intention is not just to awaken people to how the Religious Right harms us all. He ends his book with a much-needed plan for action. As a shrewd former politician, and highly successful executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, Sean Faircloth is uniquely positioned to play a decisive role in returning America to its secular foundation. His concluding manifesto is the optimistic flipside to the dark picture that his earlier chapters present. Readers will finish the book exercised, energized, and eager to join Sean Faircloth in a bold rediscovery of the secular dream of the European Enlightenment and America’s enlightened Fathers.

R
ICHARD
D
AWKINS

O
XFORD
, E
NGLAND

Early in high school I had acne, braces, and perpetually crooked glasses. My parents dressed me in polyester and refused me the haircuts that were then fashionable. To understate matters, dating was a challenge. Oh, girls sometimes spoke to me. I recall one in particular saying, “Pizza face, railroad tracks, four-eyed geek!” Forever hunched over a book, I sought, and often found, an escape from, well, me. I needed to overcome my shyness, so my dad, a theater teacher, suggested I try out for a play at my high school.

Since elementary school, I had watched my father direct plays. Frequently, after my regular school day was done, I would tag along to the high school where my dad taught and watch rehearsals into the night. Dad’s approach to directing students more closely resembled the stereotypical style of a football coach or baseball manager than that of an artistic director. Ethereal was not my dad’s style. Unlike me, he was a good athlete, and he played sports long before he got into theater. His vernacular seemed to spring more from the ball field than the salon. Dad had a grizzled half-time approach when barking out stage notes: “Blocking! Blocking! Learn your blocking. . . . Lines people! Learn the damn lines. Master nuts and bolts, then we can move on from there.” Sometimes dad issued compliments, but they were concise. His speaking style and approach to his craft were muscular, not flowery. “Good,” he’d say, “Now you’re getting it.” Or, “That was tighter.”

The students enjoyed pleasing this man of decisive certainty. He joked with students, but no one doubted who was in charge. Dad welcomed and encouraged suggestions, but he had final say on the merits of a suggestion. I admired the confidence and competence that my father exuded at those rehearsals.

Although I initially was afraid to try out for a play at my school, I realized that—after observing so many rehearsals, so many stage notes, such relentless tinkering with each line reading—I might have some grasp of the
basics of my father’s craft, and I decided to take a stab at it. I heeded his advice when preparing my audition; I had a line reading in mind for every sentence—how I would sound, how I would gesture, what direction I would cast my eyes. It may not have been the most spontaneous audition, but my willingness to craft a plan and then execute it compensated for my acne and awkwardness. That audition—for a play called
Inherit the Wind—
transformed my life in two ways.

First, my fear about actually performing notwithstanding, I realized that focusing on small steps was an effective way of achieving large, daunting, long-term goals. Laurence Olivier I’m not, but this method served me reasonably well, both in landing the lead in the play and in preparing for the role. In short, I learned to have confidence in the power of incremental improvement. This confidence has never left me and epitomizes the strategic approach that I espouse in this book.

Second, I played the role of Clarence Darrow. (Henry Drummond, the fictionalized character in the play, was Darrow through and through). Darrow battled in court the great fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan. The two clashed over the nature of religion, the meaning of Charles Darwin’s work, the literal interpretation of the Bible, and the very existence of God.

My dad had long equated ministers, particularly fundamentalist ministers, with con men, so I was already a skeptic, but memorizing Darrow day in and day out had a long-standing effect on me. Darrow made connections between Darwin’s work and America’s Enlightenment history—our heritage of intellectual honesty and government based on reason not religious bias. Darrow expressed these views with zest and a sardonic wit that served a deep idealism. Darrow’s proud agnosticism was convincing. I drank up Darrow, reading Irving Stone’s biography of him and concluding, as I still do, that Darrow, whatever his personal shortcomings, was the greatest lawyer this world has known. I’ve had reasons to sometimes be disappointed in the law and those lawyers who stray from the highest ideals of the profession, but Clarence Darrow inspired me to pursue a law degree. I’m still thankful for that.

Yet the most resonant aspect of that play today is how differently our twenty-first-century world treats religious fundamentalism than did the world in 1955, when the play was written. The play was in part a parable about McCarthyism. The playwrights, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, were protesting the injustices of the McCarthy era through the metaphor of the Scopes Trial. They were speaking out for intellectual freedom. An oversimplified summary of the play’s message might be: “We shall
rise above 1950s McCarthyism just as America rose above antiscientific 1920s fundamentalism.”

But something funny happened on the way to progress. What was perceived in 1955 as a largely settled issue in mainstream American society (Darwin right, creationism wrong) has today become a controversy as strong as, in many ways stronger than, that which existed in the 1920s—in the America of spats and speakeasies. That controversy has spread beyond the single issue of creationism to pervade vast reaches of American public discourse. America, the nation of progress, has slipped backward in a way that, as we shall see, endangers the very nature of our Republic.

America changed, and dramatically so, as I moved into adulthood. My father, whose religion was more the Fighting Irish football team than the Roman Catholic Church, encouraged me to go to the University of Notre Dame. I did, and I’m glad I did. Despite my love of Darrow and his views, I saw that religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, could sometimes embody some very positive values.

Maryknoll nuns and priests fought for social justice in Latin America. I remember the brave sisters killed by the right-wing death squads in El Salvador (killed after being raped and tortured). Mario Cuomo and Robert Kennedy remain my heroes. Catholicism was different then—and was perceived differently then. The pedophilia scandals had yet to make headlines. Though I was not a Mass-going Catholic even at Notre Dame, I felt some cultural allegiance to Catholicism. Even today, I continue to harbor many positive feelings about it, particularly regarding my Irish-Catholic cultural heritage.

In 2009 there was a strong movement among conservative Catholics, including the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to shun President Barack Obama as a commencement speaker at Notre Dame. This vocal affront to a sitting president, because he is prochoice, would never have occurred in earlier decades. For example, at my own Notre Dame graduation, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who was prochoice and whose wife led a bohemian lifestyle, was welcomed to speak with very little controversy. Things were different then.

After college I joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Alaska, another positive experience involving Catholicism. The organization specifically told us volunteers not to proselytize. The work was truly focused on social service. The idea of a twenty-two-year-old kid serving as a “house parent” for Native American teen boys who faced very serious personal issues (several of these boys were victims and, in some cases, perpetrators of dangerous crimes) was something for which I was completely unqualified. I learned a lot. The
poverty and social strife I saw affected me for life. I thank the sense of mission within some elements of the Catholic Church for this valuable education, an experience that strengthened my commitment to social justice.

After law school I entered private practice and then served briefly as a state assistant attorney general in Maine, handling child-protection litigation cases, among others. In that position, I was exposed to even more social problems and injustice. I saw hideous cases of abuse, including child sexual abuse photos that made you hide your eyes. I eventually left the attorney general’s office to run successfully for the Maine legislature.

During my years as an elected official, I started to witness the significant influence of fundamentalist and conservative religion on American law. I served ten years in the legislature, three of them on the judiciary committee, before which fundamentalist Christian and Catholic groups often testified. They lobbied the judiciary committee because they cared deeply about many of the issues within the committee’s purview. The media often prominently covered the desires of these groups to deny a woman’s right to choose and to discriminate based on sexual orientation, but I found that their interests were much wider than that. I did not agree with most of their positions on issues, though there were exceptions. I respected some of the social justice positions taken by some religious leaders, and I remember one brave priest from Bangor speaking out for equal rights for gay citizens, but I found many fundamentalist policy viewpoints to be disturbing.

I once took a call from a fundamentalist preacher regarding so-called parental consent. Some states have a law requiring all minor girls to get parental permission before they can have an abortion, and he advocated for such a law in Maine. I told the minister that I was confident most parents would be very caring if their minor daughter became pregnant but that some parents might react in a physically abusive way. I told the minister that for those girls who feared an abusive reaction to their pregnancy, the option of a consultation with a trained counselor would be an appropriate alternative.

I’ll never forget the minister’s response: “Well, sometimes the rod must be applied.” And he, with accuracy, referenced a biblical passage to support his point. I felt stunned by the calm and, indeed, casual way with which he—a minister who preached to a congregation every Sunday—advocated hitting a pregnant child—a position fully consistent with his reading of scripture and his own religious “values.”

This was a dramatic moment for me in two ways. First, I saw that my worldview, still strongly informed by the values of people like Darrow, was diametrically opposed to the values of this brand of religion. Second, it sank in how strong and confident this brand of religion was, even in a New
England state like Maine. I wondered to myself, if fundamentalism could be so extremely vocal, organized, and visible in the halls of my state legislature, what must it be like in Alabama?

I was later appointed to the appropriations committee and elected Majority Whip by my party colleagues. Between these two positions, which dealt with purse strings and leadership, respectively, I was again involved with the legislative issues important to the Christian fundamentalists. During these years, I became increasingly convinced that the views and positions of the fundamentalist Protestants from whom I heard, as well as the views and positions stemming from certain quarters within the Catholic Church, represented a fundamental rejection of the values that I—and the majority of Americans—held most dear. As a state legislator, I passionately advocated different policies, and I felt a desire to espouse the philosophy that drove them. At one point, I took an opportunity to strike a small blow for secular values—and to have some fun while doing so.

The Maine legislature, like most legislatures in America, opens with a prayer. This usually involves legislators scheduling clergy from their home districts to open the session. It’s perceived as an honor and it gives clergy something to mention to their congregation at services (“I want to thank Representative Jones who asked me to open the session last Tuesday”). When things got too hectic or busy to extend formal invitations to clergy, legislators often asked one of their own to offer a quick prayer. I decided I’d put in my name for when the legislature needed someone to pinch hit. The day I was called, I offered a “prayer” that I liked: I quoted Walt Whitman and Susan Jacoby from her book
Freethinkers
. I heard a couple of grumbles from one or two people on the other side of the aisle, but I suffered no particular negative political consequence. Although offering the “prayer” was a hoot, at the time I knew of no organization, no strong lobbying force whatsoever for the secular values that I had communicated—Jeffersonian and Madisonian values.