Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (6 page)

The Seductive Simplicity of Certainty

Thomas Jefferson believed that “reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” The Enlightenment philosophy of our Founders got enshrined in our Constitution, which indeed constitutes a philosophy, a worldview. This worldview stands inherently and most essentially as evidence based. Contrast this Enlightenment philosophy with that of George Hensley, a Pentecostal preacher who, like many religious people, passionately adhered to selected portions of the Bible’s vast and contradictory texts. Hensley focused on Mark 16:18, which asserts the power to “take up serpents” and “drink any deadly thing,” because “it shall not hurt them.” This great theologian, George Hensley, died in 1955 of a snakebite. Hensley has thousands of followers to this day. His passionate preaching, like that of so many itinerant preachers, is part of a very significant American tradition, a tradition that stands in direct contrast to the views of our Founders. Back in Maine I found delicious irony in the fact that fundamentalists passionately pointed to those biblical passages condemning homosexuality, yet never mentioned the prohibition on eating shellfish, a biblical edict that would be none too helpful to Maine’s emblematic lobster industry.

This à la carte reading of ancient texts is not unique to Christians. Osama bin Laden acted far more viciously than any viper, and certainly more viciously than Hensley. Yet, like George Hensley, bin Laden preached his selected scripture adamantly. I prefer the many religious people who purposely avert their eyes from the texts of their own scripture. Better to avert one’s eyes than believe, especially when scripture exhorts people to violence and endangerment.

Just because I share a Jeffersonian skepticism about biblical literalism, I nonetheless assert that, by all means, the Bible should be required reading for public school children.

Read Luke 19:27, where Jesus is quoted as saying: “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me.” Read the Koran, too: “The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.” Then read the Constitution of the United States. Which of these documents evolves? Which of them proclaim themselves perfect and unchangeable?

When considering the sagacity of the Founders, remember that, in this century, women have been stripped, raped, and set on fire in the name of religion. Not in some ancient time. In this century, a pregnant woman has been cut open and her fetus impaled on a pike in the name of religion. In this century, two hundred men and women were hacked by machetes and burned alive in Nigeria—because women planned to wear bikinis! In 2002 in Saudi Arabia, fourteen girls burned to death in their school. Why? The country’s “religious police” blocked the schoolgirls from exiting their burning school building and blocked rescue workers from entering because the girls weren’t wearing proper Islamic dress! I completely disagree with those who stigmatize Muslims as a group, but we should also face unflinchingly the extremist and violent actions taken in the name of Islam.

Think of all the hours that could be spent helping others that are now spent explaining why we should agree with, or simultaneously embrace or ignore, harsh sexual codes from ancient Middle Eastern peoples, regardless of whether those ancient sects adhered to the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Koran.

St. Augustine wrote that torture was an acceptable sanction for breaking the laws of men and, therefore, it was an acceptable sanction for breaking the laws of God. Hitler was never excommunicated, but Galileo was. The Catholic Church only recently recanted Galileo’s excommunication. No word yet on booting Hitler from the fold.

One of our present Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, said, “The more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.” Perhaps he’s right. Justice Scalia’s principle might also be applied to Muslim fundamentalist countries. In a world where fundamentalism is on the rise, America must be made safe for the ideas of Einstein and Twain. Politics must be made safe for the ideas of Madison and Jefferson.

Let us follow two “golden rules”:

First
: “Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him.” Jesus you might think? Too recent. Pittacus, the Greek sage—who lived more than five centuries before Christ (c. 640–568 BCE)

Second
: Officials “shall be bound . . . to support the Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” This comes from our Constitution—in particular, Article 6, Section 3.

Our Constitution beautifully embraces the theory of evolution—societal evolution. As Jefferson said, “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”

The Bible and the Koran reject evolution, not just in the scientific sense, but in the humanistic sense. The words of the Bible and Koran are unchangeable, no matter what compassion, science, or thousands of years of reason may reveal. Blacks? Women? Gay people? Too bad. Your applications were received centuries too late. The Constitution—and this was Madison’s original intent—is an evolutionary document by design. Madison’s genius was his humble belief that what he knew in the late 1700s wasn’t all there was to know and therefore our system must adapt and change.

Darwin and Einstein offered real books of revelation, profoundly new to our eyes—elegantly explaining marvelous rules of our universe. Just as surely, just as dramatically, and just as importantly, Madison revealed new and marvelous rules for human interactions. Just as Einstein showed us that light bends, Madison showed us that the light of justice bends in beautiful and unexpected ways—toward compassion and justice. Our world is all the more marvelous for it. In both Madison’s and Einstein’s case, we see an ennobling sense of humbleness to their brilliant revelations. Einstein said, “I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

The minds of Einstein and Madison make me very optimistic about the future. The trends arc toward science and compassion, inherently humble concepts, and, especially among the young, toward justice, secularism, and greater inclusion. However, those with the greatest and most absolute certainty can, at least at first, have a rhetorical advantage. Some people find certainty extremely comforting. Indeed, the seductive simplicity of certainty is the greatest rhetorical advantage of fundamentalism.

Let’s give credit to fundamentalists. They sell the comfort of certainty, and many people have been buying, including our politicians. The Christian fundamentalists have secured special rights in Congress and the states. Fundamentalists have secured billions of tax dollars that are in turn used to help them achieve their political ends.

Almost thirty years ago fundamentalist author Robert Simonds wrote
How to Elect Christians to Public Office
. Dismissing the fundamentalists as
mere crackpots was not savvy politics. Their strategy was excellent and successful beyond what their numbers would warrant. Can nonfundamentalist Americans—those committed to the separation of church and state—be as committed to truth as fundamentalists can be committed to unbending, ancient documents? Can we be as committed to gentleness as they are committed to corporal punishment in school? Can we be as committed to justice and inclusion as they are to judgmental harshness? Can we be as committed to action based on reason as they are to action based on unbending doctrine?

Perhaps the biggest motivation for action is the stark and harsh results of privileging of religion in U.S. law. We will see that, far from an intellectual abstraction, this breach of Jefferson’s wall has greatly harmed Americans and people the world over. Moreover, fundamentalists, through their political and legislative efforts, have harmed the very American exceptionalism they claim to revere. After all, America is exceptional only so long as it embodies the rationalism and reason that were central to the genius of Jefferson and Madison, our brilliant leaders who envisioned, designed, and then built the all-important wall separating church and state.

Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our Constitution rests
.

—Mitt Romney

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution
.

—James Madison

You’ve heard the phrase “you can’t legislate morality.” In fact, the only thing you can legislate is morality. Legislative decisions embody the moral choices of a society. Most religious people are good and honorable citizens who place a high premium on morality, as they should, yet theocrats increasingly manipulate our laws and tax dollars in ways that harm real people—and that are, put simply, immoral.

Religious people will often ask the nonreligious, how can you be moral if you don’t believe in God? Consider the words of Jefferson: “Fix Reason firmly in her seat. . . . Question with boldness even the existence of a God. . . . Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.” I ask, how can our morals be rigidly bound by ancient texts rather than guided and modified by reason and compassion?

Whether we turn our attention to health care, the care of children, women’s rights, tax policy, or general issues of religious discrimination, we see myriad examples of real people harmed by religious bias in law—in
short, by religious “morality.” Yet the vast majority of Americans, including Americans, religious and secular, who care about separation of church and state, remain blithely unaware of even the most harmful and immoral of these laws.

You’ve already been briefly introduced to the horrific ways in which religious bias in law harms children, and we will see more examples of how it harms children, which is but one of several areas in American law that reeks with unjust bias. We must shine a light on the many ways that religious bias in law and in many of our government institutions harms all of us and, through our foreign policy, harms people the world over.

Religious Bias Hurts Our Men and Women in Uniform

Federal law requires everyone who enlists in the Armed Forces to take the enlistment oath, pledging to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution states that religion cannot be used as a qualification for public service and that our government can neither advance nor inhibit religion. Despite this oath, assignments and promotions based on religious membership rather than merit have occurred in the U.S. military, as have direct endorsements of religion, particularly in recent decades. The military has failed to create effective mechanisms for reporting and, when necessary, disciplining those who discriminate and harass based on religion.

In 2004 “friendly fire” killed Pat Tillman, who left the National Football League to join the Army Rangers. The circumstances of his being shot in the head three times by U.S. weapons while on tour in Afghanistan remain hazy. (The military first pretended that Tillman died under enemy fire.) A well-read man, Tillman, just before he died, had made an appointment to meet with the antiwar intellectual Noam Chomsky. Tillman was not religious and opposed the Iraq War, and he is rightly considered a national hero. But how would a more anonymous soldier in the military be treated who held similar views about our place in the universe?

Consider the case of Specialist Jeremy Hall, who chose to be honest about his lack of religion. Unlike Tillman, who was used by the military as a propaganda tool, Hall did not have the protection of fame. A superior officer implied to Hall that to get promoted he must put his lack of religion aside and pray with his fellow soldiers. A man of integrity, Hall refused—and didn’t receive the promotion. Later, at a meeting of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers organized by Hall, a major crashed the meeting and chastised Hall, threatening disciplinary action.

Because of his personal beliefs, Hall received death threats from fellow soldiers. On leave in Qatar, a group of U.S. soldiers chased Hall, hurling
slurs and threatening to beat him. Fearing for Hall’s safety, the army assigned him a bodyguard. He eventually chose not to reenlist.

Such harassment is not unique. A 2005 U.S. Air Force report found that officers, faculty, and cadets at the Air Force Academy promoted fundamentalist beliefs and harangued cadets who practiced a different religion or no religion. Media reports have revealed similar incidents in the military, particularly in recent years.

Contrast that with what happens to those officers who actively promote fundamentalist beliefs. In 2006, seven high-ranking uniformed military officials appeared in a video promoting the Christian Embassy, a proselytizing organization led by Bill Bright. Bright founded the multimillion-dollar Campus Crusade for Christ. He signed the 2002 “Land Letter” that offered President George W. Bush religious justifications for invading Iraq. What happened to the uniformed officers in the Christian Embassy video? Two of them, General Robert Caslen and Colonel Lucious Morton, were promoted, despite a reprimand by the Department of Defense’s inspector general for their uniformed participation in this evangelical project.