Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (22 page)

Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers for all the problems men face
.

—Ronald Reagan

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error
.

—Thomas Jefferson

What kind of America will there be for my sons in the year 2050? Hell, I’m enjoying myself enough that I’d like to still be working away in 2050. What will that America be like?

It seemed unrealistic in 1960 to envision an African-American president. It seemed unrealistic in 1970 to envision an America in which openly gay people hold high-ranking elected office. But there were people at that time working toward those goals. Those people were true leaders and heroes. We will do the same for secularism. Let us envision the Secular America of 2050, a time in which the real values of Jefferson and Madison have come to prevail and dominate the political and civic discourse of our nation.

Whatever his faults, Jefferson was a genius nearly beyond our comprehension. One of my favorite books is
Undaunted Courage
about the journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This expedition, formally known as the Corps of Discovery, was a personal initiative of President Jefferson. What a feat of derring-do! But the vision and the sheer lust for botany, for science, for geography, for anthropology, for life? That was all Jefferson.

With Jefferson’s Enlightenment vision and Madison’s remarkable Constitution, we see a nation intentionally designed to evolve as it moves into the future, not to be locked in some inflexible past. This Tea Party nonsense of pretending that Americans today are supposed to behave as Americans did in 1787 is the exact opposite of what Madison intended. What might our secular future look like? 133

Ten Guiding Principles of a Secular America

Our rejuvenated secular America will be guided by these moral imperatives:

1. Our military shall serve and include all Americans, religious and nonreligious, with no hint of bias, and with no hint of fundamentalist extremism coloring our military decisions at home or abroad.
   
2. Any federal- or state-funded program, whether offering services domestic or foreign, that relates to reproductive health and intimate sexual decisions shall be based on science and public health, not on religious bias or the denigration of women or sexual minorities.
   
3. Health-care professionals shall fulfill their ethical and professional oath to address the needs of their patients, and they must do so with no hint of religious bias and in respectful service to the needs of the patients they are sworn to serve—or they must find another job.
   
4. There shall be no bias based on religion or lack thereof in any land-use planning or environmental laws, and discrimination based on religion or lack thereof shall be prohibited in any employment setting.
   
5. While marriage can be defined by a religion as that religion so chooses for the purposes of its internal ceremonies, our government shall never impose a religious bias on the definition of marriage.
   
6. When facing the end of life, all Americans shall be guaranteed control over their own bodies, without being thwarted by religious bias.
   
7. America’s youth shall never be subjected to religious bias in education. If there is one penny of government funds involved, there must not be one iota of religious bias or propaganda.
   
8. The composition of our Congress and legislatures shall include Secular Americans, and there must be no political bias against secular candidates.
   
9. There shall be one consistent standard pertaining to the health and welfare of children, no matter the religion of a child’s parents, school, or child-care center. Religious extremists can do whatever they want to their own bodies, but children shall be treated as human beings, not as pawns to be sacrificed in the name of religion.
   
10. Medical, technical, and scientific innovation shall be dedicated to the health and advancement of our fellow citizens and must never be impeded by religious bias.
    

Let us linger on this last point, for it captures something essential and inspiring. Important ideals—and real lives—are at stake. When we betray stem cell research, we betray our fellow human beings. When we betray the scientific method, we betray the human spirit at its very best.

Our cause, the cause of Secular Americans—as the principles described herein demonstrate—is sacred. That’s right. Sacred. Progress today, progress in 2050, and progress a thousand years from now will be based most significantly on our commitment to Enlightenment values. Evidence will guide our conclusions. Compassion will guide our actions. This is the essence of secular social action.

This incremental improvement—step by step, piece by piece, evidence upon evidence, idea upon idea—stands as the most important guiding tool of our species. There is indeed “a grandeur to this view of life,” as Darwin put it.

Our Secular Decade plan sets out achievable goals to significantly improve our nation. It will require all of us to work together with every ounce of our reason, our devotion, our passion. If together we achieve the steps I’ve described in this plan by 2020, we will have reached a tipping point that will lead us to an even greater America—one based on our founding principles.

Reason and Innovation from the Top of the World

America must speak from the mountaintop once again. Our great secular future—like our great secular past—will be one of innovation, of science, and of the ever-churning competition of new ideas. Our future America must be an America where the tinkerer and the garage inventor are hailed as heroes, and the shysters and “prosperity” preachers are prosecuted for misuse of funds.

JFK liked to quote Aristotle, that happiness is life lived along lines of excellence. We loved Kennedy’s patriotic vision of American exceptionalism. America the beautiful? Sure. But Kennedy inspired us to be America the best. When we set the goal of sending a man to the moon, when we led in science, when we aspired to equal opportunity for all our citizens, America was indeed exceptional in the best sense of that word. We did stand out, and the world loved us for it. Kennedy’s picture was in huts in Africa, in villages in India. Think of the sheer boldness of it.

Conservative columnist George Will had his finger on a central issue when he wrote in a January 2, 2011, column: “From 1970 to 1995, federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent. On a per-student
basis, state support of public universities has declined for more than two decades and was at the lowest level in a quarter-century before the current economic unpleasantness. Annual federal spending on mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering now equals only the increase in health-care costs every nine weeks.”

Sadly America must look elsewhere for a glimpse of the secular America of 2050 to which we must aspire. Consider innovation in Sweden. The public and the private sectors in Sweden allocate nearly 4 percent of GDP to research and development (R&D) annually, which makes Sweden one of the countries that invest most in R&D as a percentage of GDP. Sweden tops Europe in comparative statistics both in terms of research investments as a percentage of GDP as well as in the number of published scientific works per capita.

Sweden can’t be bothered with endless discussion about creationism, or about ancient sexual restrictions on women and minorities. Sweden innovates while America rehashes debates long settled elsewhere. Sweden often leads the world in medical science and is also among the top in natural science and engineering in terms of the number of scientific publications per capita.

Swedish inventors held a total of 33,523 patents in the United States as of 2007, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Only ten other countries hold more patents than Sweden. Think about the size of the Swedish population to understand the scale of this accomplishment. With less than 10 million citizens, its more than thirty times smaller than the United States. Of the nine nations with more patents, eight are large-population countries. Only very secular Switzerland is a smaller country on the list, a nation (remember patent clerk Einstein) that was already a patent capital in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the industrial countries in the top ten are among the most secular nations on Earth.

How does saving a life every six minutes strike you as an accomplishment? It resulted from Volvo’s capitalism and innovation with the three-point seat belt. In the book
Sweden: Up North, Down to Earth
, the authors state that “Swedes are some of the world’s fastest people at adapting to new trends and ideas, and are constantly on the cusp of a groundbreaking innovation.”

Sweden went from a frozen and poverty-stricken outpost in the late 1800s to the nation of the zipper and ball bearing in the twentieth century to Skype today. Swedes don’t just come up with new ideas, they bring innovative ideas to market. In May 2010 Sweden ranked as the most competitive
European Union country according to the World Economic Forum, followed by two other very secular nations, Denmark and Finland.

Sweden’s government also consistently ranks as one of the most transparent and noncorrupt. Phil Zuckerman writes persuasively about the quality of life in secular nations in a piece published January 16, 2011, by the Council for Secular Humanism titled “Is Faith Good for Us?”

The 2004 United Nations’ Human Development Report, which ranks 177 countries on a Human Development Index, measured such indicators of societal health as life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, and educational attainment. According to this report, the five top nations in terms of human development were Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. All had notably high degrees of organic atheism. Furthermore, of the top twenty-five nations, all but Ireland and the United States were nations with some of the highest percentages of nontheism on Earth. Conversely, the bottom fifty countries of the Human Development Index lacked statistically significant levels of organic atheism.

As Zuckerman further points out, the most nontheistic nations have the lowest infant-mortality rates. The most religious nations have the highest infant-mortality rates. He reveals the same trend with regard to homicide rates. He points to a 2003 study which found that nations with the highest illiteracy rates were all highly religious. The highly irreligious nations in Scandinavia, which offer widespread sex education and birth-control access, have the lowest HIV and AIDS rates. According to a 2004 study, the most irreligious nations were the most likely to treat women and girls equally. The nations with the most sexist policies tend to be the most religious.

I will not attempt to prove here a direct causal relationship between secularism and a healthy strong society, but I will say secularism sure doesn’t seem to hurt. In particular, as a strong proponent of innovation and capitalism, I am very impressed by the emphasis on R&D in Sweden, as well as on securing patents. Our nation has lost sight of innovation and quality of life as the standards for rational government decision making.

Another example: American Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman makes a strong, evidence-based case for early childhood education leading to economic strength. Pay for executives at America’s largest firms has quadrupled—in real dollars—since the 1970s, which might be fine—if American executives made smart long-term choices. However, gearing decisions to the next quarterly report and the next golden parachute for themselves does nothing to match the more strategic decisions Swedes have made to invest in early childhood education so as to secure the excellent return on investment to which economic evidence points.

Sweden’s sister country, Denmark, is rated the “most happy nation on earth” by the World Values Survey, conducted by Ron Inglehart and funded by the National Science Foundation. Average Danish citizens themselves report these highest levels of happiness. Inglehart discerns four common factors in the happiest nations: prosperity; a functioning democracy; high levels of social tolerance; and personal freedom (e.g., gender equality).

Danes are often rated, even more so than Swedes, as the most secular people on earth. Consider that high levels of social tolerance and personal freedom are very difficult to achieve in countries where religious dogma holds sway. A central tenet of fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam is suppression of sexual minorities and opposition to many forms of equal rights for women.

As Phil Zuckerman has said, Danes and Swedes, spectacularly secular, find meaning in life through work, family, causes, traditions, nature, love, and good works. Instead of arguing about how some ancient document requires the shunning of other human beings, they address issues rationally. As a result, they have bus systems that work, pragmatic health coverage, and low crime rates. These innovative capitalist countries have the lowest church attendance of any place in the Western world. And what else do we find there? These innovative capitalist countries, according to the testimony of the people themselves, create a far better quality of life than Americans themselves report.

Saab and Volvo are respected innovators. America has a dual culture in business. The big corporate bureaucracy (think of our auto industry leading up to the 2008 disaster) and the innovators in our computer industry. Redmond, Washington, and Silicon Valley count among the most secular places in America, places of real innovation and capitalism. I love this country. My competitive blood flows, not out of hostility, but out of admiration for the Scandinavians. America must not be satisfied with its pockets of innovation—innovation must be our defining business practice.