Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (5 page)

Just imagine, Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest thinkers, one of our greatest presidents, might be lost to us if he ran for office today—because the author of the Declaration of Independence dared to think independently.

Particularly in the last three decades, a candidate of Jefferson’s views would face almost insurmountable electoral odds. Consider the words of W. A. Criswell, the man selected by President Ronald Reagan to deliver the benediction for the 1984 Republican National Convention. Criswell said the separation of church and state “is the figment of some infidel’s imagination.” It was Criswell who introduced Reagan at a giant gathering of
fundamentalist preachers in 1980 to whom Reagan made this pivotal declaration: “I know you can’t endorse me, but . . . I want you to know that I endorse you.”

Now what if we political consultants uncovered the following set of quotes from another aspiring politician:

Quote one:
“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”

Quote two:
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

Quote three:
“During almost 15 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.”

Quote four:
“Religion . . . has been much oftener a motive to repression than a restraint from it.”

How might political consultants react to a candidate with the above quotes? As with Jefferson, the response would likely be, “Hang it up there, James Madison, Father of the Constitution.”

At least Jefferson looked like a politician: he was tall, handsome, and even played the violin. Madison was short, paunchy, and shaped rather like an oversize toad, and is one of the most underrated of the Founders. But if the words and ideals of Jefferson cause today’s theocrats fits, Madison’s might put theocrats into an outright seizure.

Jefferson famously wrote the words “separation of church and state.” Madison wrote that government and religion are served by “the
total
separation of church and state.” (emphasis added) As a twenty-five-year-old legislator, Madison succeeded in his first major legislative proposal, which left religious opinion completely to the “dictates of conscience.”

Many secularists have seemed pleased simply because President Obama has made less of a show of the National Prayer Breakfast than had President George W. Bush. Contrast that with Madison, who publicly opposed any government-sponsored prayer day. In 1817 he wrote that a national day of prayer would “imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.”

Today a chaplain opens Congress with a prayer. Madison said, “Establishment of a chaplainship to Congress is a . . . violation of equal
rights, as well as . . . Constitutional principles.” As the Constitution’s prime author, he’d know.

With regard to chaplains in the military, Madison said, “Better also to disarm in the same way, the precedent of chaplainship for the army and navy than erect them into a political authority in matters of religion.” Madison concluded that the appointment of military chaplains would inevitably constitute majority tyranny—that religious truth would be tested by numbers and that major sects would end up governing minor sects. This, as Madison foresaw and we shall see later, is the case today.

What of so-called faith-based initiatives? Madison opposed federal recognition of religious charities, even when they involved no federal funds. According to the Father of the Constitution, a bill vesting in churches an authority to provide for the support of the poor was something he opposed as giving “legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.” Today, so-called faith-based initiatives involve your tax dollars going to religious organizations. But get this: Madison vetoed legislation that recognized a church charity even though the legislation gave the church no money at all.

Regarding legislation pertaining to a parcel of land for the Baptist Church, Madison opposed “the appropriation of funds of the U.S. for the use and support of religious societies,” which he saw as contrary to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. He not only vetoed bills that would have allocated surplus land for churches but also vetoed bills that offered only symbolic support to houses of worship. Wrote Madison: “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property . . . by ecclesiastical corporations.”

In other words, Madison went much further than any recent president in separating government from religion. Many fundamentalists mouth the phrase “original intent.” I’m quoting the real original intent, from the Father of the Constitution. It is understandable that theocrats seek to paper over Madison, and even delete references to Jefferson in textbooks, as was recently attempted in Texas.

The forceful nature of Madison’s strong support of church-state separation is something fundamentalists work hard to shout over. They must shout because, despite their repetitive claims, America was not founded as a Christian nation—the evidence against them is the decisive clarity of the
actual
original intent. In his day, Jefferson espoused legislation in Virginia that specifically rejected the idea of Christian-only religious protection to include, according to Jefferson himself, protections for “the Jew,” “the Hindoo,” “the Mahometan,” and “the infidel.” Jefferson won the 1800 election over strong opposition from most religious
groups. How? Well, by one estimate, only 10–15 percent of Americans were church members in 1800.

Some say Jefferson was a Christian. Perhaps, but Jefferson, in writing, specifically rejected the following: the resurrection, the miracles, Christ’s divinity, and the immaculate conception. Can you imagine what fundamentalists would say about such a “Christian” today?

Jefferson proposed the idea for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1776 at the same time he met Madison, with whom he would have a political partnership lasting a half century. Madison, as a legislator, led the statute to passage in 1786, stating that no one “shall be compelled to . . . support any religious worship . . .
whatsoever
” and that one’s religious opinion “shall in no wise diminish,
enlarge, or affect
their civil capacities.” (emphasis added)

Let’s give John Adams, our most religious early president, final word on whether America is a Christian nation. “The United States,” Adams wrote, marks “the example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. . . . Governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone without a pretense of miracle or mystery . . . are a great point gained in the favor of the rights of mankind.”

The 1796–1797 treaty between the United States and Tripoli, reviewed and approved by the secretary of state, unanimously approved by the Senate, and signed by President John Adams, states that the U.S. government is “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Not in any sense
. The treaty was drafted under the previous administration, and the language was specifically approved by President George Washington.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison—these were leaders of the Enlightenment. Just as important, they were thinkers imbued with Enlightenment values. Sometimes this made them lightning rods—an especially apt metaphor when recalling that clergy in both America and Britain condemned Ben Franklin’s lightning rod as a sacrilegious defiance of God’s ability to smite whosoever God chose. But that view, so similar to the attitudes of today’s fundamentalists, was a minority view during America’s founding. Jefferson, widely accused (with some justification) of apostasy, won elections and remained revered by the solid majority of Americans.

JFK, Dr. King, and School Prayer

In the 1800s America saw a rise in fundamentalism. By one estimate the percentage of church-going Americans doubled from 1776 to 1832, from 17 percent to approximately 34 percent. The times became riskier for freethinking
politicians such as the one who said this: “The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.” This freethinking politician was Abraham Lincoln, who never joined a church and who, according to his best friend and law partner, “died an unbeliever.” Maybe Lincoln’s law partner was wrong. Maybe Lincoln, who was well versed in the Bible, was really religious, but had the Savior of the Union faced his own words today, his political career would probably stop short of Congress, much less the presidency.

Just maybe we should include freethinkers in public debate: take, for example, the great feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.” Stanton also said, “I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.”

Stanton may have been thinking of Ephesians 5:24: “As the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.” Or perhaps First Corinthians 11:9, which says that woman was “made from man and for man.” When fundamentalists point to the Bible to support the view that women are to be subordinate, they are justified—if you accept the premise that the Bible is worthy of greater deference than any other document. As the experts tell us, the Bible has gone through so many convoluted changes, redrafts, and translations that, even if one accepts biblical inerrancy, the question remains: which Bible? We’ll leave that debate to the experts and turn instead to the Lincoln of American letters: Mark Twain.

Ernest Hemingway wrote that “all modern American literature comes from one book,
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain.”
Huckleberry Finn
is widely proclaimed the great American novel. What is the central conflict of that novel? Morality, as laid down by the church, requires that Huck turn in Jim, the runaway slave. Huck accepts as gospel that helping Jim is immoral—against God. To help his friend, Huck, believing clear church teaching, chooses the fires of hell. Author Mark Twain is no less clear than the church in presenting his views: “If there is a God, he is a malign thug.”

Twain also wrote, “I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious—unless he purposely shuts the eyes of his mind and keeps them shut by force.” There was a time when America believed that a person with Mark Twain’s views on religion should be included as an equal part of the American tapestry.

The chain of open skeptics and freethinkers continues from Walt Whitman to Thomas Edison to Andrew Carnegie to Clarence Darrow. Inspiring people all, and all central to the American story. They must be included as equal voices in American life.

One person who thought this group should be included was John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy was more clear on separation of church and state than any president since Madison. “The separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy said. “[America is] . . . where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.”

In more recent years, a nun who served as a parochial school administrator said publicly at a conference that when a child enters a parochial school, they leave any constitutional right at the door. She said, if you want those constitutional rights, “you will have to leave.” Court rulings support her view that private religious schools have far more leeway to restrict students than do public schools, but Kennedy was clear: “No church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference”—zero tax dollars for such religious schools. Religious schools have expelled students with AIDS and expelled students who were not sufficiently religious. Some religious schools refuse to offer special education. Such neglect and discrimination is not an option available to public schools. Federal law requires just treatment of children with mental disabilities. Public schools must accept all comers. Not so religious schools.

Kennedy’s policies contrast with the America of recent decades, in which private religious schools receive tax dollars through textbook aid, vouchers, and transportation subsidies—yet they remain free from most state and federal regulations. The Golden Christian School in Cleveland had a curriculum based exclusively on watching videos. This religious school got your tax money. Another religious school hired a convicted murderer and had no fire alarms. That religious school got your tax money, too.

Kennedy’s view was the mainstream view, both in his era and throughout most of America’s history. He encouraged acceptance of the 1962 Supreme Court decision that prohibited government-run prayer in schools. Fundamentalists argued that the ruling “banned” prayer in school when in fact individual children were quite free to pray. The court simply said the government can’t orchestrate school prayer. The 1962 decision left that choice to children and their families. It’s called freedom.

One of the greatest Supreme Court justices in American history, William Brennan, like Kennedy, was a Catholic. Brennan put it best about schools and religion: “Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposefully be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and their family.” Religion and publicly funded schools do not mix well.

Politics and religion do mix in that each of us is, like Dr. Martin Luther King, entirely welcome to bring our values, religious or not, to any debate. Yet it was Dr. King who said of school-sponsored prayer: “It would be better if the school day began with a reading of the Bill of Rights rather than the Bible.”