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II
“... All Things to All Men”
How Religion Denies Itself
By Ronald J. Barrier,
American Atheists National Spokesperson
 t
has been claimed by clerics, believers and publicly-pious politicians that
all America needs in order to right itself from a host of wrongs is to
inundate ourselves in “religious values”; to participate in the majoritarian
dance used to entertain and delight supernatural divinities; to believe
certain things.
It doesn’t matter who you are. Your ethics, your
compassion, your ability to think, your uniqueness, your ability to accept
yourself and for others to accept you for who you are – fairness, honesty,
sound judgement, unity, even love – all are irrelevant unless you profess:
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to believe certain things;
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to put our own self-interests aside and make them
secondary, even tertiary, to serve the interests of a mystical personality;
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to replace self-reliance with outer-dependency;
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to substitute the beauty, wonder, and challenge of
reality with a guilt-ridden, stress-producing fear of the unknown;
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to allow yourself to be told what to think instead
of practicing how to think;
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to erase your own personal views and replace them
with irrational, dehumanizing ideas that have their origins in mankind’s
most primitive, superstitious, and ignorant past;
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to crawl on your knees in subjection to a philosophy
that is the prime source of anxiety and hostility;
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to become “religious.”
What does it mean to be “religious”? What distinguishes
a religious mind from the Atheist mind? What are those certain things we
should believe?
As Atheists, we hold no “beliefs” that lie within
the realm of the supernatural. That is, we see no evidence whatsoever to
support religious assumptions such as the following:
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There is an alternate society or civilization that
dwells in an unlocatable reality which does not consist of matter as we
understand it to be, but yet functions within some hierarchical structure,
with total submission to the leader as the sole goal and purpose of its
inhabitants;
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That this civilization is responsible for the existence
of the entire universe, especially human beings on Earth;
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That individuals from this society, by a manner unknown
to us, have the ability to travel or “cross over” into our reality and
manipulate our thoughts, actions, and suspend or reverse the laws of physics
and nature as we currently understand them for the express purpose of performing
magical tricks designed to elicit awe, wonderment, and – eventually
– mental slavery;
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That we, as human beings on the planet Earth, can,
by mumbling to ourselves or with others, conjure up a communication with
the leader of this society or any of its other representatives. This society
can also be contacted by invoking dead persons – regardless of how long
they have been dead or regardless of whether they are real or not –
to act as intermediaries for the sole purpose of eliciting favors, good
will, or guidance. The assumption here is that these inhabitants would
not do what they are supposed to do unless they were constantly nagged
by prayer;
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That the leader of this civilization (and his alleged
“humanized,” virgin-produced offspring, according to Christianity) will
issue final reports concerning the quality of our individual and collective
existences;
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That the gateway to this “other reality” is achieved
through the natural and commonplace process we call death.
Of course, if you were to present this scenario to
believers they would actively deny that any of this is true. It happens
to me all the time. It is startling what believers will say when confronted
with their own absurdities in plain, unambiguous language.
As the spokesperson for the premier Atheist organization
in the United States, I have been involved in dozens of debates on various
religious and state/church separation topics, and I would like to briefly
share with you some of the statements made by Christians, for they are
the ones I find to be my adversaries in each of these situations.
“Creationism has nothing to do with the Bible.”
Of course it does. You know it, and I know it,
but they’ll deny it. What should really be said is that creationism has
nothing to do with science. Scientists themselves have aided creationists
in the quest to produce stupid children in the schools by not confronting
the core principle of creationism. It’s not the fossil record. It’s not
the geological record. No great flood. No big bang.
That core principle is the redeeming role of the
Messiah in Christian theology. For without the fall of man, the function
of the Christ in Christianity is moot, unfulfilling, and needless. The
famous “Fall of Man” is even more amusing. Here you have the principle
that disease and mortality entered the world as the direct result of a
philosophical conversation between a Hebrew-speaking snake and a human
female over the qualities of a specific fruit tree.
This is not science, my friends, this is religious
mumbo-jumbo.
“Prayer is not religion.”
This is patent nonsense, since there would be no
religion if it were not for the act of prayer. Prayer is religion’s lifeblood.
Without prayer there is no religion. But denying it is of no consequence
when it is convenient to do so.
“God is not religion.”
That may or may not be true, depending on how one
defines religion. But the religionist will define “no religion” as a religion,
so the argument briefly sustains itself. Of course, if “no religion” is
a religion, then the word “religion” itself is meaningless, and the argument
falls apart.
“You can’t have morals without God-belief.”
People state that they not only need a god but
must – on a daily basis, or at least as often as possible with as many
other persons participating (or at least watching) – engage in specific
choreography to entertain that god. This god then instructs them on how
to behave in the real world.
Those who admit this (and many have) are actually
saying that they have no idea on how to act responsibly. They are clueless
as to how to relate to other human beings unless this god “reveals” things
to them. Of course, what those things may be are up to the god to decide,
since the believer has no idea how to make sound, rational decisions unless
constantly instructed and reminded on at least a weekly basis. The will
of the god must be served before the will of the individual. Essentially,
the Christian religion can be made to justify any action to anyone at anytime
if its priestly proprietors can hoodwink practitioners into believing that
its god has ordered it.
Let’s look a little closer at a few examples of
religious deceit and the low character of religious ethics.
“Prayers were removed from the schools.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. No one
or no law can stop people from praying if they wish to do so. What was
stopped was the mandatory requirement that children participate in a religious
ritual of a particular sect at the beginning of the school day. If Madalyn
Murray O’Hair is to be remembered for one thing, it should be for making
the public schools available to all children. Children were now
free to seek an education without having to pass a religious litmus test
as a condition for acceptance.
Religious Freedom Amendment
Christian Coalition
Brittney Settles
Brittney Settles-Gosset is the “poster girl” for
the Christian Coalition and their push for a “Religious Freedom Amendment”
to the constitution. Brittney Settles-Gosset is being held up as an example
of the persecution of Christians in the public school. She was “the little
girl who received a zero on her paper about Jesus.” She and her parents
went to court over this “zero” under the guise of freedom of religious
expression. Christian American, the Coalition’s magazine recently
showed her signing a petition for the RFA.
Was her religious expression curtailed? In my hand
I have a copy of the ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the
6th District, Settle v Dickson County School Board (93-6207, May
8, 1995), in which the court ascertained the truth of the matter.
This young girl’s religious rights weren’t infringed
upon. She received a zero because she refused to follow the guidelines
for research issued by the teacher, guidelines to which the remainder of
the class adhered. She then, most likely at the suggestion of her parents,
lawyer, and maybe clergyman, disguised her ignorance as religious expression.
This is the ethic advocated and promoted by religion.
Evangelizing Today’s Child (holding
up magazine)
This is an evangelical publication put out for
the express purpose of filling young people’s brains with superstition
and ignorance.
I address the so-called “science” section (p. C1)
prepared by Fred Wilson who “works in science education with the
Institute for Creation Research, Santee, CA.” All of you are familiar with
the ICR, the world’s largest temple of creationist mumbo jumbo.
In a “Contest Assignment” section on p. C4 it states,
“B. Design a poster to put in front of the ape cage at the zoo to replace
the sign that says we evolved from the ape 25 million years ago.” In other
words, for Jesus it is perfectly proper to deface public property in order
to advance your own particular ideology.
Christians are teaching this to children.... and
Atheists are supposed to have no morals!
South Carolina Governor Beasley vs. Herb
Silverman
Here we have a case of an Atheist being refused
his desire to become a notary public because he crossed out “so help me
god” on his application. I’m a notary public in New York, and we have no
such requirement. But that’s not the point. Mr. Silverman took his case
to court and won. But Gov. Beasley decided to spend tens of thousands of
taxpayers’ dollars and waste valuable court time because he couldn’t tolerate
an honest person to be a notary public in South Carolina. In South Carolina,
a liar or perjurer is preferred over an honest person. Conformity is a
more desirable trait than honesty. Another example of backward Christian
morals.
Guidelines for Behavior (Schools &
Federal Workplaces)
In 1996 the federal government issued guidelines
for religious expression in the public schools. This past August the government
issued guidelines for religious expression in the federal workplace.
You thought religion was the road to morality,
the path to truth, the light of the world? Think again.
Why do religious people need a secular government
to give them guidelines on how to behave in public places? I can only come
to the conclusion that the gods are such a complete and utter failure in
instilling ethics in them, they must seek directives from the state telling
them how to act. If the theist argument about Atheists held true, then
the government should be issuing guidelines for Atheists in schools
and on the job. But the government doesn’t have to. We already know how
to behave in a reasonable and fair manner.
Scientific “proof” for the effectiveness of
prayer
Obviously, if prayer worked, its professional advocates
(priests, ministers, mullahs, rabbis, and other practitioners of the magic
arts) would be the healthiest people on earth. But they are not. They drop
dead with the same frequency as everyone else.
These are just a few of the situations in which
what is said is not what is meant – while what is meant is not being said.
These situations clearly illustrate that religion,
and in particular Christianity, possesses no absolutes other than the truism
that it will do absolutely anything to survive, no matter what it takes
– even if it takes deceit, dishonesty, and threats of violence to accomplish
its goals. And what are those goals? To destroy our constitutional freedoms
and place this country under the brutality and ignorance of biblical law.
The Atheist must, in these times, stand tall and
proud. The Atheist must be both vigilant and visible. The Atheist must
be prepared to confront superstition and voodoo wherever they may be found.
It is time for the Atheist to echo those words
made famous by the late Peter Finch in the 1976 film classic Network…
words that are more relevant today than they were 21 years ago: “I’m mad
as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
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III
The Millennium: A New Dark Age
Dawning?
By Frank R. Zindler
Editor, American Atheist Press
 here
is disagreement concerning just when it is that the new Millennium will
begin. Some say it will begin after New Year’s Eve 1999, others say after
New Year’s Eve 2000, and others hold different opinions – including the
notion that the Millennium began LAST New Year’s Eve. However this may
all sort out, the question I wish to address is, Just what sort of threshold
will we be crossing? Will we be entering into an era marked by the continued
advance of science? Will reason reign? Or will the millennial milestone
be a millstone marking the crushing of intellectual freedom? Will it signal
the start of a dimming of the light, a failing of intellectual focus, a
loss of liberty of the mind?
Bluntly posed, the question is: Are we at the beginning
of a new Dark Age?
Fifteen hundred years ago, Christianity snuffed
out the lamps of learning in the Western European world, and darkness,
ignorance, and superstition reigned for nearly a thousand years. Despite
the miracle of the period known as the Enlightenment – an Age of Reason
that gave rise not only to modern science as we know it, but also to America’s
Founding Fathers and their grand experiment in popular, secular government
– despite the fact of the Enlightenment, one might argue that the Dark
Ages never ended completely. The light of reason and learning illuminated
much of the world. But there have always remained large regions of shadow,
regions where light has never penetrated fully. And there are also plenty
of deep, abyssal pits where the light of reason has NEVER shone, where
the darkest ignorance has persisted unrelieved for millennia.
As we approach the year 2000, we must look around
us to inquire whether or not the shadows are getting longer… or shorter;
whether the light will last, or whether the saprophytic fungi of fanatical
religion shall grow where once reason’s bright flowers flourished.
There are of course, some indexes that give grounds
for hope. The sheer volume of scientific discoveries is increasing at a
dizzying rate. Every day, knowledge about our world and how it works is
expanded – at least in the minds of a small number of scientists. World
population growth is slowing somewhat, although it is still too large for
a population that can be sustained at a level compatible with a civilized
culture. Nevertheless, there is some basis for hope on the population front.
Great progress is being made in understanding and controlling diseases
of all sorts, including heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and genetic diseases
of all sorts. Indeed, we are gaining understanding at an exhilarating pace
of that ultimate of all diseases – old age.
Despite these bright spots, there are ominous shadows
falling across the pathway leading to the millennium. There are indications
that Thomas Jefferson was wrong in his optimistic view – expressed in his
Notes on Virginia, Query 17 – that “Reason and experiment have been
indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs
the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” It is not so certain
now that truth can stand on its own.
Of course, Jefferson himself realized that that
statement could not be accepted without some qualification. He realized
that democracy could only be preserved by a citizenry that was educated.
“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people
alone,” he noted correctly in Query 14, opining that “The people themselves
are its only safe depositories.” Then the big point: “And to render even
them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree... An amendment
of our constitution must here come in aid of the public education.”
To preserve freedom, to rescue reason, education
is essential. And to know what the state of freedom, reason, secularism
– and the truth we identify as Atheism – will be in the new millennium,
we must assess the educational dimension of our present world. We must
see if the lamp of learning still burns, whether its light still pierces
deep into the darkness, whether it burns but is hidden, or whether it has
been snuffed out altogether.
In all of human intellectual history, probably
the greatest boost to the development of the Atheist Weltanschauung
came in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species.
The need for a designing creator – the stumbling block that kept the Founding
Fathers deists rather than outright Atheists – was eliminated by the discovery
of evolution by means of natural selection. Knowledge and understanding
of this crucial principle are of course critical if the next millennium
is to be one of science, reason, and Atheism. So what are the facts? How
is education spreading the word about evolution?
Back in 1990, a biologist friend of mine by the
name of Michael Zimmerman did some surveys which were rather stunning in
their impact. He found that a majority (52.7%) of school board presidents
in Ohio believed that so-called creation science should be favorably taught
in public schools. That was school board presidents. Only 49.7% of them
accepted the theory of evolution as being correct. At that time, almost
half (48.4%) of the members of the Ohio legislature felt that creationism
should be taught in public schools and almost a third (30.2%) of the U.S.
Congress thought so too. About two-thirds of Ohio legislators believed
that Adam and Eve were real, and more than one-fourth of the U.S. Congress
agreed with them. Dr. Zimmerman’s survey of the top news executive at each
of the 1,563 daily newspapers in the United States showed that about one-fourth
of them personally accepted the premises of “creation science,” and only
57% disagreed strongly with the statement “Every word in the Bible is true.”
Only 51% disagreed strongly with the statement “dinosaurs and humans lived
contemporaneously.” That year, 30% of American high school seniors did
not know that the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west in
the USA.
So why is this? How can there be literally millions
of pages of research published showing evolution to be a fact and explaining
it in amazing detail, but yet so many people are oblivious of all this?
America
is awash in an electromagnetic plenum of prevarication.
The answer is simple: Truth is being drowned in
what we may term the Second Coming of Noah’s Flood. This flood, however,
is not a flood of water, but an equally lethal deluge of misinformation,
disinformation, and preternatural propaganda. Knowledge is being swallowed
up in a sea of willful ignorance and prevarication.
Whence comes this flood of falsehood? What are
the wellsprings of the ink that blots out the learning gained at such expense
of life and labor by the heroes who have struggled before us – the men
and women who banished gods from the economy of forces in physics and eliminated
divine clock makers from the economy of adaptive interactions in the life
sciences?
Let’s let the Yellow Pages do some of the
thinking for us on this question.
Columbus, Ohio, is usually considered to be a northern
city. With its suburbs, it contains about one million people. In the Yellow
Pages – with some help from the business White Pages – we discover
that there are about 500 schools in the city. This includes everything
from preschools and kindergartens to a major university, where one can
learn how to kick balls, bat balls, bounce balls, roll balls – I wouldn’t
be surprised if you could learn to juggle balls there. Of those 500 schools,
however, 125 of them are so-called “religious schools” – an oxymoron of
the first order. These are institutions committed to the hiding of truth
in certain areas and to the inculcation of falsehoods and credulity in
others. Their raison d’être is to create citizens who do not
– or preferably, cannot – think critically. And then there is the
burgeoning presence of home schools, where parents increasingly are trying
to train their children away from the secular influence of the public schools.
Some of these parents have only a high school equivalency diploma as qualification
to be teachers. Of course, they have the bible as their main textbook.
At any rate, subtracting the 125 religious schools
from the 500 total leaves us with 375 nonsectarian schools – a collection
that includes not only the public schools but beauty colleges, truck-driving
schools, and bartending academies. Keeping the number 375 in mind, we turn
to the church listings in the Yellow Pages. We find approximately
1,200 churches in the Columbus directory.
That’s 3.2 churches for every school. That’s 3.2
places working to undo learning for every place trying to advance it. That’s
3.2 stupefaction centers for every edifying one. (The ratio is worse if
you remove bartending academies from the list of secular schools.) Add
to this the fact that of 96 bookstores in Columbus, 33 of them are purveyors
of religious books, and you will see that Noah’s flood is indeed upon us.
Turn on the cable television and go channel surfing on the flood. Turn
on the radio – AM or FM, it doesn’t matter – and you can hear the flood
waves on the air waves. America is awash in an electromagnetic plenum of
prevarication.
As bad as things are in Columbus, Ohio, I suspect
the situation is worse in most of the rest of the country.
A lie repeated often enough will be believed. Certainly,
history has taught us the truth of this maxim. Only if the endless repetitions
of the religious propagandists can be interrupted somehow and be confronted
with repeated doses of reality is there any hope of avoiding a new-age
Dark Age. Only if Atheists and other rationalists can succeed in disseminating
their understanding of things to the larger society is there any hope at
all. We face formidable obstacles. There are many places where an Atheist
identified as such cannot publish a letter to the editor of the local paper.
Very few are the bookstores that will carry American Atheist Press books.
When we are on radio and television, almost always it is an up-hill battle
to be given a fair and reasoned hearing. A society that has become so thoroughly
besotted with religion, as has America, does not want to hear us, and it
has both motivation and means to silence our voices, stop our pens, and
neutralize our influence.
While things look quite bleak here in America,
America is not, after all, the whole world. Not all the world has succumbed
to the siren song of superstition. Whether the religious contagion of America
can succeed in infecting the rest of the developed world remains to be
seen. Russia, certainly, has been gravely bitten by rabid missionaries
of all sorts – from creationists and astrologers to Mormons, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Campus Crusade-type evangelists, and that indisputably genuine
religion, Scientology.
So where does that leave us? Despite the gloom
I have spread, I have not yet lost all hope. I think there is still a possibility
we can get our message out. As editor of American Atheist Press, I think
we can within a few years get the word out to a critical fraction of the
populace. I think we can, if we are careful and intelligent in the way
we proceed, get through to the people who will be “the doers and shakers.”
Keep in mind, that in America as elsewhere, most
of the population really does not count in decision-making of significance.
It is usually an elite cadre of people that sees how things should be done
and does them. Just as doctors try to target their cytotoxic drugs to tumors
in order to save the rest of the body, so too we must focus our efforts
for mental liberation at a particular part of the body politic. But unlike
the cytotoxic drugs that kill the targets at which they are aimed, our
medicine is a stimulant and a tonic. If we arouse the right parts of the
body politic, it may awaken the remainder.
As I come to the conclusion of this talk it now
occurs to me that I framed the question incorrectly at the beginning when
I asked, Are we at the beginning of a New Dark Age? It now occurs to me
that we are now in a Dark Age. It began probably in the late sixties,
and the light has dimmed steadily since then. We must ask instead, How
and when will this Dark Age end? To answer that will require another lecture.
IV
The Future of Secularism
By Conrad F. Goeringer,
Director of American Atheists On-Line Services
 y
remarks during this phase of the conference
are preliminary to my main talk, “Confronting Secularism,” scheduled for
later this afternoon, but let me touch on some of the main ideas I’d like
to talk about.
The first is that the future of secularism in both
the United States and throughout the world is being shaped by a new Realpolitik
of which, so far, many First Amendment activists remain largely unaware.
In a nutshell, we are living in the midst of a GLOBAL RESURGENCE OF RELIGIOUS
MOVEMENTS. This resurgence is being fueled by the emergence of a multipolar
political order based less on secular or economic ideologies and more on
factors such as ancestry, national identity, culture, language, and especially
religion. Crucial in this respect is the recent work by Samuel Huntington,
The Clash Of Civilizations: The Remaking of World Order.
My second point has to do with the threat to secularism
posed by what I call THE REVOLT AGAINST MODERNITY. I would distinguish
between the global trend toward economic development and modernization
and the wider and more abstract notion of “modernity,” which is the set
of assumptions which underpin certain western societies in the late twentieth
century. I analyze most religious movements, and the worldwide religious
resurgence mentioned by writers like Huntington, as a general revolt against
modernity which is played out in Christian, Islamic, African, and even
Far East societies as a series of ongoing “culture wars.” Culture wars
are not unique to the American religious right. They are global. They are
the “fault lines,” if you will, resulting from stresses wrought by modernity
and the so-called traditional values rooted in institutions like language,
culture, focus on ancestry, and nationalism.
My third concern is what I call THE REVOLT AGAINST
REASON. I think that a compelling case may be made in support of the
proposition that secularism is not a by-product of Christianity, as some
have suggested, but remains instead very much the result of the Enlightenment
Agenda. Secularism in its best sense is closely linked with other Enlightenment
notions such as restraints on the power of autocratic and authoritarian
states, and an affirmation of the value of the scientific enterprise, reason,
logic, and the Idea of Progress. These are very general concepts, of course,
and they can mean different things in different communities. But today
especially, this pillar of Enlightenment thought which emphasizes the worth
of science and reason as tools in making human life better, more productive,
more worthwhile and fulfilling, is under serious debate and attack. The
popular culture is increasingly captivated by irrationality in the form
of new-age faddism, pseudoscience, the emergence of a sort of postmodernist
“belief bazaar,” as well as by the revitalization of fundamentalist or
hard-line religious movements.
Another concern I have is the growing call for
“special rights” for religious believers and groups. In many other
countries, especially the emergent and revitalized states of the former
Soviet Union, they’re essentially replicating a debate which took place
in our own nation following the Revolution: there is a dialogue about the
civil status of religion and its institutions. It is significant that the
Russian Duma unanimously approved legislation which rendered the Orthodox
Church the official state religion. In the eyes of seemingly diverse groups
there – including the nostalgic Communist Party – some kind of alliance
with the Patriarchy appears to be politically beneficial. In South Africa,
there was a very acrimonious debate over the status of religion, and fortunately
Nelson Mandela and the ANC majority followed through and kept their word
and framed a secular document as their constitution. This is essentially
a replay of the “disestablishment” which occurred in our country starting
with the American Revolution when the official religions of the respective
states were privatized, taken off the public welfare role and at least
in theory made to pay their own way. Religious affiliation was theoretically
abolished as a litmus test for the exercise of certain rights. We’re still
fighting the remnants of this battle today, though. For instance in South
Carolina, in the Silverman case, an Atheist finally won the right
to hold the exalted office of Notary Public. But the question here is really
a fundamental one: should specific religious groups enjoy some kind of
privileged, official sanction?
This issue of special rights for believers is going
to become more crucial in the years ahead. We’re going to be facing some
tough fights over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. American Atheists
was one of the very few groups which actively opposed this measure, and
the Supreme Court, in a somewhat narrow interpretation, found the RFRA
to be unconstitutional in the recent Boerne v Flores case. As you
may know, the Act required that government had to show a “compelling reason”
or interest before taking any step which would “burden” religious rites
or groups. That sounds good on paper, but the effect of the RFRA
was, from our perspective, to establish a “dual system” of justice, one
for believers, another for non-believers and, indeed, any private or commercial
practice not connected with religion.
My final point concerns what I term the Faith
Consensus. One of the things I’ll be discussing later today is the
case of novelist Salman Rushdie, because I think this event has served
to highlight the growing agreement among diverse religious groups and some
political interests that religion – any religion – is somehow preferable
to nonbelief, and that belief must be actively protected by the State.
In Britain, for instance, there have been growing calls by Jews, Muslims,
and Christians that their religious ideologies and institutions be included
under the notorious Blasphemy Laws which currently protect only the Church
of England. One thing that strikes me as very significant about the Rushdie
case is how so many religious leaders in the west, while often stopping
short of the fatwa or death decree issued by the late Ayatollah
Khomeini, nevertheless agreed that Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses,
should not have been published, or should be excised from libraries and
bookstore shelves.
You find this same sort of religious “popular front”
among Muslims, Christians, Jews and other religious emerging over many
“culture war” issues. For instance, I think it is noteworthy that the Catholic
Civil Rights League has picked up support from over two dozen other groups,
including Jews and Moslems, in protesting the TV program Nothing Sacred.
There are over 350,000 churches, mosques, temples,
chapels and other locations in America where “people of faith” may practice
their beliefs. There are no “Atheist Police” running around putting padlocks
on these churches, or preventing anyone from praying or exercising their
freedom of religion. Religious groups have their own television networks,
their own facilities, their own schools, their own bookstores – in fact,
the market for Christian and other spiritual-oriented books is the single
fastest growing portion of the book trade. Despite all of this, we find
more determination than ever on the part of religious movements to curry
favor and special status with the state – whether it be in the form of
“special rights’ for believers through bad law such as the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, or by placing religious organizations firmly at the public
trough through schemes like the American Community Renewal Act and the
Religious Freedom Amendment, which would lift the few remaining barriers
to the outright public subsidy of religious groups.
These are just some of the threats to secularism
in the United States and throughout the world. In closing, I’d agree with
writers like Jacques Delores, Samuel Huntington, and others who see religion
playing more – not less – of a role in our future. And with that role come
new and revitalized threats not only to state-church separation, but the
intellectual and social rights of those of us who profess no religious
beliefs.
V
Separationist Organizations
Needed
By Chris Allen
American Atheists Board of Directors
 e
are today in the midst of a culture war being waged against American Society
by the Religious Right. It’s also being waged by the Religious Left and
Middle too, for that matter. The object of this war is to weaken and destroy
all legal support for separation of state and church and to encourage all
forms of government establishment of religion. American Atheists is participating
in this war to try to defend state-church separation where it still exists.
Unfortunately, the religious factions are winning this war. They are better
financed, better organized, and more committed than the supporters of separation.
Thanks to the Christian Coalition, they even have their own political party,
and their agenda is moving through Congress.
To press their attack, the religious factions have
created, staffed, and financed a number of organizations that are focused
on specific objectives. These organizations are designed to mount full-time,
on-going campaigns the year around. The common method employed by each
organization is to encourage the mixing of state and church in one specific
way. Each success then serves as a precedent for further weakening separation
in that area.
One such group is the Laymen’s
National Bible Association (LNBA).1 This
group writes to the President, Congressmen, Governors, and Mayors asking
them to declare a National Bible Week during the week of Thanksgiving,
and they have been very successful. The LNBA’s campaign uses radio and
television spot announcements, prints ads in national magazines, provides
ads and feature material for newspapers, and propagandizes with thousands
of donated billboard spaces. It is backed by an array of civic and religious
agencies, including the AFL-CIO, Boy Scouts of America, Kiwanis International,
and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Every year, at the urging of the LNBA,
public officials host hundreds of rallies on public property on behalf
of the bible.
Another such group is the National
Day of Prayer Task Force (NDPTF)2 This
group also writes to government officials, and it asks them to declare
and promote a National Day of Prayer on the first Thursday in May every
year. Congress established that date by law in 1988. In that year, 33 governors
and 150 mayors issued proclamations commemorating the day of prayer. The
task force has a full-time staff of five. It holds annual “Coordinators
Conferences.” It seeks to hold rallies on capitols’ steps and has achieved
them in forty states and the District of Columbia. The chairman of the
task force is Shirley Dobson, wife of Rev. James Dobson of “Focus on the
Family.” They offer an “Adopt a Leader Kit” with cards for writing public
officials.
Another annual event is the See
You At The Poles rally (SYATP).3 This campaign
is targeted for a specific weekday in September, not yet fixed, and calls
for public school kids to meet at the school flag pole for prayers before
school starts. It is a campaign to intrude promotion of religion into the
public schools, and to deny or obscure the divisiveness that religious
differences threaten the children with. This year the event was held on
September 17. Two organizations are promoting this event now, The
North American Mission Board4 of the Southern
Baptist Convention, and the National Network of
Youth Ministries in San Diego.5
The Institute for Creation Research
(ICR)6 focuses on combating the teaching
of evolution in the public schools and on encouraging public schools to
teach so-called scientific creationism. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled (Edwards v Aguillard) that creationism was religion, not science,
and could not be taught in the public schools as science. Since then, the
ICR has been working successfully at the local level to get school boards
to introduce their material into the schools. The ICR produces books, newsletters,
tracts, and speakers to teach and promote its perspective. It maintains
a museum and a “graduate school” in San Diego. The founder is evangelical
fundamentalist Rev. Tim LaHaye.
Although I have every confidence in the ideas of
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concerning separation of state and church,
these organized, focused efforts to undermine the concept nation-wide are
a real threat. The constant grass-roots religious propaganda from these
organizations needs to be answered and balanced in an equally organized
and focused fashion, or we will lose further public support for these ideas.
To a large extent the acceptance of ideas in any
society depends on a kind of information hydraulics. If the pressure and
flow of propaganda for one idea is high, opposing ideas will lose public
support in spite of their relative merits. It’s very difficult to defend
against propaganda if you have never been exposed to well-reasoned counter-arguments
and have to research and re-invent them yourself. The public schools ought
to be teaching about the merits of separation of state and church as part
of the history of the First Amendment, but pressure to exclude this material
often leaves people ignorant of the subject and vulnerable to the propaganda.
To oppose the organized efforts of the religious
factions described above, counter-organizations are needed that are just
as organized and focused and that function continually. These organizations
are needed to speak up for and defend separation of state and church against
the organized attacks and to provide resources for supporters to do likewise.
We need organized efforts to oppose the annual campaigns for a National
Bible Week, a National Day of Prayer, and a national See You At The Pole
rally. These efforts would include writing letters to newspapers and to
government officials asking that these observances not be supported by
government.
I am not aware of any focused counter-organizations
for the three religious ones listed above, but American Atheists will be
working within our own organization for this purpose and also is prepared
to work with other organizations with the same interests. I
am aware that the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been pursuing a
campaign asking mayors and governors to issue secular Thanksgiving proclamations
for a “Give Thanks for State/Church Separation” Week, and that several
mayors have issued their proclamations.7
There is a counter-organization designed to oppose
the campaigns of the ICR and other creationists. It is called the National
Center for Science and Education (NCSE)8
and it describes itself as follows:
A nonprofit, tax-exempt membership organization
working to defend the teaching of evolution against sectarian religious
attack. We are a nationally recognized clearinghouse for information and
advice to keep evolution in the science classroom and ‘scientific creationism’
out. While there are organizations that oppose ‘scientific creationism’
as part of their general goals (such as good science education, or separation
of church and state), NCSE is the only national organization that specializes
in this issue. When teachers, parents, school boards, the press, and others
need information and help, they turn to NCSE.
I know of individual members and officers of American
Atheists that work with NCSE from time to time, and I expect that will
continue.
A different approach to attacking
separation of state and church is taken by an organization called Wallbuilders9
in Texas. Wallbuilders focuses on historical revision, claiming that the
nation’s founders never intended to separate state and church and that
the current interpretation of the First Amendment in this respect is a
recent innovation and a liberal conspiracy. Wallbuilders publishes and
sells books, tracts, videotapes, and other teaching materials.
The founder and president, David Barton, has written
several books, including one titled The Myth of Separation. In the
Wallbuilders videotape, America’s Godly Heritage, Barton claims
(invents, actually) that Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” quote
is taken out of context, and that the original quote (not cited) referred
to a one-way wall that allowed religion in government but prohibited government
from intruding on religion. In Barton’s pamphlet The Truth about Thomas
Jefferson & the First Amendment, he argues that Jefferson had no
part in drafting the First Amendment, conveniently ignoring Jefferson’s
pioneering of the concept in his Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious
Freedom (introduced in 1779 and passed in 1786 by the Assembly of Virginia).
Barton maintains a continuing speaking schedule throughout the country,
often addressing lawmakers and helping them compose laws.
To my knowledge there is no counter-organization
focused on refuting the bogus history coming from Wallbuilders, but there
needs to be. The ACLU10
produced their own video, America’s Constitutional Heritage, featuring
a clergyman explaining the value of state/church separation. Rob
Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State11
has written an article about Wallbuilders, “Sects, Lies and Videotape – David
Barton’s Distorted History,”12 and a book, Why
the Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church and State,13
both of which would serve well as resource material for debunking Wallbuilder
history.
We have seen that there are numerous organizations
toiling non-stop to destroy the wall of separation between state and church
in America. For some of these organizations there are separationist counter-organizations.
These counter-organizations deserve the cooperation
of American Atheists wherever it is possible. To counteract the organizations
which as yet are propagandizing unopposed, American Atheists has its work
cut out. We must expand our activities and redouble our efforts.
The wall must be saved!
1 Laymen’s National
Bible Association, Inc.,1865 Broadway, New York, NY 10023, (212) 408-1390,
Newsletter: National Bible Week News,
http://www.biblenet.org/ ![[back]](../../backarrow.gif)
2 National Day of
Prayer - National Task Force, P. O. Box 15616,Colorado Springs, CO 80935-
5616, (719) 531-3379, Newsletter: Prayer Lines, http://www.lesea.com/ndp/
3 http://www.syatp.org
4 North American
Mission Board, 4200 North Point Parkway, Alpharetta, GA 30022-4176, (770)
410-6000, http:// www.namb.net/
5 National Network
of Youth Ministries, 12335 World Trade Drive, Suite 16, San Diego,
CA 92128-3791, (619) 451-1111, http://www.nnym.org/
E-mail: NNetwork@nnym.org
6 Institute for Creation
Research, 10946 Woodside Ave. North, Santee, CA 92071, (619) 448-0900,
Newsletters: Acts & Facts, Days of Praise, http://www.icr.org/
7 Freethought Today,
December 1995, http://www.infidels.org/org/ffrf/fttoday/
december95/proclamation.html
8 National Center
for Science and Education, Inc., P.O. Box 9477, Berkeley, CA 94709-0477,
(510) 526-1674, (800) 290-6006, http://natcenscied.org/
E-mail: ncse@NatCenSciEd.org
9 WallBuilders,
P.O. Box 397, Aledo, TX 76008, (817) 441-6044, newsletter: The Wallbuilder
Report, http://www.christiananswers.net/wall/
wallhome.html
10 http://www.aclu.org/
11 Americans United
for Separation of Church and State, 1816 Jefferson Pl, NW, Washington,
DC 20036, (202) 466-3234, magazine: Church and State, http://www.au.org/,
E-mail: americansunited@au.org
12 Church and
State, vol. 46 no. 4, April 1993 p. 8.
13 Prometheus Books,
59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228-2197, (716) 691-0133,
http://www.prometheusbooks.com/
E-mail: prometheusbooks@worldnet.att.net
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![[Wall of Separation]](../sepwall.gif)
Atheism,
Reason, Secularism, And State-Church Separation.
