Here in the United States we live in a country that was the first to be founded on secular principles. Many of us also live in fear that we will become the first such country to vote out those secular principles! We have been treated, with our 2008 presidential election looming, to a parade of pious politicians wearing religion on their sleeves, competing among themselves to see who can pander most successfully to the religious voter. A secular national news network televised a “faith and values” forum last June in which Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton were asked and expected to seriously answer such questions as, “What do you pray for?” and “What is the biggest sin you ever committed?” A leading Republican candidate, John McCain, recently said point blank that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” even though our Constitution does not mention God, Jesus or the Ten Commandments. Several Republican candidates have even publicly endorsed creationism!

It would be hard to imagine a candidate today echoing what Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy said in 1960:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President – should he be Catholic – how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, . . .

Thomas Jefferson’s metaphorical “wall of separation between church and state” is being battered, broken down and tunneled under. The Pope has not only told Catholic politicians how they should vote (against abortion, gay rights and stem-cell research), but our Methodist President actually begged John Paul II to call on the U.S. bishops to support him in his re-election bid! “Patriot pastors” are mustering their congregations. The nation’s largest Protestant church, the Southern Baptists, recently announced their open plans to “make the will of Christ supreme in public affairs,” and to turn the 16-million member church into “a disciplined political machine.” Since President Bush announced his “faith-based initiative,” billions of dollars of public funds have poured into churches and religious organizations with literally no oversight, monitoring or accountability. Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court now has a 5-4 majority which is Roman Catholic, and these justices are voting together as a right-wing block. “Separation between church and state” isn’t want it used to be in the United States!

In the past week, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has gone to a federal court to stop a public school district in Colorado from recommending that children spend at least one hour a week at a “religious institution.” Among the state/church complaints I handled this week was writing to a school superintendent in Ohio to ask him to stop a social studies teacher from forcing children to memorize the Ten Commandments! Among the recent newspaper exposés was an article in the Washington Post revealing that President Bush has encouraged federal workers to accumulate “religious compensation time.” One worker received an extra $18 000 upon retirement for the time he would have spent in synagogue, but spent at work instead!

Many Americans look at recent events, and realize that if we do not speak up now to make known our opposition to attempts to turn the clock back to a Disenlightenment, we are in danger of losing our civil liberties. A turning point was the 2005 Terri Schiavo case in Florida. Few of us will forget the spectacle of Congress meeting in the middle of the night, and Bush helicoptering in from his ranch, to interfere with a court decision to permit a vegetative woman to die after 15 years in limbo. The histrionics were calculated solely to appease the religious right and play political football with this tragedy. Michael Schiavo fought the power of the Catholic Church and Congress, and followed his wife’s express wish not to be kept alive indefinitely with heroic measures. His actions were vindicated, and Congress was shamed, when the autopsy revealed Terri had indeed been in a persistent vegetative state. We all asked ourselves: if Congress could stick its nose in one family’s case in this disgraceful manner, what else might it be prepared to do, and whose rights might be the next theo-political sacrifice?

Paradoxically, the excellent news is that there have never been more atheists, agnostics, skeptics and other freethinkers openly making known their dissent from religion in the United States. The nation’s definitive survey of “religious identification” found in 2001 that the self-defined “non-religious” make up 14 per cent of adult Americans – that’s 30 million of us! The non-theistic runaway bestsellers by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris have focused media attention on free thought. Free thought groups are flourishing. Although our First Amendment’s separation of church and state has never been under greater attack, there has never been greater free speech for freethinkers. We at the Freedom From Religion Foundation now have a national weekly free thought program on Air America Radio, which opens to the strains of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” We have started to erect our own billboards – employing a stained-glass window motif bearing the words “Beware of Dogma” and “Imagine no religion,” to counter the ubiquity of roadside religion. The pendulum seems finally to be swinging back to reason in a religion-drenched nation. We have our work cut out for us, but we take comfort in the example of a largely secular European Union.

Author: Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation