Category for single articles that are landing pages for sections but would not go in a category listing of the section.
Your state has at least one anti-abortion law on the books that will make abortion illegal in your state if Roe v. Wade falls within the next month or so. Anti-abortion “trigger” laws would take effect immediately.
Alabama
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
Near-total ban: A law enacted after Roe to prohibit abortion under all or nearly all circumstances
State constitution bars protection: Constitution has been amended to prohibit any protection for abortion rights
Arkansas
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Georgia
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Iowa
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Idaho
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant and creates bounty for those who “aid and abet” in abortion
Kentucky
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Louisiana
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Near-total ban: A law enacted after Roe to prohibit abortion under all or nearly all circumstances
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
State constitution bars protection: Constitution has been amended to prohibit any protection for abortion rights
Mississippi
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Missouri
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Eight-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
North Dakota
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Ohio
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
Oklahoma
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Near-total ban: A law enacted after Roe to prohibit abortion under all or nearly all circumstances
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
South Carolina
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
South Dakota
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant
State constitution bars protection: Constitution has been amended to prohibit any protection for abortion rights
Texas
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Six-week ban: Law that prohibits abortion before most people even know they are pregnant and creates bounty for those who “aid and abet” in abortion
Utah
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
Near-total ban: A law enacted after Roe to prohibit abortion under all or nearly all circumstances
West Virginia
Pre-Roe ban: Law enacted before 1973 and never removed
State constitution bars protection: Constitution has been amended to prohibit any protection for abortion rights
Wyoming
“Trigger” ban: A law designated to take effect automatically or by quick state action
By Bonya Ahmed
I’m honored to announce this year’s annual Avijit Roy Courage Award. This is the second annual Avijit Courage Award and this year’s award goes to Avinash Patil.
He is the current executive president of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), which means “Blind Faith Eradication Committee.” I am happy to mention that this award comes with $5,000. Thank you very much for coming all the way from India to accept this award.
I have been asked to introduce two of our fallen comrades.
I actually knew one of them very well — Avijit Roy. I lived with him for 13 years. I worked with him. I enjoyed life with him until it ended very abruptly. Thanks to FFRF for starting this award last year in his name.
The other person is Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, who founded MANS in 1989, the organization Avinash runs now. I did not know him personally, but I have immense respect for his work and the sacrifices he made for all of us. But both he and Avijit were killed for their work, for their writings and for their belief or, maybe we should say, for their nonbelief.
Avijit loved to write. That was his passion. He was a prolific writer. He wrote eight books and hundreds and hundreds of articles and blogs in such a short period of time. He was just 43 when he died. His books ranged from philosophy to science to literature.
The Islamic militants, who later marched with al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, mentioned that they targeted us — Avijit and me — for our writing, specifically for two of Avijit’s books: Virus of Faith and Homosexuality: A Scientific and Socio-Psychological Investigation.
Many of you already know that we were attacked by machete-wielding Islamic militants at a book fair when we were visiting our homeland for a book-signing trip in 2015. Avijit died in the hospital and I survived, with four machete stabs on my head and a sliced-off thumb and numerous wounds all over my body.
After the attack on us, Islamic militants vowed to kill one atheist blogger every month in Bangladesh and they managed to do so. The impunity was so high. The government stayed quiet. So, the Islamists murdered three other bloggers and managed to kill the two publishers of those two books. They actually managed to hack the two publishers in their offices. One died and the other one barely survived.
Let me tell the story of Dr. Dabholkar before I get carried away. We are giving the prize to Avinash and the MANS organization because of the sacrifices that the organization has made. And Dr. Dabholkar has given his life for it.
Dr. Dabholkar decided to become a social worker after working as a medical doctor for 12 years in Maharashtra in India. He founded MANS and campaigned against religious superstitions prevalent in India. He was the editor of a renowned Marathi weekly, and he fought against godmen. You know they are very big all over India and claim to perform medical miracles. He also relentlessly fought for the equality of Dalit — the Untouchables, and against violence rooted in the Hindu caste system. He received numerous threats, but as far as I know, he refused to take any police protection from the government. And he was gunned down and murdered Aug. 20, 2013.
Let me read one of his quotes. “Sowing seeds of reason in the mind is not an easy job. However, reason uttered repeatedly does take you a step ahead. The utterance converts into a movement. If people involved in the movement practice what they propagate, the movement culminates into a union, which is a good thing to happen. If, in addition, the union jumps into a struggle for change, nothing like it but climbing up these steps exhausts you considerably. I am treading this path with whatever ability I possess, knowing full well that it is endless.”
And endless it is. It does seem ever so endless today more than ever, doesn’t it?
There is nowhere to hide: Charlottesville to Istanbul, Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia, India to Nigeria. There is nowhere else to go. Or, maybe, it is too soon to despair. I also think that we should not give up hope, even if the battle feels increasingly difficult. I haven’t given up hope, yet. Human progress is never linear.
It demands immense sacrifice, struggle and dedication. Sometimes you have to take two steps backward just to make one step forward. Let’s not lose hope. I haven’t. May there be a day when we will not need any award such as the Avijit Roy Courage Award. I think that should be our goal. That is the best goal. That is the best way to honor the Avijits and the Narendras of the world. Thanks to FFRF and thank you all for being here.
Jeff is an award-winning literary journalist author of The New York Times bestseller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. He is also executive producer of the new Netflix documentary series based on those books. Please give a warm welcome to Jeff Sharlet.
By Jeff Sharlet
Thank you for having me here.
In the so-called “cease-fire deal” that Mike Pence negotiated recently with Turkey, Pence declared that he not only wanted to thank President Trump, he wanted to thank the millions of Americans who were holding that moment in prayer.
The press passed over that nod to the evangelical base. But I believe it was key because, for a fraction of a second, Christian Nationalist support for Trump had wavered. You probably heard Pat Robertson’s warning that Trump was in danger of losing the mandate of heaven.
But the mandate of heaven is in Mike Pence’s portfolio, and Mike Pence wanted Christian Nationalists to remember that he is their man, their agent, and that he represents the covenant between Trumpism and the faithful that he, on behalf of Trump, heard their prayers. And, lo, he said, their prayers were answered. Peace in our time, said Pence. Don’t fret the details. Consider not the fate of the Kurds, not even their fellow Christians among them.
I don’t make many political predictions, but in 2010, I ended my book C Street, in which I’d written about a number of Christian Nationalist politicians fallen to scandal, with a little speculation about who might represent Christian Nationalism in 2016? Maybe, I wrote, it’ll be Rep. Mike Pence, a little-known Indiana congressman, a former right-wing radio host with White House eyes. I was so close. I could not imagine that Donald Trump would become the chosen one. How did that happen?
That question is at the heart of my recent documentary series on Netflix, “The Family,” directed by the brilliant Jesse Moss. The Family, also called The Fellowship, is the oldest and most influential Christian political organization in Washington. It’s also the most secretive. The longtime leader, Doug Coe, liked to preach that the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have. This so-called invisibility served The Family’s purposes because it’s not a mass organization. It’s not interested in your soul. It’s not interested in your salvation. This is one Christian Right group that is not going to try and convert you. It’s worse.
The Family began long before what we think of as the inception of the modern Christian Right. It was the midst of the Great Depression, 1935, when the founder Abraham Vereide was convinced that economic suffering was a punishment from God for socialism, for the New Deal, for Franklin Roosevelt.
God told Vereide — and I mean told him, spoke to him, he could hear the voice of God — that Christianity has been getting it wrong for centuries. It was focusing on the poor, the weak, the down-and-out. God told Vereide that he actually cared most for the strong, the wealthy, for those whom Vereide called the up-and-out men in power, given that power was better to build God’s kingdom.
A deal with God
How this can work, this deal with God? The Family moved to Washington, D.C., where it began organizing congressmen and business and military leaders in 1953. It created the National Prayer Breakfast to sanctify the nation to Jesus, and in its documents it’s explicit about this — to create a space to cut deals between Christ’s followers and government and business.
By the 1960s, it was firmly established around the world through its embrace of foreign dictators, whom it said had been chosen by God to aid America in the Cold War.
Here’s just one example among many. The Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre called himself a Koranic Marxist. But his Soviet backers had abandoned him. He needed some help and he agreed to pray to Jesus with Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who’s still serving us today.
Sen. Grassley, who is representing The Family in Somalia, was remarkably candid in his correspondence about what Barre wanted in return for his prayers to Jesus: military aid and a White House meeting — quid pro quo. Done and done, wrote The Family.
And, so it was. And, in return for that, The Family said in a now declassified CIA memo, Barre would give the U.S. full land and naval bases and complete access to his territory. So, for the dictator, this was a good deal. To The Family, to Sen. Grassley and his friends, it was faith. Everybody wins, except Somalia, to which Barre laid near biblical waste with the backing of the American Christ.
Such is the art of the deal. Let me give you another example.
American preacher and former Congressman Zach Wamp, a leader of The Family, told us as we made this documentary, that Trump is the vessel of God, albeit an imperfect vessel.
He says The Family is not blind to the vanity of man, especially to the man to whom it gives its backing. They know who they’re dealing with. One Family leader calls its clients its specialty dictators, murderers and thieves. Their words — “dictators, murderers and thieves.” The miracle, they say, is that such men — and it is almost always men — are chosen by God. The Family calls this quid pro quo a covenant. I’m going to quote Doug Coe, the longtime leader, what he means by that term covenant.
“Jesus says: ‘You have to put me before other people.’ Hitler, that was the demand of the Nazi Party. Quite a leap there. I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China. A table laid out like a butcher table. They would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end. He would take an ax and cut her head off. To have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother, father, brother, sister, their own life. That was a covenant, a pledge. That was what Jesus said. If you’re going to have any kind of movement, you have to have that kind of commitment.”
Which is why it does not matter to The Family, to Christian Nationalism, what Trump believes. Or whether he is, as some Christian Nationalists claim, a baby Christian, a man brought to grace by power. Each of his actions in the White House — the appointment of judges, a rollback of reproductive rights, spiritual war with Islam, the fortification of America as a chosen nation — symbolized by the wall to be built on its border. Each action is like a baby step toward the Lord. It does not matter whether he is a baby Christian or perhaps not truly a believer at all, but rather a tool in the hands of the Lord.
Trump as King Cyrus
This is the notion popularized in the 2016 campaign among evangelicals. The biblical story of King Cyrus the Great recast for the man who would make America great again. Both of them anointed by God. Even though neither necessarily had faith in God. It is King Cyrus, the king of Persia, a pagan, who the story goes, freed the Jews from Babylon and, what’s more, built a wall around Jerusalem. A wall. There’s real subtlety in this movement. And he didn’t actually build a wall either.
Now, some critics see these such beliefs as dangerous superstition, as naivete at its worst. Others say it’s cynicism.
And what I want to propose to you today is that it is both the art of the deal, of which Trump’s ghostwriters boast, and their best approximation of Trump. The real art of the deal is making everyone believe they got a good deal. It’s not the hard compromise of democracy where we’re aware of what we gave up.
The art of this deal is faith. The product of the deal is power, strength, total commitment. This is what The Family has dreamed of since its founder first wrote admiringly of Hitler’s effectiveness. It’s what Doug Coe spoke of whenever he cited Hitler, Lenin and Mao as the models of strength of the covenant, the deal with power that followers of Christ must seek. Trump instinctively understood early on that he was something like that model of strength — the unique figure who could bind reactionary forces together or according to Christian Nationalist mythology.
I want to emphasize this may not be true. It was allegedly Melania who figured it out, according to a 2016 best-selling campaign book called God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling, by Lance Wallnau, an evangelical Trump adviser. Wallnau writes, “While [Trump is] watching the evening news with his wife Melania, they witnessed the escalating violence and riots happening in Baltimore. In that moment, Melania turned to Trump and said, ‘If you run now, you will be president.’
“‘What,’ said Trump? He was legitimately shocked by this sudden declaration. ‘I thought you said I was too bright and brash to get elected.’ Melania turned back to the plasma screen and said, ‘Something has changed. They are ready for you now.’”
This is an edited version of the speech given by Andrew L. Seidel at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18, 2019. He was introduced by FFRF Co-President Dan Barker:
Andrew is the director of strategic response at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He graduated from Tulane University with a B.S. in neuroscience and environmental science and he graduated magna cum laude from Tulane University Law School in 2009, where he was awarded the Haber J. McCarthy Award for excellence in environmental law. Andrew studied human rights international law at the University of Amsterdam, completing his Master of Laws at Denver University Sturm College of Law in 2011.
He was also one of FFRF’s student essay contest winners that year, which is how we met him. Andrew joined FFRF as a constitutional attorney on Halloween 2011 and ever since then he’s been scaring the hell out of the Religious Right.
He also writes for many other publications including Think Progress, Religion News Service, Rewire News and others. Andrew’s new book is called The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Please welcome Andrew.
By Andrew L. Seidel
Do we have a government of the people for the people and by the people? Or is ours a government of the Christians for the Christians and by the Christians? That is our battle right now. America is in a desperate fight against Christian Nationalism, a political theology that is an existential threat to our republic.
That is why I wrote The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Christian Nationalism is not a scholarly debate. It is a sinister exclusionary idea. The goal is to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist identity and then reshape our law accordingly. Christian Nationalism is the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation that is based on Judeo-Christian principles and, most importantly, that we’ve strayed from that foundation. Now we’ve got to get back to our godly roots. They use that language of return to justify all manner of evil public policy.
Christian Nationalists seized power in 2016. The best predictor of a Trump voter in 2016 was thinking that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. So, Trump tapped into this fearful undercurrent of Christian Nationalism and he rode it into the most powerful office in the land. And since then he and his administration chockablock full of Christian Nationalists have been implementing this exclusionary public policy. You’ve seen it. They love to talk about it.
The Muslim ban is a really great example of this. Not only did it ban immigration from Muslim-majority countries, it also favored immigration for Christians, and the child separation policy at the border. The administration justified it. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, got up there and justified it using the bible. Romans 13 opposition to LGBTQ equality and opposition to reproductive rights is almost exclusively Christian Nationalist and it’s not just at the federal level. We are seeing it all across the states as well. There is a coordinated push.
Religion becoming law
They call it Project Blitz and it is unabashedly Christian Nationalist. Their religion is becoming the law. But there’s good news because the very identity of the Christian Nationalists depends on myths and lies. You’ve heard them before. Trump loves to spout them all. “One nation under God.” “In God we trust.” “The Declaration of Independence references the Christian God four different times.” “Our Founding Fathers were all the equivalent of evangelical Christians.” “They prayed at the Constitutional Convention.” “George Washington got down on his knees at Valley Forge in the snow and said a prayer.”
And my personal least favorite: that our law is based on the Ten Commandments. Without the historical cover that these myths and lies give, their policy justifications begin to crumble. Their identity begins to wither and fade, so their entire identity and political ideology is actually incredibly weak and vulnerable because it is based on these historical distortions and lies.
But we need more than facts to fight back. We need better arguments. So, that is the purpose of The Founding Myth — to bury Christian Nationalism. It’s a lofty goal, I admit. I want to utterly destroy this un-American ideology. The book is not simply a refutation of the idea that we are founded as a Christian nation. Instead, I wanted to go deeper.
So, I asked, did Judeo-Christian principles positively influence the founding of the United States of America? And the answer to that question is no, they did not. In fact, it’s a good thing they didn’t because Judeo-Christian principles, and especially those principles that are central to Christian Nationalism, are fundamentally opposed to the principles on which this nation was built. There is such disagreement and conflict that it is fair to say, albeit bluntly, Christianity is un-American.
That is the argument I make. There are these two conflicting systems. They have irreconcilable differences so much so that the Founders had to divorce the two.
To make the argument in the book, I broke it up into four basic parts. Part one goes over the Founding Fathers and their personal beliefs. It also talks about the Declaration of Independence. I walk you through every one of those four references to God or the Christian God, supposedly in the Declaration, and I talk about our colonial history. And, again, what I’m trying to do in the book is give you better arguments.
So, it is really fun to talk about the religion or lack thereof of the Founding Fathers. But if we do that, we are actually ceding a central point, and that is that it doesn’t matter what they personally believed about God or Jesus or any of that. What matters was their views on the separation of state and church. That’s why we need to be focusing on the Declaration of Independence. We can go over all of the references in there we can talk about it, but, at its heart, it is an anti-biblical document. The central points in it are that power comes from the people and the people have a right to overthrow and rebel against their government when it becomes tyrannical. Both of those central principles are refuted in the bible in Romans 13, the same chapter that supposedly justifies the child-separation policy at our border.
Part 2 of the book is called the “United States v. the Bible.” And here I really dig into those Christian principles that you can find in the bible. Things like hell, vicarious redemption through human sacrifice, biblical obedience and any notions of justice, and I compare those to America’s founding principles. Again, you see this fundamental disconnect.
Part 3 is where the book began. This book actually started out as a law review article that just got really, really out of hand. In this section, I compare the Ten Commandments to our founding principles and I walk you through every single one of the Ten Commandments and show that they really are fundamentally opposed to the principles on which our nation was built. All of them — yes, even the ones that you’re thinking of right now.
Part 4 is called “American Verbiage.” This is argument by idiom. These are the things that you all know and loathe: “In God We Trust.” “One nation under God.” “So help me God.” “God bless America.” Almost all of you know that none of those is from the founding generation. They’re all much later additions to the American vernacular. But our better argument is that these phrases were deliberately foisted on America during times of national fear and crisis by Christian Nationalists who were often seeking to wipe out earlier unifying phrases. “E Pluribus Unum” (“From Many One”) replaced by “In God we trust,” “one nation, indivisible” literally dividing the indivisible with God, historically the most divisive force known to humankind.
So, you have not read a book like The Founding Myth. It is different. Previous books have offered this gentle correction to the Christian Nationalists. Here’s what our Founding Fathers meant. Here’s what they actually said. This is the real history and they’ve kind of left it at that, but correction is not enough.
Facts are not enough
Facts are not enough. Pointing out errors is no longer sufficient. So, this book does that, but then it takes the next step. This book goes on the offensive because patriotism has no religion. This book is an assault on the Christian Nationalist identity. Not only are Christian Nationalists wrong, their beliefs and identity run counter to the ideals on which this nation was founded. They are un-American.
Christian Nationalists are not just un-American, they’re also thieves. Christian Nationalism seeks to steal America’s greatness, its accolades and credit. It insists that a nation with a godless Constitution is dedicated to one particular god. This is a religion that demands fearful unwavering obedience and it’s trying to claim credit for a rebellion against a godly king and a revolution in self-government. It declares that that revolution was the brainchild of a few pious Christians rather than a group of unorthodox thinkers testing Enlightenment principles.
Christian Nationalism also bears false witness. It claims that a nation dedicated to the freedom of and from religion was built for one particular religion. It seeks to bury a fundamental truth on which our republic rests. That there is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.
Christian Nationalism claims that the United States is exceptional because it was chosen, but a religion did not make America great, let alone make America at all. “We the People” make America great. America did not succeed because of Jesus or the bible. America succeeded as an experiment because it was based on reason. And if we abandon reason in favor of faith, or if we ask our elected leaders to commit this sin, we are asking to regress and not to some golden age but to a time when religion ruled the world, which was called the Dark Ages, as Ruth Green had said.
The Christian Nationalists will not go gently into the obsolescence for which they are bound. They have grown accustomed to religious privilege. They are used to imposing their beliefs on unsuspecting schoolchildren. They expect politicians to pay lip service to their duty and they demand acknowledgments of their god on government property.
But that time is ending. The end of Christian privilege is near. But you have to fight. As progress marches on, the lies exposed in this book will be professed more often, more loudly and with more desperation. You must be prepared to refute them factually and vocally. The Founding Myth gives you the facts and it gives you better arguments. You are responsible for the rest. Outspoken resistance is, to quote James Madison, the first duty of citizens.
Christian Nationalists have persuaded too many Americans to abandon our heritage, to spurn our secular foundations in favor of their myth. But America invented the separation of state and church. It is an American original. The idea was born in the Enlightenment, but was first implemented in the American experiment and it is time for us to reclaim that heritage and bury their lies.
This is not a Christian nation.
Our Constitution does not belong to the Christian Nationalists. It belongs to “We the People” — all of the people — and it’s about damn time that we take it back.
Purchase Andrew L. Seidel’s book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, from ffrf.org/shop and Andrew will donate his royalty to FFRF.
Q&A with Andrew L. Seidel
Here is a selection of Q&A from convention attendees to Andrew L. Seidel following his presentation.
Can you speak to the intersection of White Nationalism and Christian Nationalism?
Yes. So, if you’re looking at a Venn diagram, it’s a circle.
I know that FFRF frequently sends friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court. Do the judges read those?
The clerks certainly read those. The judges are supposed to read all that. Sometimes, I think they just get briefed by clerks on what is in them. But they can be effective, especially if you can make them stand out among the pack, which is something that we really work on doing.
I have a question about the intersection of the bible as the myth of the Christian Nationalists, but the Constitution as sort of the myth of the American people. Can you talk about how you dealt with that in your book?
Yeah, absolutely. I do get into that in the book, a lot. There are many of the principles that are in the Declaration and the Constitution that were aspirational at the time they were written and successive generations left it to their children to do the hard work of realizing a lot of those principles.
I have devoted quite a few chapters in the book to this because it’s taken us a long time to get to the idea that all of us are equal, but I don’t think we’re there yet. There are a few places where I actually had to concede some influence to Christian Nationalists. It’s just not a positive influence.
I mean, seriously, slavery is a really good example. All of the justifications for slavery on the “we need to have slaves” side were religious. And it’s in the bible, it’s in the Ten Commandments twice. Jesus tells you how hard you have to beat your slaves in a parable. I mean, if you have a holy book that you can point to that says, “Yes, slavery is totally fine,” you’re gonna hang a hat on that. And they did.
And there were few other areas where I had to concede that influence. The subjugation of women is another area where Judeo-Christianity had a massive impact. And the fight for LGBTQ rights is another area where we have to concede some influence, but it’s not good influence. It’s a poisonous influence that we are trying to shake off and have been for centuries.
Could you address Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the taking over of the State Department’s website to promote his Christian leadership?
For people who did not see this, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, spoke in Nashville at this conference of Christian counselors. He basically said the bible should be a guidebook for leadership. He told everybody to read it, then used the secretary of state website to promote his talk. The Department of State’s website had this huge image of him with a link to his talk, including the full remarks. So, he’s using the resources of the state to promote his personal religion, which is Christian. That is Christian Nationalism.
That’s exactly what we are working to fight. FFRF wrote a letter within a couple of hours of that happening. That did come down from the website shortly thereafter, but not just because of our letter. There was a huge outcry. This is what we are fighting.
And it’s not just Pompeo. That same day, Attorney General Bill Barr gave his really hateful speech at Notre Dame, where he weaponized religious liberty. He vilified nonreligious Americans, he bastardized American history and the law, and just spouted pure Christian Nationalism as the U.S. attorney general, which was nothing new.
We warned everybody that he had these views. He gave speeches that were very similar to that back in 1992. We warned Congress not to confirm him in this position for that very reason. So, nothing new there. But this is the kind of stuff that we are regularly fighting.
We brought the winner of FFRF’s William J. Schulz Essay Contest for College-Bound High School Students to speak today. The students were asked to write an essay based on this prompt: “Why we must rely on ourselves, not God, to solve the world’s problems.” Their insights give us nonbelievers faith in the future.
Our first-place essay winner is 18-year-old Aline Pham, an exceptional young woman from La Mirada, Calif., who is attending the University of California-Irvine. Aline was valedictorian of her high school class, and it says a lot about her that her senior class voted her “most likely to vote for a cause.” She told us that separation of church and state is one of those causes. She would like to become a teacher, then a principal and her ultimate goal is one day to become a superintendent.
Welcome, Aline.
By Aline Pham
This past summer break, while my friends were taking trips to San Diego and making the most of their last summer before adulthood, I sat in my room and applied for scholarships. But my mom is the real champion. She spent her days searching for scholarships and nagging me to apply. That’s how we found out about the Freedom From Religion Foundation and this scholarship. But unlike other essay applications, this prompt didn’t take me hours to answer. It came easily to me. So, I sat there and I thought.
I thought about myself in fifth grade, a 10-year-old girl fed up with the substitute teacher who went on a 30-minute spiel about God after introducing herself. She called attendance and praised every child whose name originated from the bible. But that’s not all. She rambled about how we, as children of God, must be grateful for the blessing of education and thank him every Sunday in church. Impulsively, but not regretfully, I raised my hand and said, “What if I don’t go to church?” I swear I could hear 30 students shifting in their seats awaiting a response. She replied something along the lines of, “Oh dear, well that’s OK, too.” But I could tell by looking in her astonished eyes that she thought this 10-year-old was going to hell.
I thought about 13-year-old me sitting criss-cross applesauce in the public library when a security guard approached me and firmly demanded that I take my feet off the chair. With his bulging eyes, he asked me, “Do you sit like that in church, miss?” At the time, I was too taken aback to call him out on his rude assumption. But now, I realize how wrong he was in imposing his beliefs on me, even though I shouldn’t have had my feet on the furniture.
I thought about ninth grade, when my friend (whom I get along with very well) asked me, “Wait, you’re Christian, right?” “Why would you assume that?” I asked him. I thought to myself, “Maybe it’s because I once helped him correct grammatical errors in his letter for a mission trip to Mexico.” But to my utter disbelief, he replied, “Well, I mean, I just figured because you’re nice and a good person.” I wouldn’t have hesitated to call him out on this obviously flawed logic, but the funny thing is that he seemed to recognize his mistake before I could point it out. This dangerous association of Christianity with good and anything else with bad is what spews ignorance and hatred throughout our nation.
So, I took all these thoughts (and many more) that had been roaming around in my head for years and put them onto paper. The result was this:
“God makes no mistakes.” Personally, I think he set the oven temperature too high when he cooked up Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, when he stirred Jewish bodies in Nazi Germany, when he sprinkled some cockroaches in the Rwandan genocide. A god did not do that. Humans did. Instead of singing “hallelujah” and talking to the sky, we should hold ourselves accountable for such terrible atrocities and prevent history from repeating itself.
Vietnamese Buddhist funerals are very peculiar. For hours on end, monks recite prayers repeatedly, slurring their words so much that no one — not even the most fluent Vietnamese grandparents — can comprehend. My mother tells me the murmuring chants will allow my grandfather’s soul to leave his body and move on. I nod my head just to humor her. He’s dead. His body has been cremated. His body is gone, but his memory lives on. We don’t need monks or altars or burning incense to recognize that. I refused to cope with my grandpa’s death by reciting meaningless prayers in front of Buddha statues, and instead vowed to carry on his memory by working hard in school and being kind to others. Three years after his passing, I have healed and still continue to fulfill my promises — without the help of a god.
After the Parkland shootings, the smell of social activism lingered in the air as my school led its own student sit-out for common-sense gun control. While I protested in honor of the 17 victims, some of my peers refused to participate, convinced that their “thoughts and prayers” would suffice to heal all wounds. As comforting as they may be, prayers cannot heal bullet wounds — or social wounds caused by mental health issues, faulty legislation and deep-rooted prejudice.
These prayers are merely temporary solutions that encourage individuals to unproductively wait around for the “man upstairs” to solve their problems and vanquish their worries. Rather than throwing baseless words at victims, we should address problems such as gun violence by introducing new laws and voting for new politicians. The same students who offered “thoughts and prayers” use the bible as their sole “evidence” for discriminating against my LGBTQ+ classmates. I often wonder if they realize that such baseless claims contradict the “Love thy neighbor” principle. Religion gets in the way of so many things and is a root cause of many social wars we fight today.
I draw conclusions about our world using evidence provided by Bill Nye the Science Guy, not the bible. I have always been fascinated by science, biology in particular. In freshman year of high school, my passion and drive paid off when I was recognized as my teacher’s top biology student at my high school’s award ceremony. Intending to compliment me, my friend exclaimed, “Aline, you’re so lucky and blessed!” To my surprise, my teacher corrected him. He said matter-of-factly, “No, she’s not. She worked hard to earn it. No luck or blessings needed.” Looking back, I realize he was right. In biology, I participated in class discussions, led group projects, and conducted unique experiments. It was my work that earned me awards, not prayers. It was my drive, not dogma.
The truth is, I have never written a piece like this — not one that expresses my raw feelings toward religion and faith, or lack thereof. I will be the first to admit that I was not always this confident about my secular stance. I always thought I was insecure growing up because all my friends were Christian while my family was Buddhist. But now I realize I was insecure because school was Christian, home was Buddhist, and I was neither.
A lot has happened since I wrote this essay. I started my first year at college and often find myself overwhelmed by the new people, environment and expectations. A few days ago, I even thought to myself, “How nice would it be to sit here, hold my hands and pray? All my worries would be washed away.” But is that really the mentality we want to teach our kids? To deflect our problems toward God? To slap a Band-Aid on a gushing wound? No. I have to take responsibility for my mistakes: procrastinating on an assignment, not keeping in touch enough with friends and family, and so forth. I must have drive, not dogma.
So, I would like to sincerely thank FFRF for giving me the opportunity to do so, and for making this convention possible for me to attend. Thank you to my mom, who has always encouraged me to speak up and exercise my First Amendment rights, whether she agrees with me or not. And lastly, thank you all for listening to my story.
This is an edited version of the speech made by Andrew Bradley at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18, 2019. He, along with Deven Green, created the comedy act of Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian, which is an award-winning satirical web series. The duo performed an act for the convention crowd, but then Bradley took the stage solo to give this speech.
By Andrew Bradley
America is lucky it was founded during the Enlightenment. Or, rather, it was lucky that it was the Enlightenment that pushed it to be founded. The Enlightenment meant that the United States was formed during a time of healthy skepticism for religions.
If you read the correspondence of most of the Founding Fathers, it would be almost impossible for any of them to be elected now, even as a Democrat.
They would be destroyed in the primaries by the super PACS: “Why does Ben Franklin hate Jesus so much? Why did Thomas Jefferson desecrate the Lord’s word by calling it a steaming pile of feces?” The Establishment Clause reflects this lull between fits of religious radicalism in this country.
Can you imagine the Bill of Rights written by the Puritans? It would probably look a lot like one that would be written by today’s evangelicals. And would probably have come to be known as the Bill of Wrongs. And only apply to other people.
Evangelicals don’t like — because of our pesky Constitution — that the United States isn’t the Official Sponsor of Christianity. And they’re tirelessly showing their resentment right now.
American theocracy has a new gimmick it’s using to try to work around the Constitution, and to shoehorn a right-wing brand of Christianity into the secular square. It’s called “religious freedom.” Forgive yourself right now if you think religious freedom is about being either religious or free. It is not.
As is the case with most political branding, the words were chosen for their ability to disarm rather than inform. “Religious freedom” is code. It’s anti-constitutional theocracy in constitutional drag. Who could possibly object to freedom? But a peek beneath its benign surface reveals “religious freedom” is really about one thing: Evangelicals using our government to promote their faith. But just an unapologetically selfish and vindictive version of their purported faith.
This very objective was regarded as so inimical to our secular republic that both the Founders and citizens thwarted it twice in the Constitution.
Once, in the body of the Constitution, Article 6, Section 3, banning religious tests for holding office. And then once again, for good measure, in the First Amendment, barring government from promoting any religion. The Founders haven’t been alone at recoiling from theocracy.
“Religious freedom” is not about indulging, much less protecting, non-Christians. It’s not even about protecting Christians who are not right-wing evangelicals. That’s because “religious freedom” is rooted in a lie. Its blandly inclusive title, pretending to protect people of all faiths, is descriptive only of its marketing, not implementation.
If you doubt this, listen to one of “religious freedom’s” highest profile proponents, the anti-LGBTQ president of Family Research Council, the odious Tony Perkins, a man who has selflessly devoted his life to thinking about men licking each other.
[Video of Perkins plays:] “The key to the Muslim community remains Jesus Christ. And that means that we, as Americans, understand the unique nature of this country, its heritage and its government is founded upon Christian truth. And that’s how it works. And the ideas of democracy and individual liberty and self-government are incompatible with what we see in the Muslim world.”
Now, that doesn’t sound like a guy who’s serious about protecting everyone else’s freedom to practice their religion.
In fact, Perkins has also said the Constitution does not protect Islam. And, according to him, “religious freedom” is even more stingy, as it only protects “orthodox” versions of Christianity. You know, the type that, quite coincidentally, hates the gays just as much as Perkins does.
It’s an ungrateful line in the sand. One of the Family Research Council’s favorite tropes to support its made-up version of “religious freedom” is to cite the statutory version called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The RFRA, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997 as unconstitutional when applied to states, was enacted in large measure to protect the religious freedom of Native Americans. The very people — pagans — the new “religious freedom” excludes.
Even beyond its objective, to have secular courts promote one faith, there are other, fundamental problems with how “religious freedom” attempts to nullify laws that apply to all Americans.
If evangelicals can void a law, ad hoc, by claiming it violates their “deeply held faith,” how do courts define that faith, much less determine whether it is deeply held?
And courts can’t just take someone’s word for it. That would be tantamount to the anarchy of giving everyone a wallet full of “Get Out of Laws Free” cards. Hardly in keeping with evangelicals’ oft-spoken fondness for “law and order.”
Let’s address the first question: What is the “faith” being used to avoid the law of the land?
It may not be the one you think. The Christianity that evangelicals practice is as abrupt a departure from Christianity as Christianity was from Judaism. It is so far removed from the teachings of Jesus, it begs for a new name. Jerry Falwell Jr. makes me think of a few . . . But Christianity 2.0™ is the most polite.
Jesus was beta-tested for centuries and, clearly, found buggy. Too many empathy commands, too few tax cuts for Herod. Too much rendering unto Caesar. And give what to the poor? Er, no. That’s not happening.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, conservatives have made their lifework not letting it go to Jesus’s head. Because, to conservatives, Jesus’s “help the poor” and “turn the other cheek” elective suggestions sound alarmingly liberal, even suspiciously un-American.
Worse, Jesus neglected to mention evangelicals’ two biggest obsessions: homosexuality and abortion. Something had to go. (Spoiler: It was Jesus.)
This has made “religious freedom” all about making up for Jesus’s carelessness. His inconveniently liberal agenda has been swapped out for evangelicals’ less-Jesusy approach.
If Jesus never had a problem with homosexuals, but you do, saying your voluntary animus is actually compulsory faith is a shrewd way to curry legal deference that would otherwise be curtly withheld. Because it’s not prejudice if you call it religion.
It’s God ignoring civil rights, not you. It’s God being an asshole for no reason, not you. “It’s nothing personal: God told me to hate you.”
Now, let’s address the second problem with this wildly improvised faith: How can it be claimed, much less proven, to be “deeply held”?
If there is one thing that the ascension of Donald Trump has taught us, it is this: The tea party never really cared about deficits. And evangelicals never really cared about “values.”
When it comes to determining what people really believe, actual actions speak louder than pious proclamations. Hardly any evangelical “deeply holds” the faith of traditional Christianity when it comes to what they do. So how can they be allowed to only hold it deeply when it comes time to use it against someone else?
Using “deeply held” religious beliefs as carte blanche to step on the constitutional toes of others is a dangerous precedent.
Do we provide exemptions from hate crime laws to Nazis, the KKK or other toxic flavors of white supremacy? Their “deeply held beliefs” about minorities, slavery and mixed marriages have, after all, been supported, with much success, in the past by the bible.
Whenever Franklin Graham tweets that the bible is a “book of timeless moral truths,” I always turn to Exodus 21:20 for tips on beating humans I own. The helpful Lord tells me I can beat them within an inch of their lives and I can’t be punished if they survive since they are my “property.” Ah, what a timeless moral truth. Glory!
I raise the Lord’s fondness for beating slaves to underscore how dangerous it is to allow rules in the bible to override secular laws about how we treat each other. Our secular laws change as humans become more knowledgeable, more caring. The bible is frozen in a time long before either science or the Enlightenment.
When you peel back the pleasant appearance of the words “religious freedom,” you see that something as fraudulent as it is unworkable is afoot. It was something the Founders tried to protect us from — an American theocracy.
Family Research Council and its ilk, after decades of butting heads against the separation of church and state mandated by the Constitution, have come up with a Trojan horse. They call it “religious freedom.”
They know that if you can’t stop inconvenient civil rights laws, creating an excuse to ignore them is the next best thing.
Cases are popping up around the country where businesses otherwise open to the public exercise their “religious freedom” to demean and refuse service to LGBTQ and other minorities.
But “religious freedom” is never about wedding desserts. It’s about just deserts: retribution against secularism.
It’s about promoting one brand of religion by making life difficult for those who do not promote it. It’s about people preening in the piety of making others comply with a “religion” they don’t even follow. It’s about upending America’s hierarchical relationship between settled law and ad hoc belief. It’s about providing right-wing evangelicals with a pretty costume to cover for their grimy bigotry.
Because “religious freedom” treats something that is just a choice (religion) as more important than immutable characteristics that are not choices (race and sexuality).
When you really look at it, you realize that “religious freedom” is neither.
This is an edited version of the speech given by Jeremiah Camara at FFRF’s convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 19, 2019. He was introduced by FFRF’s Director of Operations Lisa Strand:
It is my pleasure to introduce filmmaker Jeremiah Camara. He directed and produced the documentary, “Holy Hierarchy: The Religious Roots of Racism in America.” Those who were here at our convention a few years ago had the pleasure of seeing his other movie, “Contradiction,” also about religion, and it’s on Amazon Prime. Jeremiah is also an author, whose books are Holy Lockdown: Does the Church Limit Black Progress? and The New Doubting Thomas: The Bible, Black Folks and Blind Belief. He is the creator of the widely watched YouTube series, “Slave Sermons,” a mini-movie series addressing the harmful effects of religion. Please welcome Jeremiah Camara.
By Jeremiah Camara
I’m honored to be here. Thanks to [FFRF Co-Presidents] Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker for inviting me to this event, to an organization that’s so important, and not only to this country, but to the world. We definitely need the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
They say that America’s going to hell and going wayward because of the rise of secularism. That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It is really crazy. Do you realize that once upon a time there was something in this country called slavery — and religious belief was the driving justification behind slavery? And now they’re saying that we’re going to hell because of secularism.
My film, “Holy Hierarchy: The Religious Roots of Racism in America,” attempts to explain how the beliefs in a biased supreme being during Colonial America led to beliefs in supreme human beings. If you believe in a supreme being, it’s a seamless transition to believe in supreme human beings.
There is a legal component behind racism that we tend to forget, and it ultimately turned racism into an institution. When you believe in a god, you bring your baggage into that belief, you bring your beliefs, your bigotry, your bias, your superstitions, your stereotypes and your ignorance into that belief. And one of the most fundamental beliefs in America since Colonial times and even today, even if it’s on a subconscious level, is the belief that there is a god who created whites to be superior and blacks to be inferior. This was the prevailing precept.
We moved from Virginia, but many of us still have a Virginia state of mind. Virginia is the boss of this country. You can call it the District of Columbia, if you want. That’s Virginia. And I tell people, if you don’t understand early Virginia, it’ll be a challenge understanding racism in this country, because Virginia is the place where the party started. They perfected racism.
You can’t talk about racism without talking about white supremacy. You can’t talk about white supremacy without talking about Christianity. They’re tied. They’re interwoven. And it’s the root of racism. You don’t enslave. You don’t create systems of apartheid. You don’t create systems of Jim Crow. You don’t implement systems of redlining. The prison-industrial complex is for people who you believe are equal to you.
I think one of the least appreciated but most powerful elements that keeps the wheels of Christianity spinning is white biblical imagery and iconography throughout this country and the world. It does three things: It promotes Christianity, it promotes white supremacy, and it ensures and preserves racism. There’s a lot of talk about the separation of church and state, but there’s also the separation of church and the state of one’s mind.
Imagery is more or just as powerful than any speech that any attorney general or any president or vice president can give in promoting Christianity. Iconography is one of the most powerful weapons in support of Christianity. It’s the unnoticed elephant in the room.
Before there was television, there was imagery. Before there were magazines, there was white biblical iconography. I remember when I was about 6, my mother had a picture of a white Jesus in the kitchen and it was sitting on the table and I noticed that everywhere I went, the eyes followed me. So, I knew that there was really something to this religion because I never saw a picture do that, where the eyes actually followed you.
To people of color, especially blacks being the antithesis of white, seeing white biblical imagery causes immeasurable psychological damage, which has helped to lead to severe cases of lack of self-worth. And deep illness of Stockholm syndrome, as we witnessed in the Botham Jean-Amber Guyger case. And the humongous statue of a white Jesus in the country of Nigeria.
Since Colonial America, the imagery throughout the land continues to support the notion of white supremacy. We see mythological white biblical imagery every day in the magazine and book sections of Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, CVS and all throughout Hobby Lobby. We see the iconic biblical imagery in doctor’s offices. We see it in hospitals, airports, billboards. We’ve seen it in schools and, of course, in churches and movies.
You look at some of the big blockbuster movies that we’ve had, like “The Passion of the Christ,” that took in close to $400 million. Blacks go to these movies, too.
I always tell people that Jesus is white, even though he never existed. Jesus is white and they ask, “Why do you think that he’s white?” Because he’s white in Walmart and Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. My phone is packed with imagery that I just collect everywhere I go. It’s all around. And that’s something that’s really not talked about a lot.
I was born and raised in Cincinnati, and I used to work at a place called Half Price Books. I was a buyer there. People would bring their old books in and I would assess them. I was really the best assessor that they had and I was the only black. A lady came up with her books and she needed them assessed, and said, “I don’t want a black person touching my books,” even though she was giving them up anyway. I was like, “OK, no problem.”
Honestly, I wasn’t offended. I was cool with it, but what really pissed me off was my white co-worker who assessed her books. That’s the problem. If I can’t do them, you, as my co-worker, should say, “Look, take your books somewhere else.” So, if we’re not all offended and all appalled when we go to Walmart, when we go to these places, I don’t care. I was at the Miami airport and there’s white biblical iconography all around. It’s all over, it’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. We all should be upset about that.
Let’s not ignore imagery. Imagery is deeper many times than the spoken word. If there’s no legal justification to end the onslaught of white biblical imagery based on the Constitution’s protection of free speech, then the Constitution is flawed. You should not be able to walk into a store and see white images of Moses and Abraham. To a person of color, it does immeasurable psychological damage. There’s no way we can put a measure on the damage psychologically.
Black people don’t even embrace their own culture. We have Stockholm syndrome to the highest degree in Africa. I don’t know how many have been to Africa, but it is amazing the reverence. They have a saying in Africa that if you’re on your way to church and you see a white man, turn around, because you’ve already laid eyes on God.
This is all about imagery. But what is racism? There’s a lot of talk about it. We hear that word all the time, but racism is the legal backing of a group’s prejudices, stereotypes, bigotry, bias and ignorance. It’s when all that is backed legally it becomes racism. We’ve been mentally conditioned to perceive an all-knowing and all-powerful creator as a white male. And no matter what our current beliefs are, our memory, an association of a white Jesus, are permanently locked in our minds. I’ve been this way since I was 22 years old, since I’ve been out of religion. Done with it. But that image when I was 6 years old is still there. It will always be there.
I’ve got a little part in the film that addresses that imagery. Racism actually stems from one group believing to be of more value and more worth than another group. And it’s time to end all of that and I’m glad that I’m here. I wish there were more blacks here. I wish there were more Hispanics here. It’s a long process, but I think we’re headed in the right direction.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate you guys.
This is an edited version of the speech Amber Scorah gave at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 19, 2019. She was introduced by FFRF Programs Manager Kristina Daleiden:
Amber Scorah is the author of the moving memoir Leaving the Witness, which details her experience growing up as Jehovah’s Witness, moving to China to become a missionary and coming to question the beliefs that she had been taught and eventually leaving that religion. After suffering the tragic loss of her 4-month-old son, Amber became a parental leave advocate, bringing this issue to the forefront of the 2016 presidential campaign. She also penned an op-ed in The New York Times titled “Surviving the death of my son after the death of my faith.” “Oprah” magazine said that Leaving the Witness was one of the best books of summer and The New York Times called it one of 12 new books to watch. Amber is a Canadian writer living in Brooklyn.
Please join me in welcoming Amber Scorah.
By Amber Scorah
First of all, it’s amazing to be here. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and women were never allowed to give talks. It’s my guess that everyone in this room either has known a Jehovah’s Witness or has had one approach them to preach to them.
But so many people feel like they don’t really understand what the Jehovah’s Witnesses are about and why there isn’t more information from ex-members out there.
Jehovah’s Witnesses fly under the greater cultural radar, in many ways, because of the way its own culture is set up. As a Jehovah’s Witness, you are raised to believe that you must keep separate from the world.
This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t vote, don’t get involved in charity work, are told not to go to college or pursue any kind of career, don’t get too close to people or have relationships with anyone who is a nonbeliever. Any person who is not a Witness is considered “worldly” and a bad association. The outside is Satan’s world.
Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, I was taught I was different. And this was reinforced by many of the arbitrary things the Witnesses pull out of the bible and pronounce as necessary for salvation. No blood, which obviously meant that if you were dying and needed a blood transfusion, you’d have to accept death. No Christmas, no singing carols. We’d have to sit outside. When someone had a birthday in the classroom, we weren’t allowed to eat the cake. We couldn’t date or marry a non-Jehovah’s Witness. Our time was to be used for preaching, to save as many as we could before Armageddon.
No dirty laundry
You don’t see many books by people like me, who leave the religion, because the leaders of the group strongly forbid anyone from airing any of the organization’s dirty laundry.
This applies to very minor issues. For example, we were told constantly that even if a brother cheats us, we shouldn’t take him to court. And it extends to very serious issues, where parents are told not to go to the police when their child has been sexually abused by someone within the congregation. The idea behind this is that the most important thing is that God’s chosen ones be protected. They don’t want God to look bad.
Of course, you might think, if you leave, then you’re no longer bound by this rule, right?
But what happens when you leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, like I did, is that you are shunned. This is quite a severe punishment for people who have been taught to build their entire lives around an organization, and who, as a result, have very few ties anywhere else.
This shunning is bad enough, but if a person takes it one step further and speaks out about the organization, or their doubts, or anything that they feel is wrong within the organization, in any kind of a public way, that person is labeled an apostate.
This is a very scary brand to receive. Apostasy, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses literature, is the one sin God will never forgive. “Apostates” like me would be described in very terrifying terms. They were “mentally diseased,” “criminals,” “lower than a snake” with “characteristics like the devil.”
Even after I wrote my book and didn’t believe in the religion anymore, you feel the power of that community lasts even after you’ve left. The last thing I wanted to be was that horrible apostate character we’ve been warned about. I didn’t want to be seen that way, even by people who no longer spoke to me. I didn’t want to be “mentally diseased”!
Yet here I am, out here in Satan’s world!
Path to freedom
The path to finding my freedom happened in one of the most restrictive countries in the world: China.
When I was in my 20s, after spending years knocking on doors in my home city of Vancouver, Canada, to not much in the way of results — you all know what you do when a Jehovah’s Witness calls! — I decided to learn Mandarin Chinese and travel to China to preach. China was the one place that had not received a Witness, and I wanted to give them a chance to convert before Armageddon came and God killed them for being nonbelievers.
Ironically, it was in China that, for the first time in my life, I had some freedom, which should have told me something, since most people who go to China don’t feel more free.
Because my preaching work was done underground in China, the structure of meetings and community I had had my whole life at home as a Witness was gone. Our religion was illegal there, so there was no structure.
Of course, my aim was to preach, and I took that mission seriously. But that, too, looked different. Back at home, rarely would a Witness ever have a friend who was not a Witness. The only interaction was for the sake of conversion. Non-Witnesses were to be always kept at bay, as they were a worldly influence.
Yet here in China, we were told by the leaders of the organization that the way to go about our preaching work was to spend a lot of time getting to know people before we preached to them. This would allow us to vet them, to make sure they weren’t Communist Party members, or people who would turn us in to the authorities. Often that vetting process took a long time, because you were trying to “be casual” and get information from people naturally, before bringing in the bible or our literature and possibly endangering ourselves.
A byproduct of this, of course, was that I began to make “worldly friends” for the first time. I got to know people who weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses on a pretty intimate level before I ever even tried bringing up the bible.
Preaching in a language like Mandarin, too, was so different, it felt like my mind was being excavated. As I sat teaching my Chinese bible students “the truth,” telling them to throw away their thousands of years of cultural history for my 100-year-old religion in this new language, it was almost as if I could hear what I was saying for the first time. I started to realize my beliefs sounded a bit crazy.
Cracks in my faith
Eventually, the mild disorientation of being in this new culture and speaking this language so different than my own opened up cracks in my faith, and the physical distance from my community gave me a mental break from the constant meetings and indoctrination. Slowly, a “worldly” friendship I began to engage in with a client at my workplace ended up with me questioning everything I had been raised to believe.
A lot of people who have never been religious wonder why in the world anyone would stay in a group like this that is so obviously, to those on the outside, wrong and “culty.”
Here’s the thing: No one who is in a cult ever thinks they are in a cult. You think you are living the best life, and in some ways it IS a great life. You have no angst, you don’t worry about climate change, you don’t have to have a retirement fund because Armageddon and God are going to solve all those problems. Plus, you have many wonderful friends and family who believe in it with you. You have a warm community.
You are constantly told about how awful people’s lives are on the outside, and because you are only allowed to be close with other Witnesses, you have no way of verifying. Of course, the world can be a scary place, so it’s an easy message to sell. Sure, you see people who seem happy and fulfilled, you meet nice people at work and such, but you know that they are going to die at Armageddon, so really, how great can that be?
Yes, it isn’t until you try to leave a cult that you start to realize it’s a cult. When the people in your organization and family immediately shun you for questioning even one of the beliefs handed down from the leaders, you know you are in some form of cult.
When I voiced a doubt or two and that got back to the elders, well, that was about when I started to get the inkling that the Jehovah’s Witness organization bore the traits of a cult.
Later, after I left, I found stronger proof: The first boyfriend I had after leaving the religion found on YouTube nearly every documentary ever made about cult members and we watched them together. I was surprised as I watched. Every cult it seemed, from the most extreme (Jim Jones in Jamestown) to the less extreme ones (that didn’t mandate death), well, they were exactly my story.
They are entirely different belief systems, but have the same systems in place to keep people in. My lines of reasoning, my thought patterns, my thought-blocking, the us vs. them mentality, all the things we had been trained to do to stay in the religion were the same things people in all these cults had been trained to do.
And while the Witnesses are not as extreme as some cults, they do mandate that people die rather than take life-saving blood transfusions. So, while they aren’t drinking Kool-Aid, they are mandating death for no reason, which isn’t that different.
It takes a lot of deprogramming to realize the religion you were raised with as “truth” is simply a mythology that has been passed down from generation to generation.
No regrets
Even given all I lost — family, friends, faith, support systems, purpose — I have never once regretted waking up and leaving. And I’ve never heard any other ex-Witnesses saying any different. People have lost their own children to the religion after waking up, have lost their livelihood, everything.
But now that I shed a belief system, it’s a lot easier for me to see culti-ness everywhere, not only in religion. We are, all of us, subject to indoctrination of some form, whether we realize it or not. Obviously, some belief systems are more extreme than others, but we all have blind spots. We are born into a family that teaches us values and ideals from birth. All of us have embedded ideas about how things must be and how we must live (marry, have children, elect a straight white man, whatever it is). This is most obvious in the religious realm, but it’s also the case in the political, social, internet, scientific and any other realm in which people identify with a way of thinking.
This is why cults exist! They are just a manifestation of the extreme end of something that is in us all. We all need to check our thinking, to ensure we aren’t succumbing to our own cult-like tendencies.
How do we do this?
Make friends with people who don’t think like us. That may sound trite, but in my story, the only reason I was able to see my blind spots was because I developed a close relationship with someone “on the outside.” The differences between us were what made it possible for me to see that not everything I had been taught to believe by my culture was absolute truth. Allowing myself to get close enough to someone so different than me was what made me see that. It wasn’t always pleasant, but I’m so grateful I didn’t back away or dismiss him.
I’ve also learned this: When we feel very sure we are right, that’s always a sign to look again, look deeper, question our strongest assumptions, never be dogmatic about anything. Always be willing to listen and readjust. Never let your identity be too stuck to a group, a belief. Step outside our comfort zone and be willing to put ourselves in positions that make us feel off kilter, because that is when we get opened up, that is when we learn.
Great tragedy
There is one postscript to my story. And that is that seven years after I left my religion, I experienced a great tragedy.
My first child, my 4-month-old son, Karl, died. I raise this because many people who know my religious background have asked me if this terrible loss made me want to go back to religion. I think it’s an interesting question.
I don’t think anyone really can be prepared for the loss of a child, but it blindsided me. I was now faced with an entirely foreign landscape: death without hope of an afterlife. Grief without religion.
My father had died when I was a Witness, when I was 18, and I was sad, but I wasn’t that sad, because I was certain that one day I would see him again in paradise. Religion was born for times like this. My faith, I realize now, had acted as a buffer to many of these more devastating aspects of being human.
And now, when I lost my son, without that faith, I experienced this death as nothingness. My child, so full of promise and health and energy, vanished. It was beyond my ability to accept losing him. But it was even farther beyond my abilities to return to any kind of belief in life after death. This was the ultimate test for someone who had once had belief.
But let me tell you what I discovered about grief without religion. It has some surprising byproducts.
I now had no choice but to live with the reality of the loss, and it made me deal with what was in front of me. What was in front of me was utter devastation on every level. But once you have been that close to death, something else happens when you can’t escape it. In the midst of this kind of grief, where you have no escape, you are forced to experience a deeper pain, but you also become more clear-eyed about life. You find you see what is beautiful in life in the midst of all this suffering. And one of those things I experienced was the great care and compassion that we as human beings possess.
When I was in such great pain, so many people, strangers and friends alike, got me through by showing love in so many ways. It was the strangest thing, to experience such an awful thing, yet at the same time, to be touched by such beauty and love.
Now, time has gone by, and without the escape of belief, I have learned a lot. I have learned how to live with everyone’s worst nightmare, I’m still alive, which honestly feels like a feat sometimes. I have learned patience and endurance and how to tolerate devastating feelings, because that is what living without your child requires.
But since I do not believe that my son is “out there” somewhere or will come back to me, it has also meant that I have kept him alive in the ways in the here and now. By talking about him to his sister, and by holding close the memories I have of him every day.
I also became an activist for a national parental-leave policy in his name. Through this work, I found that death without hope didn’t have to be death without faith.
How so? Activism is an act of faith. A faith that when there are problems, we as human beings can find ways to solve them. A faith that my son’s life and death would show others the value of every child’s life. A faith that others would join me in a fight for what was right, and they did.
In my old religion, we were taught not to put our faith in man. But if humankind is all we have, perhaps this faith, this active belief that we can change the world, is not misplaced. That’s what I learned. I’m not willing to give up hope yet.
And the fact is, once we accept reality and truly live in it, with its full range of emotion, good and terrible, that’s where life lies. Not in some fictional paradise.
The one thing that no one can take away from us is the beauty and love we can find in this world if we look for it. When I am in great pain, I remember that the depth of grief we experience is a reflection of the depth of the love we are capable of.
I don’t have all the answers now, but I can appreciate the deep mystery of it all. I feel the magic of life all around me, the great power of shared humanity. I feel gratitude.
And it’s been so lovely to be here with you today. Thank you.
This is an edited version of the speech given by Hemant Mehta at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18. He was given the 2019 Nothing Fails Like Prayer Award. Hemant was introduced by FFRF Director of Strategic Response Andrew L. Seidel:
On May 5, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that it’s totally fine for local governments to have prayers, even if they are overwhelmingly Christian. One of the reasons that the Supreme Court said it was fine was because “the town at no point excluded or denied an opportunity to a would-be prayer giver.” A minister or lay person of any persuasion, including an atheist, could give an invocation. Since we couldn’t challenge this in court anymore, we figured we’ll take them at their word. And since nothing fails like prayer, FFRF inaugurated its “Nothing Fails Like Prayer” contest. Every year, we award this to someone who has gone to their local government body that is already praying and delivered a strong secular invocation. The award comes with a plaque and a $500 honorarium.
This year’s winner is Hemant Mehta, who is a writer and editor, and runs the hugely popular “Friendly Atheist” site, which I visit 19 or 100 times a day. He edited the 2017 book, Queer Disbelief: Why LGBTQ Equality is an Atheist Issue. He wrote the Young Atheists’ Survival Guide, and, in a slightly devilish transaction, he sold his soul on eBay and wrote a very fun book about that.
He’s a brilliant mind and a huge asset to the secular movement. He’s unafraid of critiquing us to make us better as much as he is unafraid of criticizing government officials who use their public offices to promote their personal religion. So, Hemant, come on up and accept your award.
By Hemant Mehta
Hi, everybody. Thank you for having me here. I’m going to talk about something that’s not directly connected to that invocation, but something I feel very strongly about.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were more atheists in public office? Of course, it would. But I don’t want them there so they can advocate for atheists. That’s not their job. I don’t need them to do the stuff that FFRF does. I want them there because having more atheists in politics has some serious symbolic value. Because it matters when my House representative is a black woman. It matters when you have a person in Congress who is a Muslim, or someone with a physical disability or someone who is LGBTQ.
We all know there’s a stigma attached to being an atheist. How many of you have gotten to know somebody, and you tell them at some point that you are an atheist. The response you get back is, “Oh, but I thought you were a good person.”
We’ve all had some sort of variation on that conversation. Let me ask you a slightly different question. When you think about the most famous atheists, who is the most famous atheist you can think of?
There’s probably a couple names that come to my mind. Maybe you’re thinking of an author or Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or somebody like that. If you are a famous atheist author, why are you a famous atheist author? It’s because you wrote a book or two where your whole point is to have readers say, “OK, I don’t believe in this stuff anymore.” Your goal in writing the book was to get people to stop being religious. Maybe you were thinking of a comedian such as Bill Maher. When does Bill Maher talk about religion? He brings it up in his act because he wants to make you laugh and I’m glad he does. It’s funny. But his point in doing that is to get you to laugh at religion.
This is why it would be such a big deal to have atheists in government. And, for the public, think about what that means. This may be their best chance to see an atheist in public life, to see (hopefully) a respectable atheist, where their job is not to denigrate religion. And I think that would go so far in changing the public perception of what it means to be an atheist.
If you are an atheist in politics and you’re good at it, you’re not doing battle against religion. You’re trying to help everybody. That is a big deal. Yet, trying to get into politics has been this huge hurdle for atheists everywhere.
[Hemant shows image of The New Republic magazine] The cover of this magazine says, “The last taboo.” And underneath there’s a subheading that says, “Politicians keep saying we should inject more religion into our public life. But what we really need is a healthy dose of atheism.” Cool. The author is Wendy Kaminer, who is a fantastic writer and activist. But she wrote this in 1996. Really? The last taboo? I mean, we hadn’t had an African-American president, we hadn’t had a woman at the top of the ticket. Is atheism the last taboo? No.
In this article, she writes, “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.” Her point was that it’s really hard to be an open atheist in politics. She was right. In 1996, there were no open atheists in the U.S. Congress.
But when you say you’re religious and you’re trying to run for office, people know what that means. It means you’re a good person. It means you can be trusted. And that’s what people want when they’re voting for somebody. Is it still toxic to be an atheist in politics? I’d say, “kind of,” but that’s changing and it’s changing quickly and in ways you may not even be aware of.
Getting an edge
I’ll give you a couple examples here. Let me take you back to 2008 in North Carolina. There was a U.S. Senate race where neither candidate was an incumbent. One was Kay Hagan, a state lawmaker running on the Democratic side. She was up against Elizabeth Dole, the wife of the former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. This was a close race and everyone knew it. There was a lot of money being funneled into North Carolina. So, you’re looking for any way to get an edge.
Kay Hagan had a fundraiser that was held at the home of someone who was known to be an atheist activist. She went to his home, not because she’s an atheist, but because he was hosting a fundraiser. And with that information alone, I’ll tell you about the commercial the Dole campaign ran afterwards.
It’s shots of atheists appearing in the news and saying, “Let’s take God off the currency.” “Let’s take God off the dollar bills.” “Kay Hagan appeared at an atheist home.” There’s dark music in the background. And, when the screen fades to black, you hear a voice saying, “There is no God.” I’m not joking. That’s really in the ad.
So, what did Hagen promise in return? I have no idea. She promised us nothing. And yet, that was the ad Dole’s campaign ran because just the link to an atheist was enough to be an attack ad. That’s how bad it is. The good news is that it didn’t hurt her enough. Kay Hagan ended up winning that race in 2008, though she lost her re-election bid in 2014 to Thom Tillis.
Let me give you another name. Do you know Pete Stark, the Democratic representative from California? He made news across the country in 2007 when he announced he was an openly nonreligious member of Congress. He was the first one we knew about. He was openly saying “I don’t believe in a higher power.” He called himself a Unitarian, but said, “Yeah, I don’t believe in a higher power and I’m OK with the Secular Coalition for America broadcasting that.” And he said later on that he was surprised the reception was overwhelmingly positive. He thought it was gonna be really bad and it wasn’t. He got so many positive messages from people.
But here’s something that was shocking. Pete Stark ran some successful re-election campaigns even after being out as an atheist. He won again in 2008 and 2010. But, in 2012, he was up for re-election but did not win because another Democrat, Eric Swalwell, beat him in the primaries.
I like Eric Swalwell; he’s really good on TV and I agree with most of his politics. But when he was running in that primary, he was looking for any edge to beat a longtime incumbent. It turned out in 2011 that the House held a symbolic vote on whether the United States should keep “In God We Trust” as the national motto. And, this is one of those things where, of course, they’re all going to say “yes” and almost 400 of them did vote that way. But nine members of the House said no. Pete Stark was one of those nine and Eric Swalwell used that fact in his primary press release. “Do we trust Pete Stark to represent our views? The 15th Congressional District deserves a member of Congress who is in touch with its people, can work well with others and can honor our national motto.”
Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona was also elected to the House in 2012. I remember hearing during the primary that there’s this bisexual atheist running for the House in a fairly conservative area, but had a good chance of winning. When she won the primary and had a chance of winning the seat, all of the sudden she stopped referring to herself as an atheist. And when she won, there were headlines saying a bisexual atheist just got elected to Congress. Her campaign was then like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not an atheist.”
I wrote to her campaign and asked what label she was using. This is what the campaign staff wrote back: “She believes the terms ‘nontheist,’ ‘atheist’ or ‘nonbeliever’ are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character.” They could have just said, “No, we’re busy and we’re not going to answer it.” Instead, they gave me that statement, basically throwing atheists under the bus. But I will give her this: When she was sworn into office, she took her oath on the Constitution. And again in 2018, when she ran for U.S. Senate and won, she took an oath of office on a copy of the Constitution with Mike Pence holding it. Very cool.
Survey says …
Every two years, the Pew Research Center releases a survey of the newly elected members of Congress and they ask for religious affiliation. There’s one section that says “unaffiliated” and there’s just one name: Kyrsten Sinema.
And, let me also take you to 2012. Every four years, Gallup does a survey during the presidential campaign which asks voters, “Would you vote for someone in your political party if that person were _____.” If that person were black, 96 percent of people said yes. Why would that be a problem? A woman? Yes. Most people are like, “That would be fine if I agreed with their politics.”
And where is “atheist” on this list in 2012? It’s way at the bottom. But, this was actually cause for celebration in 2012 because it was above 50 percent for the first time. Fifty-four percent basically said, “Yeah, it’s not the worst thing ever.”
A couple of years ago, Jared Huffman, another Democrat from California, said, “OK, fine, I will come out as nonreligious.” He used the word “humanist.” After he came out, I was very excited to see the Pew Research survey listing the Congress members and their religion because I was so excited to see the word “atheist” or “humanist” on that list. So, I scroll down and I’m looking for the word “atheist” or “humanist” and the closest I see is “unaffiliated.” But it shows just one, which we already know is Kyrsten Sinema. Jared, where are you? In its report, Pew said it gets the data from this political survey and Rep. Huffman didn’t return the survey. But, a couple of months ago, he updated that survey and it does say “humanist” now. In this case, the “H” word makes a difference.
Reps. Huffman and Jamie Raskin and Mark Pocan helped begin the Freethought Caucus, which has 12 members. Literally, Jared Huffman is the only openly nonreligious one on that list. But that is still cool. Those are people who are saying “atheist” isn’t really a dirty word for us. We’ll fight for church-state separation. We’ll fight for reason-based policymaking, which is still a thing. And maybe it will come back one day. I can’t wait.
But I want to tell you what’s really making me excited here. In 2016, Gallup did that poll asking if you would vote for a _____. And if you scroll down to the bottom, wait a minute, that’s not us anymore. A socialist is now the worst thing you can be. Atheists are at 58 percent. And, by the way, if you break this down by age and ask people under age 30 if they would vote for an atheist, the number is about 75 percent. It’s getting to the point where even the youngest people like atheists.
In 2018, when they had the midterm elections, with the help of the Center for Freethought Equality, which is an arm of the American Humanist Association, I started keeping track of everyone running not just for Congress (because Huffman is the only one who’s openly nonreligious), but at the state level. People running for state Houses or state Senates and how many of them were openly nonreligious. The only caveat was that I didn’t care what word they used. “Atheist”? Great. “Nonreligious?” All right. Any of it. I’ll take it all.
Freethinkers database
[Hemant shows database on screen] I kept a spreadsheet. On this database, I have purple representing people who ran for state House or state Senate and lost. I used green to represent people who won their races, some of whom were incumbents. Let me scroll through this spreadsheet for you. Look at all the greens in all of the states. I know, there’s a lot of purple, too. Don’t worry about that. That’s expected. But look at all the greens.
How many greens are on that list? How many openly nonreligious elected officials are there? There are 50 around the country. That is incredible. That is way more than I thought existed anywhere because I literally would have told you maybe five or six before I started keeping track. And then I realized there are so many more than that.
And, by the way, that was 2018. Can you imagine what that number is going to be during the 2020 election when we expect that progressives will come out in droves?
I remember seeing a piece of pro-science legislation in New Hampshire and seeing the sponsor of the bill and I thought that name sounded familiar. Oh, right. She’s one of the greens on my list. She’s an openly nonreligious state representative who filed this pro-science bill. Isn’t that awesome? Then I looked at her co-sponsors and it’s like she hit everybody in the state who is nonreligious.
I said as much on my website and I get a message from that state representative in my inbox and she wrote, “How do you think I found the co-sponsors?” She saw the list and thought, “Oh, my God, I have allies I didn’t even know about. I’m gonna go to them and do that.” I had another state representative contact me on Twitter and she said, “How come I’m not on your spreadsheet?” I responded, “Who are you?” I had to look at her bio and saw she’s a state representative. I asked if she’s openly nonreligious. She said, “Look at my Twitter feed. Every other tweet I’m swearing I have no problem with you calling me an atheist.” So, I added her right away.
So, how do we get this list upgraded? How do we get more people on that list?
Pop that balloon
I also have a story about Megan Hunt. She ran for office in Nebraska. Nebraska’s the state that doesn’t have a bicameral legislature. It’s just one unicameral body. Everybody’s a senator. She ran for one of those seats. She had never run for any elected office before, so it was her against one other woman. And I remember looking at her website saying, “OK, value-wise, I pretty much agree with her.” So, that’s great. If I lived there, I would totally vote for her. And then I saw there was an article in the local paper about the candidates. They had a sidebar where it just had some biographical details about Megan Hunt. And I remember seeing this: “Faith — Atheist” and I was thinking, “Oh, no, she’s going to lose now. You said it out loud. You’re not supposed to do that. What are you doing? It’s toxic.”
But then she won her race. She is one of six openly nonreligious state senators and maybe one of only six who uses the word “atheist.” I asked her, “How did you end up winning this race? How did this not hurt you? How were you able to get over that?” She told me that she took the air out of the balloon before the other side could pop it. She put it right out front. She wasn’t ashamed of it. She just said it. And then she talked about the issues that actually matter to voters: roads, health care, infrastructure, all those other things that people actually care about.
She just let it out and then what were they going to say? “Oh, hey, did you know you’re an atheist?” So, now she just says, “Yes, I am, and here’s what really matters to me,” and then talks about other things. This is the key. It may not be that big of a deal and it’s becoming less of a deal as the years go on.
I hope any of you can run for something. There are like 500,000 elected offices in America. They’re not all Congress. It’s OK. You can run for something. You can be an atheist. But if you’re running for public office, you don’t have to dwell on that. But you don’t have to be ashamed of it, either, and it may not even hurt you.
Thank you.
This is an edited version of the speech Rachel Laser gave at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18, 2019. The award was introduced by Henry Zumach, and FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor introduced Rachel.
Henry Zumach: Over the centuries and continuing into today, the greatest harm to societies has been imposed by those who hold the irrational beliefs of fundamentalist religious teachings. Those few individuals who have had the courage to confront these beliefs have been punished and persecuted. I believe that those few who speak out and take action deserve our greatest respect and admiration.
Because of this, I started the annual Henry H. Zumach Award for Freedom From Religious Fundamentalism. After giving this award to the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2016, we worked out the details for FFRF to permanently administer the award going forward. I contributed $100,000 to the fund, and will contribute another $100,000, and my hope is that the amount of the annual $10,000 award will gradually increase in the future.
Now, here is Annie Laurie Gaylor to introduce this year’s winner.
Annie Laurie Gaylor: Thank you so much, Hank. It’s my pleasure to introduce Rachel Laser. She’s the new president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It’s the first time they’ve had a woman and the first time they’ve had a non-Christian as president. She is a lawyer and advocate, a strategist who’s dedicated her career to making our nation more inclusive. As a member of a religious minority group, raised as a Reform Jew, she understands personally how important it is for our nation to have equal protection under the law. She previously served as deputy director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism. Previous to that, she directed the Culture Program at Third Way, a progressive think tank in D.C., where she launched Come Let Us Reason Together. It’s an initiative to mobilize evangelical Christians and liberals to work together on critical issues, such as women’s reproductive freedom and LGBTQ equality. She drafted the first common-ground abortion bill to be introduced jointly by the anti-abortion and pro-choice members of Congress. She served as senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, where she founded the Pharmacy Refusal Project to challenge pharmacists who refuse to fill women’s birth control prescriptions. She is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School and she serves on the national board of Pro-Choice America.
Thank you so much, Rachel, for lending your talents to separation of state and church and joining us today.
By Rachel Laser
On behalf of Americans United, our dedicated and talented staff back in Washington, D.C., our board of trustees, our volunteer leaders and our 300,000 supporters across the country, thank you so much for this award. It’s an honor for AU to receive the Henry H. Zumach Freedom From Religious Fundamentalism Award, and especially meaningful after getting to know Hank Zumach and Betty Hammond last night over dinner. It’s also an honor for me to be here with you as the first non-Christian and female leader of Americans United in our 73-year existence. I’m also thrilled to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you about how to protect and defend our cherished principle of separation of religion and government during these precarious times.
I thought I’d start by sharing a little bit more about myself. I’m Jewish, and grew up not so far away in Chicago, attending the oldest synagogue in the Midwest — KAM Isaiah Israel. I went to KAM’s “Sunday school” because my best friend started going and I asked my parents if I could go too. Even though we lived on the North Side of Chicago, my parents joined this Reform Jewish synagogue on the South Side because they loved the intellectual and progressive Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, and they liked the idea of being part of the nearby University of Chicago community.
Over the years, my parents made many friends at KAM, and by the time I graduated from law school, the temple offered my dad the role of temple president. He accepted.
Wanting to honor my dad and uncertain how, I bought him two things that he didn’t already have: a mezuzah to hang outside of his front door and a crocheted kippah to wear when he had to sit up on the bimah during services. My dad would have none of either. He asked me to please return them both to the temple gift shop. I did.
My dad is one of many Jewish atheists I know. And he is also one of the most principled, moral people I know. But that’s certainly not how the majority of the country see atheists.
Atheists discredited
I know I don’t have to tell you that atheists are, shall we say, out of favor in America. Just the other day one of our donors called to tell me that he was bequeathing us a very large gift. I asked him how he connects to our cause. He explained that he’s from the South, and when his dad died, he was the one his dad had designated as executor of the estate. His brothers and sisters didn’t like that, and they used his atheism to discredit him on the stand in court.
Recently, the attorney general of the United States of America blamed our country’s violence, mental illness, ongoing drug epidemic and “wreckage of the family” problems on “the growing ascendancy of secularism.”
You all might already know that Americans are less willing to elect an atheist for president than any other category of candidate. A poll conducted this summer by PRRI, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm, shows that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of Americans say small businesses should be allowed to refuse to serve atheists if doing so is against their religious beliefs. This support has climbed nearly 10 percentage points since 2014 (15 percent) — just four years ago. Hmmm . . . I wonder what’s been going on these past four years?
Here is an oversimplified three-part answer. First, starting in 2014, white Christians ceased being the majority in America. Add to that the first black president, the rapid movement toward LGBTQ equality, the #MeToo movement, the fast rise of the religiously unaffiliated or the “Nones” and the fact that America will be majority black and brown by 2046. This all has engendered great fear among white Christians particularly vested in traditional power structures.
Second, President Trump, playing off of that fear, promised his white Christian voting base that he would “make America great again,” meaning he would restore its perceived loss of power.
And third, given Trump’s promise and follow-through, Trump’s base has never felt more emboldened to say or do anything and everything to preserve its power, which includes squashing especially those who are challenging it the most. And that’s why atheists get such special treatment.
What else is this kowtowing president and fearful group of Americans doing to preserve their power? Unapologetically doubling down on keeping American symbols, rituals and rhetoric religious and Christian.
We witnessed the trifecta of Attorney General William Barr saying what he did about secularists, Trump declaring that Americans will “forever and always” believe in “the eternal glory of God” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragging about how his Christianity informs his decision-making and then posting his “Being a Christian Leader” speech on the official State Department website.
Supreme Court misguided
But this crusade has reached far beyond the Trump-Pence administration.
I’m sure that everyone here is familiar with the Supreme Court’s misguided decision earlier this year allowing the 40-foot towering Bladensburg cross to remain on public land in Maryland. I’m guessing you, too, agree with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s statement: “When a cross is displayed on public property, the government may be presumed to endorse its religious content.” The court, however, ruled — seven justices to two — that the government may prominently display and endorse this Christian symbol because it’s a historical custom. In other words, it’s OK to violate the constitutional right to religious freedom for all Americans if we’ve always done it that way.
We have seen recent losses in lower federal courts, as well. In August, a federal appeals court ruled against our clients in Pennsylvania, allowing the state House of Representatives to bar atheists from giving invocations before the legislature. Citing Bladensburg, the court appealed to history, saying that legislative prayer invoking God is an American tradition.
And in Congress, we are seeing the same type of religious “traditions” remain intact. Rep. Jared Huffman, the only openly atheist member of our 535 members of Congress, recently lost his battle to make the “so help me God” part of the oath optional for witnesses testifying before his committee. All it took was Rep. Liz Cheney declaring that Democrats “really have become the party of Karl Marx” to make the Democrats back down and leave the rule in place. How absurd is it that any scientist testifying before the Committee on Natural Resources would be required to swear to God or be disqualified?
Back to the 1950s?
It’s as though we’re gearing up for another full-fledged 1950s moment — the decade when fear of communism led the government to infuse our culture with an unprecedented level of religiosity (including our national motto and Pledge of Allegiance). Or perhaps you think we’re already there.
Some people say it’s hopeless to challenge social norms around religion right now. They tell us not to devote time to cases like the Bladensburg cross and to stick to the more winnable and substantive battles, like preventing religious refusals in the realm of health care and employment.
Yes, those fights are critical and we certainly are engaging in them, but we cannot and must not give up on fighting for an inclusive baseline. The reason is simple: We will not achieve our country’s promise of true religious freedom until nontheists, the nonreligious and religious minorities are as accepted as Christians.
Our founders understood this profoundly, even back in the late 1700s. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, widely seen as the foundation for the religion clauses in the First Amendment of our Constitution, he said that its aim was to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo,” and note, he included, “the infidel of every denomination.”
We know we cannot give up on the fight to change the baseline around religion to make it inclusive for all. The question is, how are we going to get there? Here’s what I know for sure: It’s not going to be easy. It’s not a five- or 10-year project. And it’s a hard question to answer.
Inspiration and lessons
But I would like to suggest that the marriage equality movement, which changed deeply embedded social norms around the institution of marriage in just one generation, offers us not just inspiration, but some excellent strategic lessons.
In 1988, when the General Social Survey first asked, only 11.6 percent of respondents said that they thought same-sex couples should have the right to marry. But by 2018, just 30 years later, the number of Americans who said same-sex couples should have the right to marry was at 68 percent. Social scientists say that it’s rare for public opinion to change this much, and this quickly, but it did.
How? Having worked on this issue as a straight ally throughout some of this critical period, three key strategies come to mind.
One is to have those who are not “the norm” come out. Public opinion research solidly demonstrates that knowing someone who is openly LGBTQ changes hearts and minds more than anything else. The LGBTQ equality movement did a phenomenal job of not only encouraging people to come out, but also creating a better climate in which to do so.
TV shows like “Will and Grace” and “Grey’s Anatomy” included LGBTQ characters, and celebrities from Ellen DeGeneres to George Michael to Melissa Etheridge started coming out (or being outed) right and left. Still, it took a huge number of brave LGBTQ people who were willing to put their relationships, family, livelihood, safety and even lives on the line to create this change.
Our equivalent is to keep encouraging non-Christians and the nonreligious, but particularly nontheists, to speak up about their religious identities (or nonreligious identities). We also need to ensure that celebrities are doing the same and popular culture is casting people in the role of loveable atheists and developing characters who don’t affiliate with any religious tradition.
FFRF continues to do excellent work with its “Out of the Closet” campaign, but we need to make a lot more noise. I challenge everyone here to share your own belief system with someone. But don’t just do so with like-minded people. The strategy here is to also tell your friends, family and communities who may have different beliefs.
The more buzz we create about the existence of nontheists and the nonreligious — and with the growing numbers of this segment of the population, more buzz should be doable — the more welcoming the environment is for others to come out, too. I want to acknowledge, however, that like with outing yourself as LGBTQ, it can be extremely difficult and even life-threatening to out yourself as a nontheist in certain parts of the country. For this reason, sadly, many of Americans United’s plaintiffs must still remain anonymous to stay safe. It takes courage and it takes risk.
A second key strategy of the marriage equality movement was to normalize not just being LGBTQ, but having romantic same-sex relationships. This is what I’ll nickname the “go for the jugular” strategy, because it went directly to one of the vulnerable spots for straight people — losing the privilege that attaches our opposite-sex relationships. Popular movies like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Call Me By Your Name” portrayed gay relationships in ways that were relatable and relatably sensual for straight people. TV shows began to include not just LGBTQ people, but gay and lesbian relationships.
I would argue that our “go for the jugular” equivalent is to go to where there is enormous privilege for religious people — the realm of moral superiority. Our efforts must engage popular culture, not just in having nontheist and nonreligious characters, but in conveying that nontheists and nonreligious people are as moral and principled as religious people are.
Some may be tempted to portray nontheists and the nonreligious as having better morals and principles than religious people. But, even if you think that’s true, the marriage equality success teaches it’s a bad idea.
A critical third strategy of the marriage equality movement was to speak to and enlist those considered the “norm” — so, in that case, opposite-sex married people. The way to opposite-sex married people’s hearts was not to tell them that same-sex marriages were better than their marriages, even if some thought they were. It was to tell them same-sex couples wanted to join their institution.
What did join mean to opposite-sex married people? Public opinion research revealed that opposite-sex married people associated marriage most with commitment, and hence a campaign was born around conveying that same-sex marriage was about commitment, too. Moreover, opposite-sex married couples — often parents or grandparents of LGBTQ people — were important spokespeople for moving the country toward full acceptance of marriage equality.
The equivalent for us is speaking to and enlisting religious leaders, but particularly Christians, who are still 65 percent of the country, in advocating for the right to be religious or nonreligious — without assigning moral superiority to either. We must speak to people of faith in a shared language and appeal to their commitment to religious freedom and the Constitution.
Uniting communities
This third strategy is where Americans United is uniquely positioned to help. The truth is, there aren’t many places where the secular and faith communities intentionally come together. But since our founding, AU has been uniting these two communities around the shared goal of church-state separation. In fact, since I joined AU, I’ve noticed that our two most passionate groups of supporters are people who have a strong tie to a faith community and strong nontheists, because both groups deeply value their religious identities and understand how important separating religion and government is to them.
I was particularly happy when Jim Winkler, the president of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical partnership of 38 Christian faith groups in the United States, became a trustee of Americans United. He joined one of the country’s pre-eminent atheist advocates, Eddie Tabash, in serving on our board.
Friends, let’s not lose hope. Someday we’re all going to have “clean” money in our pockets (you all know what I mean by that, right?), because the Constitution is on our side, because the demographics around religion in our country are changing, and because we are smart and strategic, committed and brave.
Again, it’s an honor to accept this award on behalf of Americans United. We are so happy to have FFRF as partners in today’s unreal struggle for freedom and democracy.
Thank you.