INTRODUCTION
I have the privilege of announcing this year’s FFRF’s “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” recipient. This award has been given since 1999 to public figures who, like the child in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “tell it like it is”—about religion. Past recipients include Salman Rushdie, George Carlin, John Irving, Ann Druyan, Lizz Winstead, Katha Pollitt, Ron Reagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daniel C. Dennett, Dan Savage, Congressman Jared Huffman, composer Charles Strouse, Donald C. Johanson, Julia Sweeney, Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker and Christopher Hitchens, among others.
This year’s very deserving awardee is Charles Blow.
How does a poor boy scavenging for scraps in a Louisiana city dump go on to become a leading national columnist and commentator? Many of you will have read Charles Blow’s columns, which have appeared in The New York Times since 2008, tackling social justice, racial equality, LGBTQ rights, mental health and national politics. Charles Blow is an MSNBC political analyst and has been the anchor of PRIME with Charles Blow on the Black News Channel. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book [show book] Fire Shut Up in My Bones—a memoir that I read and devoured, and heavily underlined—which was developed into an opera, the first by a Black composer to premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Charles Blow’s new book [show book] The Devil You Know has been developed into a feature-length HBO documentary called “South to Black Power.”
Charles Blow once tweeted: “People often ask my views on religion. Here goes: Human beings needed something to explain the things they couldn’t understand or contemplate, so they created religion. It’s a way of relieving anxiety and enforcing man-made morality.”
In Fire Shut Up in My Bones, writing about his waning faith, he said: “Once the curtain has been pulled back, the wizard as you knew him can never be real again.”
In a 2011 column, he wrote: “… the unaffiliated are the fastest-growing religious category in America. Nonaffiliation is not un-American. Increasingly, it is America. Eventually, our politics will have to catch up.” — And last year, he wrote: “In the same way that Donald Trump made his bones as America’s white nationalist in chief, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is trying to make his as the country’s chief Christian nationalist, a subset of white supremacy that holds that God has ordained America as a Christian nation and that its ideals must be protected from the encroachment of pluralism — racial, religious or otherwise.”
Charles Blow did not give permission to reprint or videotape his full remarks.
