Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It Read online

  ATTACK OF THE THEOCRATS!

  ATTACK OF THE THEOCRATS!

  How the Religious Right Harms Us All—

  and What We Can Do About It

  Sean Faircloth

  Foreword by Richard Dawkins

  PITCHSTONE PUBLISHING

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  PITCHSTONE PUBLISHING

  Charlottesville, Virginia 22901

  Copyright © 2012 by Sean Faircloth

  Foreword copyright © by Richard Dawkins

  All rights reserved. Published 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Faircloth, Sean.

  Attack of the theocrats! : how the religious right harms us all — and what we can do about it / Sean Faircloth ; foreword by Richard Dawkins.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-9844932-4-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-9844932-5-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Church and state—United States. 2. United States—Church history. 3. Christianity and politics—United States. I. Title.

  BR516.F25 2012

  322'.10973—dc23

  2011026904

  This book is dedicated to my three sons, Brendan, Ryan, and Declan.

  I am so proud of these funny, kind young men.

  Contents

  Foreword by Richard Dawkins

  Preface

  1. Introduction: The Crumbled Wall between Church and State

  2. Our Secular Heritage: One Nation under the Constitution

  3. Religious Bias in Law Harms Us All

  4. Genital Morality vs. Real Morality

  5. Two American Traditions:

  Religious Hucksters and Secular Innovators

  6. The Theocrats (aka the Fundamentalist Fifty)

  7. The Secularists

  8. Secularism—Born Again

  9. Our Secular Decade: A Strategic Plan

  10. A Vision of a Secular America

  Afterword

  Appendix: Secular Coalition for America

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Foreword

  The United States’ Founding Fathers, giants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, were farseeing in their plans because they were wise in history. They knew the European past from which so many Americans had escaped, and they crafted a document of immunization against any such future. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In other words, while individuals are free to practice any religion they choose,the United States shall never be a theocracy.

  That first clause of the Bill of Rights, precious First Amendment to the greatest constitutional document ever enacted, is—or ought to be—the envy of the world. My own country is still nominally a theocracy, with twenty-six unelected bishops sitting, ex officio, in Parliament; and with the head of state synonymous with head of the Church of England and constitutionally forbidden to be a Roman Catholic (let alone a Muslim or a Jew). To this day, the Catholic-Protestant divide poisons Northern Ireland and, in miniature, Glasgow on a soccer Saturday—indeed, during the rest of the week too, for Glaswegians well understand the coded meaning of “what school did you go to?” And Britain is still infested with state-subsidized “faith schools.”

  None of that would have surprised James Madison and his colleagues. It is exactly what they worked hard to forestall. But even they could not have foreseen the zealous nastiness of our twenty-first-century theocrats. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, Mustafa Ibrahim was judicially executed in 2007 for practicing “sorcery” (he was a pharmacist)—the same Saudi Arabia, our ally and oil provider, where a woman can be arrested for driving a car, for showing an arm or an ankle, or for being seen in public without a male relative (who may, as a generous concession, be a child). In Somalia, a thirteen-year-old girl, Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, was sentenced in 2008 to death by stoning, in front of a large crowd in a soccer stadium. Her crime of “adultery” was actually the crime—under sharia law—of being gang raped. After such horrors, the following, recorded of his country by a citizen of Israel in 2009, may serve as light relief by comparison:

  In no other country are there streets without buses and tracks without trains on the Sabbath. No other airline but El Al sits idle one day a week. Cold platters on the Sabbath in hospitals and hotels are also something not seen . . . and the separation in certain buses of men and women are also unknown in democratic countries. Religion has never been separate from the state here; hand in hand they oversee our way of life.

  The United States is officially not a theocracy. Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation still stands—but precariously, enduring a ceaseless buffeting, a hammering, and insidious chipping away by (mainly Christian) saboteurs, who either ignorantly misread the Founders’ intentions or willfully oppose them. And this is where Sean Faircloth rides in as a latter-day hero of the Constitution. His book is a timely—poignantly timely—manifesto of secularism (not atheism). His message is secularist and conservative in the true meaning of the term: conserving the original secularist principles of the Constitution—unlike the so-called conservatives of the Tea Party, whose aim, where religion is concerned, is unashamedly to undermine the core principle of the First Amendment. Sean Faircloth quotes Barry Goldwater: “I don’t have any respect for the Religious Right.” Though Faircloth was a liberal Democrat in the Maine State Senate, the following 1981 words of the arch conservative Senator Goldwater might have inspired this book.

  There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.

  Sean Faircloth was trained as a lawyer, and again and again his book uncovers the harm done to today’s Americans by religious bias and privileging in law. The least fortunate suffer physical injury, torture, and even death. Putting a face on the faceless, giving a voice to the voiceless, Faircloth champions these innocent victims of religious privilege. They include two-year-old Amiyah White, who died unattended in the van of a Christian child-care center. Why mention that it was “Christian”? Because the tragedy followed directly from the center’s religious exemption from state child-safety laws. In Tennessee in 2002, Jessica Crank died of cancer, aged fifteen, after her mother chose
to have her malignancy treated by “faith healing” rather than scientific medicine. This useless “treatment” was administered under cover of a religious exemption from a state child-protection law.

  Those are just two of many tragic stories. Countless other unfortunates who have suffered in the same way are lost footnotes to religion’s privileged dodging of civilized law. Seeking to restore the human element, Sean Faircloth calls on his readers to share accounts of martyred children and other victims of ignorant piety. Personal stories serve as lamentable entry points into his charge sheet against America’s theocratic politicians and hucksters. Readers may count the ways in which theocratic laws exact harm on American citizens—financially, socially, militarily, physically, emotionally, and educationally. But the “us all” to which his book’s subtitle refers is not restricted to Americans. The “theocratic attack” that has been under way in the United States for more than three decades spills out into the world at large (which incidentally entitles me, as a non-American, to recommend this book).

  Faircloth takes the death of fourteen-year-old Saron Samta from a botched back-alley abortion in Ethiopia, and links it to the global “gag rule,” initiated under Ronald Reagan, which restricts women’s access to basic health information and services. He recalls George W. Bush’s infamous phone call to Jacques Chirac before the Iraq War, when Bush reportedly warned the French president that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East” and that “the biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.” Such crass evangelical certitude, trotted out by a sitting U.S. president to another head of state, is chilling. One can only imagine what biblical chestnuts were served up and swallowed in the prayer sessions that Bush held with the equally devout Tony Blair while scheming for their war. The fundamentalists’ undermining of American science has comparable international effects. The biblical idea of man’s “dominion” has resonated through the environmental policies of Republican administrations and informs public views on climate change, thus contributing to the degradation of the whole planet.

  As Faircloth reminds us, 535 members of Congress make laws for the other 300 million Americans. He names and shames the fifty most egregious theocrats among them (all but three of them Republicans), omitting those who merely vote for theocratic policies while not being vocal about them. He gives honorable mention to Congressman Pete Stark as the only one of the 535 who has publicly come out as a nonbeliever. He might have added that, in a country where 17 percent of the population are nonbelievers (25 percent of those under thirty), it is statistically vanishingly unlikely that Pete Stark is really the only nonbelieving American to have been elected to Congress. Given the additional fact that nonbelief is especially frequent among educated classes, the inference is inevitable that a substantial number of the other 534 would join Representative Stark if only they had his courage and his integrity. Perhaps they overestimate the votes to be gained by cynically sucking up to the pious.

  Faircloth pays just attention to one of the great iniquities of the American taxation system, one shared with many other countries. Religious institutions, churches, even obscenely wealthy televangelists, are tax-exempt, and privileged to be free from much of the burden of even declaring money for taxation. As he writes:

  Unlike nonprofits, churches don’t have to file 990 forms (a basic financial disclosure). Thus, their finances are the most secretive of any so-called charitable organization. For-profit businesses, of course, must file detailed tax documents. So must 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Because the finances of religious organizations are akin to the proverbial black box, it is difficult to even find out whether something improper has occurred.

  Only a “high-level” IRS official can even authorize an audit of a religious organization. Meanwhile, the rest of us—whether individuals, for-profit businesses, or secular nonprofits—can be audited by any old IRS bureaucrat.

  Religious groups can legally give tax-free housing allowances to so-called clergy (some of whom just might be family), allowances that are not counted as income, exempting the housing from taxation.

  To return to my opening theme, Faircloth leaves us in no doubt that the Founding Fathers established a nation that should forever separate state from church. Every American child knows this, or at least used to know it (the Texas Board of Education’s 2010 decision to question the separation of church and state in the state’s social-studies curriculum awaits a more charitable interpretation than I can muster). By sage design, the United States was to be kept free of religion’s suffocating foot so as to give breath to individual conscience. By putting into practice this cherished ideal, the United States civilized humankind. Other countries followed suit with their own secular constitutions, including, notably, France, Turkey, and India. If America, the world’s standard-bearer of secular governance, allows fundamentalists, tipsy with faith, to erode the wall between church and state, whither the world?

  Faircloth paints a sobering picture, but fortunately, as anyone who has heard his speeches knows, he also has an inspiring and invigorating vision to offer. His intention is not just to awaken people to how the Religious Right harms us all. He ends his book with a much-needed plan for action. As a shrewd former politician, and highly successful executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, Sean Faircloth is uniquely positioned to play a decisive role in returning America to its secular foundation. His concluding manifesto is the optimistic flipside to the dark picture that his earlier chapters present. Readers will finish the book exercised, energized, and eager to join Sean Faircloth in a bold rediscovery of the secular dream of the European Enlightenment and America’s enlightened Fathers.

  RICHARD DAWKINS

  OXFORD, ENGLAND

  Preface

  Early in high school I had acne, braces, and perpetually crooked glasses. My parents dressed me in polyester and refused me the haircuts that were then fashionable. To understate matters, dating was a challenge. Oh, girls sometimes spoke to me. I recall one in particular saying, “Pizza face, railroad tracks, four-eyed geek!” Forever hunched over a book, I sought, and often found, an escape from, well, me. I needed to overcome my shyness, so my dad, a theater teacher, suggested I try out for a play at my high school.

  Since elementary school, I had watched my father direct plays. Frequently, after my regular school day was done, I would tag along to the high school where my dad taught and watch rehearsals into the night. Dad’s approach to directing students more closely resembled the stereotypical style of a football coach or baseball manager than that of an artistic director. Ethereal was not my dad’s style. Unlike me, he was a good athlete, and he played sports long before he got into theater. His vernacular seemed to spring more from the ball field than the salon. Dad had a grizzled half-time approach when barking out stage notes: “Blocking! Blocking! Learn your blocking. . . . Lines people! Learn the damn lines. Master nuts and bolts, then we can move on from there.” Sometimes dad issued compliments, but they were concise. His speaking style and approach to his craft were muscular, not flowery. “Good,” he’d say, “Now you’re getting it.” Or, “That was tighter.”

  The students enjoyed pleasing this man of decisive certainty. He joked with students, but no one doubted who was in charge. Dad welcomed and encouraged suggestions, but he had final say on the merits of a suggestion. I admired the confidence and competence that my father exuded at those rehearsals.

  Although I initially was afraid to try out for a play at my school, I realized that—after observing so many rehearsals, so many stage notes, such relentless tinkering with each line reading—I might have some grasp of the basics of my father’s craft, and I decided to take a stab at it. I heeded his advice when preparing my audition; I had a line reading in mind for every sentence—how I would sound, how I would gesture, what direction I would cast my eyes. It may not have been the most spontaneous audition, but my willingness to craft a plan and then execute it compensated for my acne and awkwardness. That audition—for a play called Inherit the Wind—
transformed my life in two ways.

  First, my fear about actually performing notwithstanding, I realized that focusing on small steps was an effective way of achieving large, daunting, long-term goals. Laurence Olivier I’m not, but this method served me reasonably well, both in landing the lead in the play and in preparing for the role. In short, I learned to have confidence in the power of incremental improvement. This confidence has never left me and epitomizes the strategic approach that I espouse in this book.

  Second, I played the role of Clarence Darrow. (Henry Drummond, the fictionalized character in the play, was Darrow through and through). Darrow battled in court the great fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan. The two clashed over the nature of religion, the meaning of Charles Darwin’s work, the literal interpretation of the Bible, and the very existence of God.

  My dad had long equated ministers, particularly fundamentalist ministers, with con men, so I was already a skeptic, but memorizing Darrow day in and day out had a long-standing effect on me. Darrow made connections between Darwin’s work and America’s Enlightenment history—our heritage of intellectual honesty and government based on reason not religious bias. Darrow expressed these views with zest and a sardonic wit that served a deep idealism. Darrow’s proud agnosticism was convincing. I drank up Darrow, reading Irving Stone’s biography of him and concluding, as I still do, that Darrow, whatever his personal shortcomings, was the greatest lawyer this world has known. I’ve had reasons to sometimes be disappointed in the law and those lawyers who stray from the highest ideals of the profession, but Clarence Darrow inspired me to pursue a law degree. I’m still thankful for that.