That might have been a good title for my essay, just out in the new issue of The Public Eye magazine. In it, I discuss how secular baiting, witting or unwitting, has percolated throughout our political culture from Mitt Romney to Michael Lerner via the leaders of several generations of Religious Right thinkers and leaders.
Some of this is an updated version of the "godless communist" smear mongering so popular in the last century. But in any case, the framing that secularism, secular fundamentalism, militant secularism, secular progressives or the secular left are somehow responsible for a host of woes in America -- drives a surprising amount of our national conversation. One jaw-dropping example popped-up recently on the CBS Evening News:
News anchor Katie Couric led-in to a story on a recent major Pew survey on religious affiliations:
The unprecedented survey of religion answers many concerns about a secular, morally void America. To the surprise of many experts, Americans are still deeply religious, with 84 percent of adults claiming a religious affiliation, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports.
But there was nothing in the CBS News report that in any way linked secularity with any kind of "moral void." What’s more, there was nothing in the Pew survey about a "moral void" let alone any assignment of blame. As disgraceful as this episode is, this kind of unexplained and unsubstanitated assertion is astoundingly common in American public life.
My article opens:
One of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of the contemporary discussion of faith in public life is that a defining feature of the religious right worldview has filtered deeply into mainstream and even progressive thought. This defining feature is the idea that somehow God, and/or Christianity, and/or "people of faith" are being driven from "the public square." It is a powerfully animating idea for many Americans; yet it is rarely factually supported and even more rarely challenged.
Interestingly, much of this distortion hinges on a single word. The word is "secular" and such variants as "secular humanists," "secular fundamentalists," and just plain "secularists." While the word has simple and benign definitions, the word is also the touchstone of a powerful and usually subterranean set of meanings that often makes it a term of derision and demonization.
Tracing the word "secular" exposes how an important and dynamic dimension of religious right ideology has drifted to the top of American political discourse as well as elements of the liberal/left. This has, as we shall see, consequences for the mainstream discussion of separation of church and state, while also fomenting unnecessary divisions among progressives, and even raising the specter of old fashioned red baiting with is echoes of the "Godless Communist" smear leveled at generations of American progressives.
Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst at Political Research Associates, writes that for decades, the religious right has promoted a conspiracy theory that Christianity is under attack by "secular humanists."
The idea that a coordinated campaign by "secular humanists" was aimed at displacing Christianity as the moral bedrock of America actually traces back to a group of Catholic ideologues in the 1960s. It was Protestant evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, who brought this concept into the public political arena and developed a plan to mobilize grassroots activists as foot soldiers in what became known as the Culture Wars of the 1980s....
The idea of a conscious and coordinated conspiracy of secular humanists has been propounded in various ways by a variety of national conservative organizations and individuals.
For example, longtime televangelist and religious right leader, the late D. James Kennedy, offers a typical religious right use of the term: "God forbid that we who were born into the blessings of a Christian America should let our patrimony slip like sand through our fingers and leave to our children the bleached bones of a godless secular society. But whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: God has called us to engage the enemy in this culture war."
Perhaps the most infamous example is Reverend Jerry Falwell’s explanation to Pat Robertson of the 9/11 attacks on Robertson’s 700 Club cable TV show: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’"
By framing these claims as a conspiracy to provoke a "Culture War," Berlet concluded, "conservative Christians transform political disagreements into a battle between the Godly and the Godless, between good and evil, and ultimately between those that side with God and those that wittingly or unwittingly side with Satan."
This framing is powerful, highly adaptable, and profoundly resonant. And because that is so, we see the frame employed by rightwing propagandists on specific issues and against groups or individuals all the time. For example, nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, a former spokesperson for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, drew on the power of the frame in a recent effort to discredit concern about global warming, snidely referring to "the secular fundamentalists who believe in Al Gore as a prophet and global warming as a religious doctrine ..." On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly routinely uses the term "secular progressive" in a way that slyly implies that progressives are inherently non- or even anti-religious. But sometimes, the fullness of his meaning surfaces. During a tirade about the alleged "war on Christmas," he declared: "See, I think it’s all part of the secular progressive agenda—to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square. Because if you look at what happened in Western Europe and Canada, if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage, because the objection to those things is religious-based, usually."
Coincidentally, Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller recent published a column that covers some of the same ground about the struggle over the definition, uses and misuses of the word secular (while my essay was being published on a slower track. The Public Eye is a quarterly, after all.)
"Secular" does mean "godless," and its neutral meaning has always fought with the more negative one; recently, though, the word has taken on a lot more freight. Like the words "feminist" and "liberal," "secular" and its derivatives have come to mean extreme versions of themselves. They are code in conservative Christian circles for "atheist" or even "God hating"—they conjure, in a fresh way, all the demons Christian conservatives have been fighting for more than 30 years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness and moral lassitude. The Fox News star Bill O'Reilly frequently frames the culture war as "traditionals versus secular-progressives." Ann Coulter accused "the liberals and the secularists and atheists" of using religion as a wedge. In a speech last year, Newt Gingrich decried the "growing culture of radical secularism," and in a new book the diplomat John Bolton critiques "the High Minded elite who worship at the altar of the Secular Pope." In politics, where it is efficacious to unite people against a common enemy, "secularism" has become that enemy's new name.
To be fair, battles in the war against secularism have been fought for about 150 years, dating back to a time when discoveries in science (especially those of Charles Darwin) and a disenchantment with organized religion led a critical mass of mostly European intellectuals to declare that one could lead a moral life independent of God. By the middle of the 20th century, their heirs had coined the term "secular humanism," to mean a concern with values but not with religion, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell took particular aim at them. In 1986, he proclaimed that secular humanists "challenge every principle on which America was founded," including "abortion on demand, recognition of homosexuals, free use of pornography, legalizing of prostitution and gambling, and free use of drugs." Pope Benedict XVI speaks out frequently against the dangers of secularism.
It is very important to keep an open ear to the way that people use and misuse the word "secular." It is a touchstone of contemporary religious right ideology. (Oh, you remember the religious right. You know, those people whose powerful political movement some say is dead/dying/irrelevant and such.)