Remember candidate Obama’s 2008 speech in Zanesville, Ohio, in which he pledged to clean up then-President Bush’s Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives? Most vividly he called for an end of public funding for religious charities that discriminate on the basis of religion. Then, do you remember how President Obama, once elected, did nothing of the sort? Between those two points, Sher draws a disturbing—and if true, little known—connection:

“Obama’s signature faith initiative — the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — exists today largely in the form that these conservative religious leaders demanded. Back in 2008, candidate Obama nearly spelled the end of a carefully cultivated alliance with some religious leaders when he pledged in a speech to fix the constitutional inadequacies of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. These livid religious leaders extracted a promise from the campaign: Don’t make a fuss about the speech now, and Obama will not make the changes he promised.”

I wish I had more confidence that President Obama would absorb the lessons of this article. We seculars have a lot more coming to us than occasional mentions at the end of lists of religious people.

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I’ll pause while you pick yourself up off the floor. Then I’ll urge you to review Ron Lindsay’s acute and fair-minded analysis of the decision at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/hosanna-tabor_and_the_weird_status_of_religion/ . Finally, I’ll direct you to Ron’s final paragraph, where he captures what I think is the heart of the matter:

“Perhaps as a pragmatic matter, we have to give religious institutions a pass. One of the purposes of the religion clauses of the First Amendment was to prevent the violence and civil unrest that had plagued Europe for centuries as a result of religious conflict. It’s possible that any attempt to enforce discrimination laws in the context of religious institutions would be met with such resistance that the disadvantage of doing so would outweigh the benefits.”

I think that’s exactly the issue in play here. Understanding it requires us to consider the historical circumstances surrounding the birth of the Bill of Rights generally, and the First Amendments’s religion clauses in particular. The Founders were a mixed lot, conventional religious believers working alongside (for the time) a surprising number of deists. But they were all men of the Enlightenment. (See Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers for an astute analysis of how the post-Revolutionary period marked a high point in the influence of Enlightenment thought, to a degree not equaled before or since.  We secularists are profoundly lucky that our Constitution just happened to receive its most significant refinements during that epic decade.) As Ron mentioned, the Founders looked back on Europe’s sorry history of religious warfare and, I think, drew a conclusion that’s astonishing in the depth of its radicalism. Not many of them might have articulated it in these terms—though Jefferson and Madison came close, and Paine (though he did not contribute any writing to the Constitution) spelled it out pretty clearly. Here’s the radical conclusion: Profound religious passion is foundationally incompatible with democracy.

Think about it. Democracy depends on compromise, on free men (in those days) clashing as their various views of an issue drive them, and ultimately using reason and pragmatism to reach a conclusion that satisifies—and dissatisfies—them all in a way that is fair and, ultimately, socially workable. It’s a method for hammering out compromises that all partisans can live with so that the people’s business can go forward. What’s missing from this formula? Absolute right and wrong, of course. Divine warrant. The whole process depends on a background assumption that no participant can claim absolute virtue for his position—and of course, the usual method of claiming absolute virtue is to claim God’s endorsement. Just as the Declaration of Independence denied that monarchs held any divine privilege that could trump the rights of their subjects, the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, denied the possibility of divine interest in any socio-political issue. It envisioned a democratic process that is profoundly a-theistic, in the sense that no participant in democratic debate has the right to drag in God on his side. Basically, the shared commitment to the democratic enterprise is a shared commitment to debate and resolve public issues, in effect, as though God does not exist.

Knowing their European history, the Founders knew well what the alternative was: pitched conflicts between religious camps in which no one could admit the possibility of compromise because everyone believed his side alone represented the will of God. That leads to war that ravages on until one side is too devastated to fight on. Or until both sides are.

With this background in mind, it is easier to understand why the Founders chose to limit government more severely in matters of religion than in any other arena of human interest. From freedom of the press to the freedom against being forced to billet soldiers, each of the other rights established by the Bill of Rights is set forth in a single sentence, sometimes a single phrase. Only when it comes to religion did the Founders see a need to limit government using two clauses. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise clause provide two non-parallel streams of restriction on government power that can interact in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. There has to be a reason why the Founders never took this extraordinary step as regards issues like self-incrimination, commerce, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and so on. And I think that reason is that they intended to restrict government more intensely in regard to religion than in regard to anything else—because they appreciated the special dangers religious passion could pose to their democratic experiment.

Today we usually think of the religion clauses as protecting people of faith against government interference, which they do. But that’s just the half of it. The religion clauses were also designed to protect the orderly workings of government against the strife of sects. It reflects a sober Enlightenment recognition that democracy cannot long survive the influx of religious passion into the conduct of the people’s business. That’s right, even while they protect religious people against the state, the religion clauses are also there to protect the state against religious people.

As Ron said, “If so, that’s a sad comment on the human condition.” Sad as it may be, I think it’s true. Men and women swept away by religious fervor essentially disqualify themselves from participating in any process based on compromise. Admit too many such fervid partisans to the halls of government, and government will collapse. A democratic system that hopes to continue for centuries has to protect itself from that sort of corrosion—and sometimes this must be done by declaring otherwise reasonable kinds of government action simply off limits. This is why the IRS formally avoids defining what religion is (much as it somehow matters to decide that some nonprofits are eligible for religious exemptions and others aren’t, but that’s a matter for another post). That’s why government treads lightly in applying zoning laws to houses of worship, much as secularists may object to the way this is sometimes realized in practice. And, I think, it’s why a unanimous Supreme Court decided that the state must not impose the requirements of Federal employment law on anyone who even might be a minister of religion.

There is much for secularists to criticize in Hosanna-Tabor. Still, I can’t help breaking a smile at the image of the most conservative Supreme Court in many years implicitly acknowledging that in a democracy, people swept away by religious fervor simply can’t be trusted and so the state had better steer clear of them!

I invite your comments for an obvious reason. As the “Anti-Claus” I’ve become kind of the #1 guy for secular humanists and other unbelievers who choose to sit out the entire holiday season, purposely and conspicuously. Of course, secular humanists vary widely in their approaches to this ubiquitous and, to many, intrusively religious season. Where do you stand?

In no particular order:

1) It’s not the birthday of anyone I know. Far as I’m concerned, December 25 is just another day. (That’s my stance, but you probably knew that.)

2) I find the holiday deeply offensive and rebuke every aspect of it. Christians who wish me “merry Xmas” are practicing cultural imperialism of the most brutal and contemptible sort. (Even I don’t go that far, though I come close!)

3) I observe an alternative festivity, but not the Winter Solstice—after all, if I’m not a Christian, I’m not a pagan either. (So what do you observe? HumanLight? Festivus? Newton’s Birthday? Something else?)

4) I keep the secular side of Christmas—what the hell, most of it’s pagan or commercial in derivation anyway.

5) I do the whole Christmas routine from hot buttered rum to rum-pum-pum-pum and I don’t see any contradiction between doing that and being a secular humanist.

6) Jingle bells, jingle bells—I just can’t help doing it all at holiday time, worldview be damned!

This isn’t one of those glossy online polls where you get to check boxes, it’s a plain old blog post. Please reply with your thoughts. If none of the five options express what this time of yeare means to you, by all means ignore tham all and post your own comments.

And here’s another, related question. Are holidays in general overrated? Do you welcome any excuse for a party, or does it seem to you that in our culture where most people (except the poorest) lead lives of agreeable consumption day in and day out—and where even those considered “poor” today lead lives in many ways incalculably richer than those known by kings of old—  the whole notion of a holiday as a socially sanctioned opportunity for conspicuous consumption means less than it used to?

Reply away!

To be sure, some people around the world paid attention when Paul Ehrlich’s Sixties jeremiad The Population Bomb was new. Me, for one. While still in my teens I resolved to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, by never having kids—a decision I have never regretted. I took comfort a couple of years ago when Oregon State University released a study concluding, among other things, that the greatest contribution individual Americans can make to fighting climate change is to have fewer children, or none.

Still, enthusiasm for the Ehrlich message quickly dwindled. The Nixon and Ford administrations conducted a policy analysis concluding that wide access to birth control and abortion was humanity’s only hope. Then the study was mysteriously spiked—at the behest of the Vatican, according to investigator Stephen Mumford—and later U.S. administrations did their best to brush population control under the rug. Here are some quotes from my forthcoming op-ed in the December/January FREE INQUIRY:

Consider that 48 percent of the globe’s population is living on less than two dollars per day; if all seven billion humans lived like Americans, you’d need five planet Earths to supply what we’d consume. Even in the United States, whose population swelled by about 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, much of the growth has been concentrated in regions where everything from freshwater supplies to electrical generating capacity is already stressed. (With the economic down­turn, unemployment is now higher in the Sun Belt than in the Rust Belt, yet the South and Southwest continue to attract the majority of immigrants, legal and otherwise, seeking work in the United States.)

By many criteria, America may not seem overpopulated. Yet even here, further population increase genuinely threatens both national and global welfare. In part this is because Americans consume so profligately; a recent Oregon State University study found that over time, an American child will generate seven times as much carbon dioxide as a Chinese child. 169 times as much as a Bangladeshi child.

Yet when was the last time you heard an earnest discussion about overpopulation? When did you last hear terms like population bomb mentioned in a contemporary context?

It’s too often assumed that overpopulation as a topic went out of fashion thirty years ago or even that it’s taboo. So what better time than hu­manity’s passing of the seven-billion mark to move this critical subject back to center stage?

Most of all, we need to recognize that overpopulation is not a problem that went out of fashion with rust-colored shag rugs and avocado appliances. Our world was overpopulated in the sixties; it was even more overpopulated in the seventies; and it’s desperately overpopulated now. In all likelihood there has been a “too many people” problem since experts began expressing systematic misgivings on the subject in the 1950s. In large part, our world of today bears the marks of our past failures to come to grips with population issues. From rush hour in Atlanta to starvation in South Sudan, we are living in the dystopian future that sixties “population bomb” prophets predicted. Granted, conditions aren’t quite as apocalyptic as writers like Paul Ehrlich foresaw—we’re not living in a Mad Max horror-world scoured by food riots—yet—but we should scarcely imagine from that that we’ve ducked the Malthusian bullet altogether.

 In the op-ed, I’ll delve further into the idea that overpopulation is not just a Third World problem, but an American problem too. And I’ll tackle one of the great third-rail issues. Given that Americans are reproducing at a rate of just 2.0 children per woman—that is, below replacement rate—how come America’s population grew by 10 percent during the first decade of this century? Spoiler alert: It has to do with immigration, and I’ll close with a call to re-evaluate U.S. immigration policy, not on any of the tired old grounds reliably thrown about in typical immigration debates, but as a way of—maybe—tackling America’s population crisis (yes, it has one). Shameless plug: The December/January issue containing the whole of my no-doubt scandalous op-ed will be in the mail to subscribers (and on newsstands) around November 15. Don’t miss it!

As summer ripens into fall, there’s still time to immerse yourself in freethought history ... on the Freethought Trail! For several years now the Council for Secular Humanism has operated an informal historic trail to highlight sites significant to the history of radical reform history in west-central New York State. Why there? First, of course, that’s where the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum is, which the Council has operated as North America’s only dedicated freethought museum every summer and fall since 1993. Second, that region—very roughly extending from Rochester, New York, to a bit east of Syracuse, and centering on the Erie Canal —was an astonishing center for radical social reform during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the so-called Golden Age of Freethought, the region was a bubbling cauldron of social ferment, bringing forth reform movements, new political parties, and even new religions. It played the same role on the national scene that Southern California would play during most of the twentieth century, as the bellwether region where social trends of the future emerged.

Among those trends were freethought, the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, birth control, and anarchism. The Trail includes nearly eighty sites significant to their history. Some are museums; some feature historical markers; some are unmarked locations whose significance is known only to a few. Unlike some historic trails, the sites aren’t arranged along any single route. Instead, they’re scattered all across the hilly, lake-dotted topography of west-central New York. Our Web site is designed to help visitors choose the sites of greatest interest to them and get detailed driving directions for moving among them in the order they choose.

Some of the highlights include Ingersoll’s birthplace in Dresden, New York (you knew that was coming); the residences of leading suffragists Susan B. Anthony (Rochester), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Seneca Falls), and Matilda Joslyn Gage (Fayetteville); a thicket of Mark Twain sites in Elmira, his beloved wife’s home town; a profusion of Frederick Douglass sites in and around Rochester; and the tiny town of Peterboro, from which radical philanthropist Gerrit Brown helped fund the Underground Railroad, galvanized the abolition movement, and catalyzed developments that would be key to the woman’s rights movement.

Intrigued? Check out our site at http://www.freethought-trail.org. Or if you’re traveling the New York State Thruway, visit a tourist information booth at rest areas near the Finger Lakes and pick up our glossy fold-out brochure.

The Freethought Trial was jointly imagined by feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner, director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center, and myself. It’s grown steadily over the years and has recently inspired new directions in general promotion of cultural heritage tourism sites throughout the region. It’s also unique among historic trails in that property owners need not apply for inclusion; if your site matters, we add it to the Trail at our own volition. (That’s how come we have one stop on the Freethought Trail that’s actually a museum owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For the full story, check out Palmyra, New York, on the Trail site.

The Ingersoll Museum will be open every weekend through the end of October; many sites on the Trail are open year-round. So if your travels will bring you to west-central New York State and you’d like to learn more about the region’s oft-forgotten leading role in the remaking of nineteenth-century America, check us out! Again, it’s http://www.freethought-trail.org. Or for more information—even some personalized travel advice, if you’d like—email me at tflynn@centerforinquiry.net.

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Those words concluded my recent Washington Post “On Faith” blog praising NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg for keeping the city’s official commemoration secular. At this tenth anniversary, we seculars need to keep reminding our fellow Americans that the 9/11 attacks were, among many other things, a grim exemplar of uncompromising religious faith in action.

As we reflect on the almost 3,000 people from all over the world, of every religion and none, who died in the attacks—and the many thousands more who have sickened or died as a direct result of their participation in post-attack relief efforts—let’s also remember that Sunday marks some other somber anniversaries. It marks the end of the “firewall” between the intelligence and law enforcement communities, a giant step forward in the architecture of a free society that had been realized only in the wake of Watergate, and which we may never see again. It marks the end of America as a nation we could take pride in because it did not detain large numbers of human beings for indefinite periods without charge, and did not torture.

This is only my personal opinion, but I think aspect of this anniversary that we might regard with the greatest sadness is the moment when America’s leaders chose—and I say chose because they could always have chosen otherwise—to categorize the 9/11 attacks not as a monstrous crime, but rather as an act of war. In my view, the moral fallout of that botched choice has done as much to harm this nation as anything the terrorists inflicted. But that’s just how it looks to me.

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