Religion is Destroying America

We are in a do-or-die situation. Non-believers must speak up now to roll back the tide of dangerous white Christian nationalism.

Cartoon by Steve Benson drawn for FFRF. Reprinted with permission from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

This article might offend you. Quite a lot, in fact. Some readers will not only cancel their subscriptions, they’ll do everything they can to cancel me.

I accept the consequences of my actions, including a possibly crippling blow to this ezine that I’ve toiled so hard over for the past year. After all, I’m speaking the truth, I’m saying the quiet part out loud, and no one — no one — smiles at the messenger.

I intend no disrespect to you, personally, or your faith, if it’s observed in a quiet, humble, personal and non-ostentatious manner, but the time has come for someone besides Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to talk about the real threat to America. I’m referring to the reason Trump was elected president. The reason a woman’s right to reproductive healthcare is about to be overturned by the Supreme Court. The reason we can’t get any gun control in this country. The reason sex education is so dangerously inadequate. The reason LGBTQ rights are under fire, including the likely revocation of gay marriage.

Religion has spread like a metastasizing cancer throughout federal and local government, our boards of education, our court system, and the body politic. The only way to stop cancer is it kill it.

I’m taking particular aim at white evangelicals, a minority of religious extremists that has a stranglehold on American politics, the NRA (through which millions of dollars in dark money is funneled to politicians) and the judiciary, but I’d like to go a step further than that. All religion is inherently destructive, superstitious, judgmental, divisive and delusional.

As much as it may pain or enrage you to hear this, there is no evidence that God exists. And for those who reject their responsibility for the burden of proof, who insist there’s no evidence that God doesn’t exist (itself a logical fallacy), I give you astronomer-author-cosmologist Carl Sagan: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In other words, proving the non-existence of that for which no evidence of any kind exists is erroneous because nothing can be relevant to the non-existent. The non-existent is nothing. It doesn’t exist.

If I say that Michigan J. Frog is dancing in my underwear drawer, you might ask me to prove it. I might then say to you, prove that Michigan J. Frog isn’t dancing in my underwear drawer. You wouldn’t be able to disprove that Michigan J. Frog is dancing in my underwear drawer because Michigan J. Frog doesn’t exist, in which case I might smugly assert that since you can’t disprove my statement, it must therefore be true.

There are 4,200 religions in the world. Which one is the “true” god? And if there is one true god, doesn’t that automatically invalidate the rest of them?

This is what we’re up against, at least from the believers. The ones who are using the believers as political cannon fodder and gullible cash cows (Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Rick Warren, Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, among thousands of others) might have started out as believers, but they long ago forgot the Biblical edict about the unlikelihood of a rich man passing through the eye of a needle.

The faith economy rakes in north of $1.2 trillion a year, more than the ten biggest American tech firms combined, including Apple, Amazon, and Google. Unlike those tech firms, religious institutions are Section 501(c)(3) organizations, meaning they pay zero in federal, state, local income and property taxes. Because the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, the IRS takes a hands-off approach to churches, even though the majority of these churches is politically activist and regularly transgresses against the equally sacred separation of church and state — a right which is also protected under the law.

The faith economy is, in fact, the 15th largest national economy in the world. And this is terrifying. How is it possible to extract $1.2 trillion dollars annually from something that has no more evidentiary heft than a fairy tale? Is the need to believe in an all-seeing, all-powerful god that necessary in the 21st century? Do we really need a whip (the wages of sin) and a carrot (Jesus’s favor) in order to lead a morally righteous life?

It is the evangelical element of American Christianity that is particularly insidious. In 1987, Christian author George Grant wrote in his book, The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action, “Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. … But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice … Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.”

With these chilling words, and the events of the past five years, we finally understand the grave danger we are in.

As a lifelong secular humanist, I have tended to see evangelicals as absurd, mystifying, a bit dim but fundamentally — or Fundamentally — harmless. I was foolish. Since the social upheaval of the late 60s/early 70s, ultra rightwing Christians have been quietly organizing. They were alarmed by what they perceived as a national assault on family values: the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, Bob Jones University losing its tax-exempt status over a ban on interracial dating. The GOP, camouflaging its own white nationalist paranoia with rhetoric about criminals and welfare cheats, proved itself to be the perfect vehicle for white evangelism. The white Christian nationalists needed political clout; the GOP needed money.

And boy, did they deliver: Reagan, Bush, Trump, SCOTUS Justices Amy Coney Barrett (evangelical Catholic), Brett Kavanaugh (evangelical Catholic), John Roberts (evangelical Catholic), Samuel Alito (evangelical Catholic), Clarence Thomas (fundamentalist Catholic). Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden, is a garden-variety Roman Catholic, a far less venomous specimen of the breed.

The full extent of the religious right’s funding of the GOP, and by extent the NRA, is hidden, given that many Christian conservative organizations are registered as churches, which do not have to disclose information. If the 20th and 21st centuries have taught us anything at all, it’s that opacity in any organization (the pederasty of the Catholic Church, for example — where 216,000 children were abused by Catholic priests between 1950 and 2020 — or the 500 names released so far in connection with sexual abuse perpetrated by Southern Baptist church officials, or even the built-to-purpose murkiness of cryptocurrency) leads to indecency and corruption 100% of the time.

Apparently, people really are only as good as they have to be, including religious people. The minute we think no one is watching, we give in to our basest impulses: drugging and raping women (Jim Bakker), inappropriate touching, molestation and rape (Bill Gothard), pool boys, wife swapping and voyeurism (Jerry Falwell, Jr.), marrying an eight-year-old girl (Tony Alamo), porn addiction and molesting a four-year-old (Bob Coy), possession of child pornography (Dave Reynolds), masturbating on a fifteen-year-old while she cried and begged him to stop (Tea Party Conservative/Duggar buddy Doug Phillips), crystal meth and male escorts (conversion therapy proponent Ted Haggard). If a raving band of wild-eyed atheists descended on America and committed even 1/10th of these crimes, they’d be drawn and quartered in a public square.

For far too long, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and unaffiliated non-believers have remained silent about their lack of faith. It’s hard for some people to admit they don’t believe in god or a higher power. They may have deeply religious family members they don’t wish to offend. Also, in a culturally Christian society, admitting you’re an outlier has inherent risks. You could be passed up for promotion. Your kids might not be invited to certain birthday parties. The consequences of breaking with the herd are real, and not everyone has the luxury of bravery, especially in smaller communities.

There are no atheists in foxholes. I realize that religious belief can be of great comfort to people who are suffering. And if believers were content to practice their faith by themselves, without inflicting their horrifying “morality” on others, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

The Founding Fathers every white Christian nationalist claims to revere understood the fundamental importance of the separation of church and state. We no longer have any. The time to act is now if there is any hope left of saving our country from becoming a chapter out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Here’s your call to action.

1. When and where possible, assert your belief that white Christian nationalists are breaching that lawful and necessary divide between church and state.
2. Vote for Democrats, especially those who “wear their religion” lightly.
3. Join the Freedom from Religion Foundation. They are doing good work.
4. Remind your Republican friends that in any presidential election, God seems to back at least three or four candidates. How is that possible?
5. Watch for, and object to, religious encroachments on public property. The Satanic Temple took an amusing (and effective) approach to protesting a Ten Commandments monument by erecting this goat-headed statue.
6. If you are a non-believer, when and where possible, tell people that you are a non-believer. It will give others the courage to do the same.
7. Heighten your awareness of subtle and not-so-subtle societal pressure to keep your lack of belief a secret. I have certainly felt it. Perhaps you have, too.
8. When I was younger and frankly sweeter, Christians used to proselytize to me like crazy. When you live in a Bible-belt state, that kind of thing can happen a lot. I always gave them a politely neutral stare, but I now see how wrong that was. If someone is witnessing to you, don’t be afraid to shut them down. Don’t let them badger or intimidate you. Tell them how offensive you find that kind of talk and then change the subject or walk away.
9. Lead by example. Secular humanism/agnosticism/atheism is like vegetarianism. You don’t win hearts and minds by preaching, but by leading a moral, compassionate life free of religion.
10. Remember these words: “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”