Nick Fish of American Atheists writes in a mailing:
“The biggest lie that’s ever been told in America”
Those are the words Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas and Chairperson of President Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission”, used to describe church-state separation.
And if the draft report just released by the Religious Liberty Commission — along with its Christian Nationalist wish list of recommendations for policy changes — is any indication, Patrick’s (mis)belief that church-state separation is a lie was the unanimous position of the commission.
Of course, that should come as no surprise. A panel made up of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians and just a single (conservative) Jewish member does not represent the religious diversity of our nation. Their views on, well, everything are dramatically out of step with everyday Americans — and in some cases, the majority of their coreligionists.
The recommendations from the panel include both the boring (a “Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty” award, “Know Your Rights” posters, and a reporting hotline) and the five-alarm fire for equality (repealing the Johnson Amendment, completely turning the understanding of the Establishment Clause on its head, and a massive giveaway of your tax dollars to religious schools).
And all this at the behest of Trump, who is notoriously not a believer. I’m not going to call him an atheist, because that would require at least a moment or two of thought at some point. He’s just a de facto non-believer, in the same way he’s a non-believer in quantum physics or Etruscan tennis.
Despite the report’s executive summary claiming that religious liberty “protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” the report spends 224 pages proving they don’t actually believe that. Atheists and the nonreligious appear nowhere else in the document except as an ideology to be defeated.
Why? Because the Commission made no effort to hear from members of the atheist community.
Can we not call it that? Can we not keep bunching things into “communities”? Can we not just say “atheists” and leave it at that?
It’s not just that they deny that we might have a shared commitment to freedom of conscience. Rather, it’s that they believe we don’t exist at all except as enemies of their freedom.
Possibly the most chilling line of the entire report makes that belief crystal clear: “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”
Wut? Theocracy excludes religious voices from the process of government? Theocracy puts religious voices at the core of government; that’s why it’s called theocracy. The line is chilling but also incoherent.
Anyway, thanks for the update Nick; keep up the good work.
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