WHY I DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN

PART ONE: THE GOD THING

In this case, however, the alarmed report was news, because it came in the wake of a historic occasion. Exactly one week before the report was published, a Hindu priest named Venkatochalapathi Samuldrala gave the prayer that opened the day for the U.S. House of Representatives. He was sponsored by Sherrod Brown, a Democratic representative from Ohio, because Samuldrala's temple, the Shiva Vishnu Hindu Temple, was in Brown's district. That's how priests, ministers and rabbis get the chance to give the prayer, even if they aren't the official House "chaplain." They're invited by their Representatives to be "guest chaplains."

Most Americans, if they heard of this event at all, probably passed over it without much thought. After all, what's to think about? There must be a lot of Hindus in Ohio. There's that. That's new. There's the name of the priest in question, which must have brought a pang of sympathy to the hearts of Polish-Americans everywhere--to think, all these years, people have been telling them that their names are difficult to pronounce.

For Dailey and Regier, however, there was a lot to think about, and none of it was good. They couched their essay as a response to questions from readers, including one that said, "A Hindu priest was recently invited to give the opening invocation to the House of Representatives. What's wrong with this?"

Their answer included several paragraphs of rationalizing, but it came down to one main point: "And while it is true that the United States was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, this freedom was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage. Our Founders expected that Christianity--and no other religion--would receive support from the government..."

Now, to be entirely fair about this, the Family Research Council responded to the uproar that resulted when this essay was made public by pulling it off the web site and declaring that it did not conform to FRC policy. (You can read the full text of this particular question and answer at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.) And the words that follow the ones immediately quoted above are "...as long as that support did not violate peoples' consciences and their right to worship." Dailey and Regier did understand that there was a legitimate question of religious freedom involved in the debate.

The real point, however, is that Dailey and Regier's article puts the lie to the most common response of Christian conservatives to their fellow Americans when those Americans object to the endless God-talk of the Bush administration, or the attempts to institute prayers in everything from public schools to car washes: if you don't believe in it, I don't understand why it bothers you. If I didn't believe in it, it wouldn't bother me.

I have no doubt that there are many people out there who call themselves Christians and mean what they say when they insist that, if they were asked to sit through a Muslim prayer or a Humanist invocation, it wouldn't bother them--they'd go along with the will of the chamber and sit respectfully through the performance of a religious rite they find meaningless or flat out wrong. By now, however, there have been too many incidents of the kind that greeted Samuldrala's invocation for anyone to claim that such tolerance is advocated by the forces now pushing so hard to "bring prayer back" into public life.

Consider the case of Herb Silverman, a gadfly atheist activist and long-time mathematics professor at the College of Charleston, whose first big foray into the public eye was to challenge a South Carolina law that required a statement of belief in a "supreme being" from anyone who wanted to be a...notary public. He sued the state of South Carolina and won--unsurprisingly, since the Constitution of the United States specifically forbids religious tests as a condition of holding public office.

On March 25, 2003, Silverman made history by becoming the first atheist ever to give the opening invocation at the Charleston City Council. Needless to say, a fair number of "Good Christians" on the Council did not "not care" about sitting through such a speech. Half the Council's members walked out the door as soon as Silverman rose to speak, in an action that was later admitted to be planned and coordinated before the session. This was not a protest about the content of the speech, since none of the boycotting City Council members knew what was in it. And, in fact, the speech was not bigoted, and did not attack Christianity or religious people.

What's more, statements by the boycotting City Council members made it clear why they'd walked out. They don't believe in secular humanism, so they have no intention of sitting through a secular humanist invocation. But the Charleston City Council opens each and every meeting with an invocation, usually a Christian prayer. If it's offensive to the "Christians" on the Council when that invocation doesn't mirror their own beliefs, isn't it equally offensive to the non-"Christians" on the Council--and in the City of Charleston--when that invocation promotes "Christian" beliefs?

At least some of the people of Charleston got the point. In spite of charges that the letters chosen for the Charleston Post and Courier's letters to the editor page included none of those sent by leaders of local secular organizations, enough of what was printed expressed embarrassment and dismay at the boycott to make it clear that the action didn't sit all that well with the general public.

In case you're sitting there thinking that this is only two incidents, not an indication of a general trend among outspokenly "Christian" people--I've got bad news for you. Take the history of the application of the Equal Access Act, a law passed in 1984 to extend to students in public high schools the same rights to organize and maintain student clubs already enjoyed by students at public universities. The law was introduced and promoted by conservative Christian organizations and legislators, but it was quickly supported by a wide range of people and groups, including the ACLU, because it had one very important feature: it was viewpoint neutral.

The way the law works is simple. If a public high school allows any student clubs that are not curriculum based--the Math Club would be curriculum based if the school offers courses in mathematics; the Stamp Collecting Club would not be curriculum based if the school does not offer courses in stamp collecting--then it must allow any student-initiated club to meet on the same terms on school property.

There's no question at all that the groups that first championed this law did so with the intention of legitimating student Bible Clubs in public high schools. The appeal they made to the nation, however, stressed their interest in "religious liberty," and in the rights of all students to believe what they believed and to organize for the purposes of studying and advancing such beliefs. By the time the law came to a vote in Congress, it had overwhelming support--enough so that the law was veto-proof, if anybody had wanted to veto it. Nobody did.

Then, in the next few years, the very same groups that had first championed this law turned against it. Why? Because it wasn't only Bible Clubs that the law was protecting, it was atheist, Wiccan, and gay clubs, too. The "Christian" organizations who pushed the Equal Access Act turned out to have a rather narrow definition of "religious liberty." They meant the "liberty" of students to organize as "Christians," not to organize as anything at all.

In 1996, a high school in Salt Lake City banned all non-curricular clubs when it discovered it could not ban a gay-lesbian support club otherwise, resulting in a law suit by the ACLU on behalf of the East High Gay/Straight Alliance. The State of Utah even passed its own law to support the restriction of school clubs. It didn't matter. Both the State of Utah and the school district lost. Under the Equal Access Act, the school had to permit the Gay/Straight Alliance.

It turned out that schools had to permit Atheist Clubs, too, although the same school districts that happily allowed Bible Study and Christian Clubs fought it. In 1999, Micah White, a sixteen year old student in Grand Blanc, Michigan, was forced to bring in Americans United for Separation of Church and State before his high school agreed to approve his formation of an atheist club. Grand Blanc High School already had several religious clubs.

Reaction to the formation of Wiccan Clubs, or the mere existence of Wicca-believing or pagan students, often bordered on the hysterical. In 2003, the parents of India Tracy had to file suit against the Horace Maynard Middle School and Union County High School in Knoxville, Tennesee for punishing her for refusing to take part in Christian religious events and ostracizing her for her religion, which was "paganism." The reaction included beatings and assaults by other students threatening to hurt her if she didn't change her religion. Other students in other schools have been forced to remove pagan and Wiccan religious symbols from jewelry and clothes either by "Christian" school administrators who try to brand these things "disruptive" or by fear of schoolmates whose reaction to religious difference is not to affirm American ideals of religious pluralism.

But it doesn't require truly unusual religious viewpoints to bring out the worst in a certain kind of "Christian." On August 4, 1997, the ACLU had to file suit against the Pike County, Alabama Board of Education on behalf of the children of Sue and Wayne Willis. The Willises aren't Wiccans, pagans, atheists, or even Hindus. They're Jews. Their children, ranging in grade from middle school to high school, were prevented from talking about their religion, forced to participate in religious activities including Christian prayers, and relentlessly harassed by both administrators and fellow students. One child was disciplined by the principal by being required to write an essay on "Why Jesus Loves Me." All three children were subjected to finding Swastikas painted on their lockers and to physical intimidation and threats, including one incident where one child was beat up by five or six of his "Christian" classmates--who were never subsequently punished for what they'd done.

For all the talk about "religious liberty" that comes out of a certain segment of the conservative "Christian" right, there's precious little of it when their supporters get control of public institutions.

By now, a number of you are climbing the walls over the way I've been using scare quotes around the word "Christian" in the text above, if you're not on the verge of writing me an angry e-mail about the fact that I haven't used the scare quotes every time I used the word Christian.

My point, however, is this: there are Christians (no quotes necessary), and there are "Christians." Christians are the people who belong to one of the various denominations expressing belief in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. They include everybody from conservative Evangelicals in Mississippi to liberal Episcopalians in Connecticut. They include Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox, and Copts, and Mormons. They even include "Christians."

But "Christians" do not include all of the groups above, nor do they accept most of them--such as Mormons, and usually Roman Catholics--as Christian in any sense. By and large, "Christians" are American evangelical and/or fundamentalist Protestants who belong to a small set of denominations (like the Southern Baptists, the Fundamental Baptists, the Assemblies of God, the Bereans), or subsets within larger denominations (like the Missouri Synod Lutherans), or to no denomination at all, but identify themselves as "Bible believing Christians" or "born-agains" rather than as Lutherans, Methodists, or Presbyterians. Most of them are politically conservative, but not all politically conservative Christians are "Christians."

What they remind me of is a joke that used to be told about Catholics when I was in grade school. A man dies and goes to heaven, and St. Peter decides to show him around. "Here are the Methodists," St. Peter says. "Over there are the Episcopalians. Over there are the Unitarians."

The man is puzzled, "Who are those people over there, sitting behind that high stone wall?" he asks.

St. Peter smiles. "Oh, those are the Catholics. They think they're the only ones here."

"Christians" are the people who, these days, think they're the only ones here.

What bothers me about the Republican Party's God-talk is not that it's God-talk. It's that it's part of a party-wide policy to encourage just that segment of the U.S. population that is most dangerous to the religious liberty of all Americans. No, I don't see anything wrong with a public official expressing his faith. If President Bush prays to Jesus Christ every morning and feels it does him good--fine. He should go right ahead.

But when Bush's Department of Education announced new guidelines that would penalize schools that attempt to ban voluntary prayer or Christian organizations in violation of the law--I remembered that the law is supposed to protect more than just the "Christians" in the student body. If Bush is concerned that school districts "follow the law" that grants religious liberty to students, why didn't he threaten sanctions against schools that violate that law against any students, including the ones who want to start Atheist Clubs and Wiccan Clubs as well as Bible Studies?

The "Christians" who beat the Willis children bloody and tormented India Tracy--and the "Christian" school administrators who encouraged the harassment and did nothing to alleviate it-- are part of an organized, politically active minority who care as much for freedom of religion as I care for mayonnaise. They like to hide behind the fact that about 75% of Americans call themselves Christians, mostly by not bothering to acknowledge that what those Americans consider Christianity isn't anything more to them but heresy and apostasy. They claim to be fighting for "religious liberty," but they want no part of it--only a privileged place for themselves and what they believe, as thoroughly institutionalized and as destructive of the religious rights of others as anything any Ayatollah ever thought up. They represent only 8% of the American people, but the Bush administration has given over two cabinet level departments to their influence, is working actively to appoint judges that share their extremism, and daily encourages their ignorance, their intolerance, and their paranoia.

I have no problem with people in government, including elected officials, expressing their faith right out front where all the rest of us can see it. I do have a problem with a party that does not believe in religious freedom for all Americans, and that seems to be working overtime to constrain the citizens of the most religiously diverse country in the history of the planet within the suffocating confines of their own narrow-mindedness. Thomas Jefferson knew better. He knew that the establishment of religious freedom not only of the United States as a nation, but of the Commonwealth of Virginia, was meant to "...comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohemmatan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."

That's from Jefferson's Autobiography, quoted on the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson site. You might want to go there and read the whole page. It can be a real eye-opener for people who think that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation."

Either that, or go on to Part 2: The Money Thing.

Copyright © 2003 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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