Editorial: America founded on secular, not religious values

On Saturday, Sept. 8, 2012, a fourteen-year-old girl climbed into an armored van, rode a short distance to an idling helicopter and boarded. Veiling her face behind a green cloth to hide her identity from potential attackers, she was flown away from the jail in Rawalpindi, Pakistan that had been her home for over three weeks.

The girl, a Christian, had been falsely accused of burning pages from the Quran, the holy book of Islam, which is a crime under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The girl’s freedom came only after a Muslim cleric, Khalid Chishti, was implicated in planting the evidence by one of his own deputy clerics. Ironically, Chishti now faces the same charges which he tried to pin on another, and all in the name of “purifying” Pakistan of Christians.

In Switzerland, Kacem El Ghazzali has lived for the past two years in exile from his home in Morocco. He was only a teenager when he fled his native country after receiving specific death threats referencing where he lived. What had this young man done to warrant such violence? Nothing more than writing a blog about secularism for atheists and humanists in the Middle East.

These are but two stories, and ones with fortunate outcomes no less. But, there are thousands of similar tales which all share the same theme: oppression in the name of theocracy; persecution in favor of a state-sanctioned religion.

It was to escape these tyrannies that many of the original European settlers came to America. The idea that government has no place in dictating the people’s beliefs was so important to the founders of these United States that they placed it in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

And yet, somehow, religion has become practically embedded in modern politics. Americans now live in a paradoxical condition, where their laws demand the separation of church and state but their currency asserts trust in a deity; where scientific theories compete with religious beliefs in state-funded schools; where citizens pledge allegiance to one nation “under God.” This may not amount to state support of any specific religion, but it is an explicit endorsement of belief in a monotheistic deity.

At this year’s Democratic National Convention, there was a well-publicized debacle over the addition of language mentioning “God” and Jerusalem as the recognized capital of Israel. The convention chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, attempted to hold a voice vote over the addition, which was met with an audibly equal show of support and opposition. After twice calling for a revote, Villaraigosa finally approved the new language, as had previously been planned and scripted.

This blatant disregard for the democratic process is not the only transgression against state and church separation committed by politicians this year, on either side of the aisle. The Republican party’s affiliation with, and support of monotheism, Christianity in particular, is well documented already. The Republican presidential nominee, Willard Mitt Romney, proved as much when he said to supporters at a recent rally in Virginia Beach, Va., “I will not take ‘God’ out of the name of our platform. I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart. We’re a nation bestowed by God.”

That these words were spoken on the same day a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, the victim of persecution in another nation which claims to be bestowed by a god, was released from a Pakistani jail, is a lamentable coincidence.

The situation in America is nowhere near as dire as it is in other nations, but its existence alone is directly contradictory to the values upon which the United States were founded. As the late journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens once said, “How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.” How dismal, indeed.