Neither God nor gods give you liberty. People successfully organized against tyranny give you liberty. Freedom concerns what you control, not what Mitt Romney imagines an invisible man in the sky controls. Politicians aim to exploit the blind faith that usually results from belief in the supernatural; they mean to control you through religion. Romney’s speech sounds like an ayatollah’s sermon, not the words of a man who may govern a secular country. Romney doesn’t believe this is a secular country. He fallaciously claims that secularism is a religion, then, hypocritically, rejects it.
Secularism is the belief that public institutions shall exist free of the influence of religious belief. Secularism is not a religion; it is belief in freedom of religion. Secularists recognize that, since there are different religions with exclusive doctrinal elements, if government does not exist free of religion, then religious influence on government will inevitably fall to one sort of religion or another. Under such conditions, followers of other religions and nonbelievers will be less free.
The problem of religious pluralism (not an ideology but a fact) is the reason why the first right guaranteed by the US Bill of Rights is religious freedom, i.e., secularism: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Mitt Romney is of course free to privately practice his religion; however, as a public employee, he is not free to impose his religion on us. No politician can be free to be a tyrant. Yet Romney is arguing precisely for such a tyranny of religion when he claims that the US Constitution was established for a religious people.
Romney supports his case by selectively quoting John Adams. What happens when we bring in two other founders of our secular republic, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? Romney may not know it, but it was well known in the day that these men were free thinkers; you knew by the hysteria of the Calvinists of the day who, to quote Susan Jacoby, “denigrated [them] as atheists, heretics, and infidels.” But, just as Lincoln refused to join a church despite the pleadings of his advisers, public pressure didn’t deter Jefferson and Madison from their secularism.
Thomas Jefferson wrote,
Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What have been the effects of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and terror all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.
With history and the fact of religious pluralism in mind, Jefferson wrote to one religious association, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
James Madison also sought “total separation of the church from the state.” This was good for both the people and religion, for “practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”
Mitt Romney soils the memory of our founders work by failing to praise them for creating the first country in history to disestablish its government from religion. He betrays the vision of the founders. He is a Christianist, and his presidency represents a danger to our democracy.
Moreover, Romney’s arguments are a form of bigotry. Surveys show that nonbelievers in US society outnumber black Americans. Any government practice compelling all black Americans to observe the desires of the white majority against the interests of black Americans is discriminatory. We call this racism, and it has been a problem throughout our history. It follows, then, that any government practice compelling all nonbelievers and non-Christian believers to observe the desires of the Christian majority is discriminatory. That makes Mitt Romney is a bigot.
freedom and reason 