Politics, religion should be separate

Politics in the United States today are slowly sinking into the quagmire that is public… Politics in the United States today are slowly sinking into the quagmire that is public religion. It appears that no candidate can escape idiotic questions regarding creationism, or the “literal truth” of the Bible. But what’s worse is the subtle way in which religion has pervaded the political discourse of our nation.

Indeed, any candidates who wish to succeed in the general election or even in certain primaries must wear their faith on their sleeves these days, lest the religious question their moral fitness to lead the nation.

Nowhere is this new trend more apparent than the 2008 presidential elections, where most every candidate I have listened to has felt the need to attempt some religious connection with their audience.

Whether quoting the Bible or ending a speech with “God bless you all” or “God bless America,” many candidates pander to the religious as second nature.

But why do politicians attempt to appeal not to our reason but to our religion? The simple answer is because this approach is demanded by a large part of the public.

In March 2007, a Newsweek poll revealed that 62 percent of voters would refuse to vote for an atheist. Saying, “God bless you all” at the end of a speech is just code for “I’m one of you.”

But for me this code doesn’t work. In short, I’m agnostic but, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, if I were to explain my position briefly and in the utmost simplicity, I should say that I am an atheist.

This means that, according to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, I am one of the 9.26 percent of Americans who do not consider themselves to be religious. This 30 million-strong minority to which I belong should be relatively powerful, should have a voice in politics and should not have to put up with constant religious rhetoric.

However, these 30 million Americans are overshadowed by the 120 million Americans who believe that God created the world in six days, and the 175 million who believe Satan literally exists.

In this country, religious populism has been embraced at the expense of reason and the current political climate only serves to magnify this uniquely American situation. In the United States, homosexuals don’t have equal rights and our solution to the AIDS epidemic is abstinence-only education.

But where did this fundamentalism come from? If anything, considering our founding, America should be the most progressive, scientific-minded and secular nation in the industrialized world.

After all, the name of our country was first penned by the atheist Thomas Paine, and our first – and most popular – president was a deist. Even before the secular founding of our nation, our state of Pennsylvania was founded on the concept of religious tolerance, which made it one of the most prosperous and progressive colonies in the New World.

But now our money is engraved with “In God We Trust” and there is a monument to the Ten Commandments in front of the Allegheny County Courthouse.

To be fair to the modern religious people who claim that we are a nation with a deep-rooted religious history, they are right … in a certain sense.

Columbus did claim this entire hemisphere in the name of God and then embarked on a rather messy, but entirely Catholic, program of genocide on the island of Hispaniola that would claim the lives of millions of natives. Not to leave the Protestants out; New England was a center of Christian bigotry and violence under the Puritan theocracy that not only believed that Native Americans were the spawn of Satan but also that certain old women had magical powers and should be burned alive.

The Founding Fathers – Christian, deist and atheist alike – sought to uproot this history of persecution and violence and replace it with the values of what Paine called the Age of Reason. They weren’t perfect, but they came closer to achieving a more tolerant society than their theocratic predecessors.

Backhanded concession statement aside, I recognize that the religious have performed and will continue to perform great acts of kindness and charity. To slightly modify a statement that all liberals are fond of, some of my best friends are Christians.

However, this charity has been best performed not under the auspices of a theocracy but when people of all faiths, or none, come together as a community.

And this, after about 800 words on history, politics and religion, is really my point: When religion becomes a public or especially a political issue, it only serves to divide like-minded people.

So let’s tear down those monuments to the Ten Commandments, remove “one nation under God” from the pledge, and replace “in God we trust” with “together we can.”

E-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.