Most Americans not only profess religious belief but assume that such belief is indispensable to public morality. That is why, for example, they won’t support the deletion of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance; they imagine that virtue and self-restraint are somehow being pumped into the kids who must mumble that phrase each day. Thoroughgoing secularists like me not only find that assumption ridiculous, we reject the unhistorical idea that religion has ever served to tame aggression.
A half-century ago, when the United States was closer to being a Christian nation than it is today, racial segregation was normal, homosexual relations were felonious, and pregnant adolescents were entitled to the coat hanger of their choice. A little earlier, we had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans. Earlier still, there were lynch mobs, and, before that, we had slavery, Indian removal, and child labor, all of which were supposedly smiled upon by God.
Equality before the law is a secular ideal, having been proposed and instituted by people who, though superficially pious, kept uppermost in their minds Europe’s savagely warring theocracies and its sadistic execution of heretics. The further growth of secular justice has been stimulated by the increasingly polyglot makeup of our democracy and by the boldness of minorities that have demanded rights instead of merely bowing to commandments.
In my utopia, presidential prayer breakfasts would be abolished and churches would be taxed. But let’s keep some perspective. The evangelicals who want Christ to be America’s king aren’t our oppressors, they are fearful and bewildered reactionaries who see their world evaporating. Does secularism have a future? It is the future, by which I mean that believers and unbelievers alike will have to give up something—here the wording of a pledge, there a pipedream of biblical justice—to live together under a government that won’t be imposing tests for godliness.
Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His book Deep and Easy Knowledge: Dissenting Essays will be published in spring 2006 by Shoemaker & Hoard.
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