It’s likely the U.S. government will always claim to be secular—even while it undercuts that principle at every turn. If current trends continue, I fear we could end up with the worst of all possible words: what I call SINO, or “secularism in name only.”
President George W. Bush and his allies award millions in taxpayer funds to religious groups through “faith-based” initiatives. They support taxpayer funding of sectarian schools. They have turned much sex education over to conservative religious groups. Evolution is taught poorly or not at all in many public schools due to pressure from the Religious Right. Gay rights have been stalled and aggressive fundamentalists meddle in family decisions dealing with end-of-life issues.
At a certain point, if conservative religious groups are permitted near-unlimited access to the public purse, if they are given veto power over aspects of public education, if they are allowed to decorate government buildings and public spaces with their symbols, if they set the moral agenda for an entire nation, we have entered the realm of SINO.
I don’t believe our First Amendment will be rewritten. I doubt a “Christian nation” amendment will be added to the Constitution. The Religious Right won’t have to do that. Their elected officials will simply follow George W. Bush and stack the courts with rigid ideologues hostile to church-state separation. Sooner or later, the composition of the Supreme Court will change, and a working majority will emerge that holds views in the Antonin Scalia/Clarence Thomas mold. That majority would not hesitate to overturn existing precedent and open the door to massive funding for religion, coercive programs for religious indoctrination in public schools, and state endorsement of religious symbols and language.
The SINO scenario is by no means inevitable, but it is what we face unless an increasing number of Americans, religious and nonreligious, wake up and take steps to curb the growing power of the Religious Right.
The Reverend Barry W. Lynn is the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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