I must mention the fact that the Bible condones slavery and tribalism, but I won’t dwell on it. Martin Luther King’s speech has more wisdom, bravery, humanity, compassion and love than the whole Bible and that is damning it with faint praise. Gilbert Gottfried’s act also contains more wisdom, bravery, humanity, compassion and love than the Bible, and Gilbert is doing dick jokes. The Bible sets a low bar for compassion.
I’m not trying to paint Martin Luther King as an atheist. I do not doubt his religious faith in any way. I’m showing that when he made the most important speech of his life, one of the most important speeches in American and world history, he backs off the god shit. He chooses to include instead of exclude.
The word most conspicuous in its absence in that speech to our twenty-first-century ears is “Christian.” “‘Christian’ is not found.”
The word “Christian” has become a magic word in my lifetime. It means something different now than when I was born. It used to be a throwaway word. People didn’t used to use it much. Martin Luther King was a Baptist—Progressive National Baptist Convention—but not even the word “Baptist” appears in the speech. People just started self-labeling or getting labeled “Christian” in the last part of the twentieth century. A little before my time, in the nineteenth century, people weren’t even using the general term “Protestant” very much. They were Baptists or Southern Baptists or Dave’s Specific Southern Mississippi Snakes, but no Poison Pentecostal Church of our Unique Christ. Every religious cult was afraid of every other religious cult. The bugnutty Pentecostals didn’t want the bugnutty Methodists to have too much power. There was no “Christian Nation”—the Christians were all afraid of each other. America was founded on Christians not trusting each other. Robert Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic,” was also an atheist and was courted by many politicians. He spoke on atheism (three of the top speakers of that time were atheists speaking about atheism: Ingersoll, Mark Twain, and Darwin’s Bulldog, Thomas Huxley, who used the weasel word “agnostic” but he doesn’t fool me). Contemporary candidates wanted Ingersoll on board to show they were open to free thought. It was a rhetorical trick to show that they weren’t going to use their political position to give their own specific flavor of Baptist too much power. Ingersoll on board showed they’d let the other cults flourish. I’m no Ingersoll, but I’m an atheist who speaks on atheism and no politicians ever courted me.
Even in my lifetime, when I was a child, John F. Kennedy could have never talked much about his religion, except to alibi it. He was Catholic, and that scared all the Protestants. He just ducked and covered. If he could have used the word “Christian,” he would have and been able to go hog wild on the Jesus stuff. As it was, he spoke of the separation of church and state and made Rick Santorum vomit.
Freethinkers, a great book by Susan Jacoby, explained that the modern use of the word “Christian” was pushed to fight Roe v. Wade, and that was almost a full decade after Dr. King inspired his country talking real inclusion. The anti-choice people wanted a big tent word for the religious objection to abortion, they had to bring all the Protestants and Catholics together, and “Christian” did that. It was their magic word.
Jimmy Carter was “born again” and that phrase and the magic word started to be used more and more. I heard on NPR (Yup, I’m an atheist who reads the Bible every day and a libertarian who reads The New York Times and listens to NPR every day) that if religion is measured as references to god and appearing in churches, our most religious president was Bill Clinton. Slick Willy really rammed home the idea of “Christian” as a church slut, not caring what church he appeared in, as long as he was seen at a church.
I’ve had friends argue that Clinton was not our most religious president, but he sucked up to churches because he was our least religious president and wanted to stay president. That argument is a bit cynical for my tastes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Now we have TV political talking heads who are disgusted by Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich, and the TV announcers use that magic word that gives those whackjobs their power. They don’t say “Southern Baptist”; they say “Christian.” I’ve sat around with my atheist friends and tried to be as blasphemous as possible. I’ve used pornographic images, obscenity and poetry to try to make even the most doubtful blush, but I’ve never touched Michele Bachmann’s insult to the gentle honest faithful by saying the suffering and casualties of natural disasters are her god’s message to wayward politicians. It’s hard to imagine Martin Luther King even thinking that. What she said was disgusting, and not general “Christian” belief at all, but her blasphemous religious message was delivered on the news clips as a message from a Christian. Imagine if that had been positioned as a message from Michele Bachmann of the Salem Lutheran Church, a specific cult that had stated that the pope is the antichrist. Michele denied they believe that, but all the same, how are the non–Salem Lutherans (and that group includes all the Catholics, most of the Protestants, Martin Luther King, Mitt Romney and me) going to react to that bugnutty stuff coming from a Salem Lutheran? Even in the broad, broad definition of Lutheran, you have only about 13.5 million and that’s not enough to be president. Now Michele has moved to the Eagle Brook Evangelical Church, but without the alibi term “Christian,” that gives her only 26.3 percent of the American people. With that percentage, you need to shut up about religion. You need me on board to show that you won’t sell out all the others.
John F. Kennedy had to alibi his Catholicism; Rick Santorum just uses the magic word “Christian,” and it goes away. Rick Santorum brings his religion into everything. I think he’s deeply wrong, but I have no problem with him being a believer running for public office. All his talk of god will get his core followers fully hard and wet (and we can hope dripping some santorum out of their assholes), and with the word “Christian” it doesn’t lose as many people as “Catholic” alone would. Now let’s watch Mitt Romney as he works on trying to get the magic-underwear-wearing, the-Garden-of-Eden-was-in-North-America Mormons considered part of that “Christian” magic word.
If I make all my deadlines, our president might still be Barack Obama. If you search on the Web for Obama’s religion (and ignore the stupid Muslim shit), you’ll find he is Christian. He goes right to the magic word, and stays there. He names no specific cult ever. He no longer belongs to Trinity United Church of Christ, but our magic word saved him there. Trinity Church describes itself, on its website like this: “We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting, and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.” If Obama had run as a Trinity Church believer, he would have had a lot of explaining to do, but being “Christian” solved everything.
Again we have the Clinton cynic problem. If we see Obama as a Trinity Church believer, he’s as bugnutty as Sarah Palin, but my friends don’t see him as a believer, not even a Christian. They see him belonging to a church and saying he’s Christian so he could get elected. Many people have said to me that Obama claims religion because otherwise an African-American liberal would never have a chance of being elected. If he didn’t call himself a Christian and talk about praying in the White House, he would be painted as a Muslim and have no defense. You and I know, as the condescending argument goes, that an atheist is further from being Muslim than a Christian, but Americans don’t know that. The argument says that Americans could never understand that not believing in god means not believing in a Muslim god. Yeah, fuck you, if Americans can program in machine
code and understand “icing” in hockey, they can understand this. I’ve had many liberal friends (are they really friends?) defend Obama by calling him a liar. They have made this unilateral secret deal with Obama that Obama will say he’s Christian to get elected and then he will govern as an atheist. Obama doesn’t have to wink when he says he’s Christian; these liberals just know. It’s supernatural. These people might be right, but it doesn’t make Obama a hero to me. I’m way more against lying than I am against Christians.
It’s not hard to picture Obama in that kind of cynical deal. When he won his Nobel Peace Prize, he felt he had to address the fact that he had sent more soldiers overseas to kill and die than all the other Peace Prize winners put together. Alfred Nobel wrote that the person who won the Peace Prize “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I don’t know who that would be, but it’s demonstratively not Obama.
Obama’s speech got a laugh at the top referring to this controversy. He worked a laugh out of the crowd by pointing out that a guy running a couple wars had won the prize. I believe that anything can be funny—there are funny AIDS jokes—but this one rubbed me the wrong way. He then addresses Martin Luther King’s winning of the same prize:
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
“I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’ As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.”
Man, that’s some great speechwriting and Obama sure can deliver, but then I wanted him to say “. . . so I will be bringing all our troops home and we will stop dying and killing people for ideas we don’t understand.” But he didn’t say that.
He said, “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
Evil is strictly a religious concept. That word does not appear in the “I Have a Dream” speech. Not once. It’s not found. You would think that Martin Luther King Jr. had seen some evil in his day, but in his speech, he doesn’t use the word. He keeps it secular. People can be wrong, cruel, ignorant, and horrible, but there’s no separate evil driving some of us. We are all people and our mistakes are our own.
Obama finishes up his sweet spin with this: “The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached—their fundamental faith in human progress—that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.” I guess it’s good that he doesn’t dismiss them, but that sure feels like a pat on the head to a couple of sweet nutjobs, and not real respect. I don’t question that Obama has real and pure respect for Gandhi and King (and the other men like them who are, um, give me a moment, um…), but I wouldn’t be that quick to say that I had all their thinking covered and I was ready to move on to using violence.
Similar to the secret deal that some of my friends have with Obama—that they’ll know he’s really atheist when he says he’s religious—is the deal that peaceniks have with presidents they like. Bush was killing people overseas because he was evil and wanted to; Obama is doing it because he’s good but he has to. That’s the thinking: when a president is sworn into office, the military shows him shit that they keep secret and that changes his whole worldview. There’s heavy, secret shit that justifies war that the public could never handle. If this were true, there would be no reason to ever vote on an issue. There’s no reason to ever have a public debate. We want our benevolent despot. We vote for the best-looking president who we trust, and then let him do what he wants because we can’t handle the truth.
I don’t buy any of this. I think King did a pretty fucking good job of speaking truth to power and he did it non-violently without lying and secret deals. I think he was a real hero. He was not just a Christian, but a Baptist, yet he trusted me, an atheist, to care about his cause and join together with him. I didn’t actually join with him at the time, but I like to think that’s because I was eight years old.
Atheists are growing way, way fast. The end of the twentieth century, atheists were under 2 percent, probably lower when King gave his speech. That number got to 8 percent in the twenty-first century, after the faith-based initiative of September 11, 2001. If you throw in self-labeled “agnostics” and “not religious” some people have gotten the atheist/agnostic/humanist/secularist/freethinking cult numbers up to around 20 percent. Evangelicals are about 26 percent, Catholics about 23 percent, Jewish, 1.7 percent, Mormons also 1.7 percent—if you start breaking these “Christians” up into their smaller groups, non-believers get close to being the dominant “religion” if you can call no religion a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
The March on Washington was important and MLK needed everyone. He ends the speech by saying that “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” should join in singing “Free at last!” I guess my argument breaks down here. Dr King doesn’t mention atheists, and you could argue that he didn’t mean to include atheists. I guess if there’s one thing we’re not, it’s god’s children. But I’m not sure Martin Luther King would see it that way. I feel, listening to and reading this speech, that he would have included me in the list of god’s children even though I’m not. I can’t argue that it’s not exclusive, but it doesn’t feel that way.
I hope that our politicians will learn from Dr. Martin Luther King and keep expanding the group of people they want to serve until we move the next little step from “Christian” being the magic word to the real magic political word: “American.” Then let’s go a step further and make the magic word “humanity.”
Free at last, free at last, thank god almighty we are free at last.
Let freedom ring in the human heart.
Listening to: “Free at Last”—Al Green
GROUNDHOG DAY
THE MOVIE GROUNDHOG DAY POSTULATES perhaps thousands of years’ worth of a single day, when Bill Murray’s character learns to live that one day the right way, and by extension his entire life. Bill’s character has to learn to get his heart right and learn to love. I don’t care much about that; I care that he learned to play piano and speak French and read a lot of books. I like time to get good at real things; the heart stuff is easy. And in reality, Murray, Harold Ramis, and the rest of the cast and crew making the movie had only a bunch of rewrites and a few takes to accomplish that idea.
Teller has been doing one trick called “Shadows” in our show for his entire professional career. We did a version at our first indoor stage show together, he did it in our Asparagus Valley Cultural Society show, and it’s been in most our live shows ever since. When Teller was a child, he had a dream where the cutting of an object’s shadow had the same effect on the real object. Teller used magic tricks to make others share that dream. On one level it’s a celebration of magical thinking: that the shadow, the idea, can affect the real thing. It’s voodoo. Teller is a magician who fights against magical thinking, but onstage, in fantasy, magical thinking is a beautiful
dream. To the non-magical thinker, to the atheist, “Shadows” can be seen as being about art. Art is the representation of ideas that can change the real things, the shadows on the back of the cave wall that teach us about the real world. As writers and performers, we’re always trying to make others see our ideas, the images inside our heads. We’re trying to make others see our dreams, our hopes, and our fears. Maybe if we can all see more points of view, we can all learn. Art is the real magic.
It’s good, in this anthropic world where “good” is defined as anything we’ve found a way to live with, that magical thinking doesn’t work. We don’t have to be careful what we wish for, only what we work for. One of the big reliefs for the atheist is not having to worry about what to hope, wish, and pray for. Did I want to pray for my mother’s suffering to end? Did I want to hope for her death? I didn’t have to worry about that. I could hope one day that she’d live longer so I could talk to her, and wish the next day that she would die and not have to suffer her paralysis and physical loss any longer. My wishing and hoping were inert; I could let them run wild. I could use them as pure solace.
“Shadows” addresses this pretty idea directly in just a couple of minutes. Teller uses a stemmed rose in a vase with a light in front of it, casting a shadow on a screen. He cuts the shadow on the screen and the petals of the actual rose fall as though they had been cut. It’s probably the defining trick of our Penn & Teller career. I’m not onstage for it. Fuck you. I didn’t think it up, and… I don’t know how the trick is done.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! Page 11