From the perspective of fundamentalists, the social justice preaching of a Martin Luther King or a Robert Kennedy flew in the face of their most essential values—a perspective vociferously echoed by Glenn Beck in recent times. As fate would have it, King and Kennedy were struck down. Some might say it was God’s will. (My father remembers to this day a man across the street from the house where I grew up in Orange County, California, who said to my dad of Robert Kennedy, “I hope that son of a bitch gets shot like his brother.”) Regardless, if Robert Kennedy had lived to secure his party’s nomination, the polls showed him defeating Nixon in a walk. That wasn’t a risk fundamentalists could take again. And so a small group of committed people, people at the time considered little more than an antiquated and rejected relic of the 1925 Scopes Trial, rose faster and stronger than any phoenix and transformed America in their own image.
Forget about posters taped to the wall at your local nonprofit. The fundamentalists got the job done. So much so that, as the megachurches grew and grew, the politicians listened and listened like never before.
In August 1980 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan gave his historically pivotal speech to a vast crowd of fundamentalist ministers in Dallas, Texas, in which he sought to tear down a wall—the wall separating church and state. Knowing that religious organizations are not supposed to engage in political endorsements, Reagan made a statement that continues to echo to this day: “I know that you can’t endorse me, but . . . I want you to know I endorse you and what you are doing.” The Republican Party, with that speech, crossed a theocratic Rubicon and has never looked back.
As a politician, I know when to tip my hat to my competitors, and I tip my hat to the fundamentalists. I give the theocrats their deserved due. It’s the only sportsmanlike response.
As executive director of Secular Coalition for America, an organization of which few Americans have ever heard, I intend to see them and raise them. Why be alive if you don’t want a challenge?
America is the greatest nation on earth—because of our constitutional ideals and our founding principles. It’s time for Secular Americans to earn our nation’s respect, admiration, and understanding. It’s time for America to know that secularists seek not to attack and disdain our country, but rather to serve our nation at this critical juncture. The struggle of gay people for civil rights has contributed greatly to America’s journey toward meeting its best ideals. Gay-rights activists started small and grew unexpectedly powerful. Today Secular Americans are the right people at the right to time to take a leadership role in America’s next great step forward. Secular Americans can, and will, play a prominent role in leading America back to its highest shared ideals: freedom, reason, equality, justice, compassion, and passion.
The fundamentalists made their voices heard. How do we secularists do even better? Here’s how:
Our Secular Decade: A Patriotic Plan to Reclaim America
Increased advocacy on public policy issues must drive our entire strategy. Successful advocacy isn’t only about citing statistics or promoting statutes. Our success requires sharing and communicating stories—stories that vividly demonstrate the adverse and real effects of religious privileging in public policy.
Consider Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. 256 words. What Lincoln did was tell a story of our people and our country—concisely and powerfully.
Jack Kennedy sent a man to the moon. He didn’t lead with statistics and statutes. He inspired with a story. He told the story of boys traveling across the Irish countryside. When they came to an orchard wall that was too high and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their caps—and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them. America’s best scientists were not at all certain how to technically achieve Kennedy’s dramatic goal, especially not within ten years. But it was the drama, excitement, and specificity of Kennedy’s passionate, inspiring vision and clear goal that inspired relentless work and innovation.
Now, as Gerald Ford said, I’m no Lincoln. And as Lloyd Bentsen said to Dan Quayle, I’m no Jack Kennedy. But since 2009, I’ve been listening and learning, reading, then listening more. In crafting a strategy that will bring secular success, I’ve been listening carefully to Secular Americans and to the mood of all Americans. From that listening, I find that we must better illustrate in our public discourse the real experiences of Americans. Our central public policy strategy must be to tell stories of how our fellow citizens—real people—are harmed by the privileging of religion in law.
Stories of religious bias in law not only outrage and unite active secularists, but they also attract new people who might otherwise not have thought about the importance of secular issues. They can be attracted if we tell them simple and compelling stories that express these very real injustices taking place in the United States.
Secularists revere reason and an evidence-based approach as the highest and best standard for leading a good and positive life. This is what I’ve described as a noble flaw. Children prefer stories to a recitation of facts to be engaged and energized. Adults are no different. Secularists sometimes dismiss stories as mere “anecdotal evidence.” Wrong. A tendency toward relying on high-flown abstraction sometimes undermines our best intentions and the prospect of achieving our highest principles. Stories illustrate a larger point, sustained and supported by statistics and a careful review of statutes. Stories offer a lens through which to understand the experiences of individuals and illustrate the larger impact of policy decisions on our communities. Without stories, our cause is lost.
The old activist methods—focusing on a religious national motto or the Pledge, or mangers in a town square or crosses on public land—indeed employ valid legal arguments, but they do not pulse with the flesh and blood necessary to move a larger audience.
As seen throughout this book, we face numerous examples, particularly from recent decades, of laws that are based not on equal treatment but outright religious bias—laws that harm our fellow citizens. In extreme cases, the unjust bias in law plays a role in the physical harm of our fellow citizens, sometimes even the death of children.
We must unite around the idea that our fellow human beings should not be harmed—nor hoodwinked—by religious bias in law.
This unifying cause, expressed in human terms, is one that can garner support and participation from millions of Americans who find the rise of theocratic politics in America repugnant, but who have yet to find an organized outlet for their concerns. Our strategy for growth will be built on this idea and executed through a series of well-defined objectives.
Secular Decade Strategic Objectives
Objective: Increase advocacy by telling more stories and telling them better. The Secular Coalition for America Web site (www.secular.org) is an effective tool for communicating stories and spreading our message. You can post videos from our Web site on Facebook, mention them to your friends or colleagues over drinks or dinner, “tweet” about them. Maybe you can persuade a friendly but skeptical coworker—or your in-laws—of the harm caused to real people by religious bias in law if you offer specific examples. You can direct friends to our Web site or direct friends to this book. The stories that we share on our site, and the videos that go with them, have a simple purpose: to demonstrate to friends, family, and neighbors that secularism enhances a moral vision for America’s future by redressing concrete harm to real people.
Objective: Increase advocacy with a greater lobbying presence. There was no such thing as a secular lobbyist as recently as 2005. I’m so proud to be an advocate—a lobbyist—for secularism because, time and again, issue after issue, our secular policies call for compassion, justice, and inclusion. In times of overheated rhetoric, when God is frequently invoked to judge, to condemn, to ostracize, to discriminate, America needs the compassionate voice of secularism. We display our deep moral values through our actions on behalf of our fellow human beings, not by our willingness to condemn our fellow human beings.
Don’t think so? Think about the inclusive nature of our lobbying goals versus the discriminatory lobbying goals of fundamentalists, such as the Focus on the Family crowd. After ten years in politics, two years as legal counsel to my state senate, and two years lobbying for my state bar association, I have strong opinions about lobbying strategy. My job as Majority Whip of my legislature was to count votes and, when necessary, lobby my party colleagues. Knowing the issues inside and out is critical, but understanding the elected official (and his or her staff) can be dispositive. However, a big part of my job is strategic planning and public speaking, so we are lucky to have a full-time lobbyist working for secularism in Washington, DC. We need more soon. One is not enough. By 2020 we must have multiple full-time lobbyists fighting against theocratic policies.
Objective: Increase advocacy by strengthening our media message. Proud as I am of our lobbying for justice, Secular Coalition for America must have a clear message that connects to a broader audience than Congress itself. We must have the people to spread that message.
Whatever else you say about him, Ronald Reagan offered a consistent message. Consistency is effective. The statement, backed by evidence, that religious bias in law harms real people will be our urgent, constant drum-beat. Those who attack religion as an abstract concept often have entirely valid arguments; however, our strategy, consciously designed to appeal to many millions of our fellow citizens, should demonstrate the appeal of secular values by tugging at heartstrings and illustrating specific injustices in law that harm our fellow human beings.
We are tribunes of justice for the vulnerable—not attackers. Our cause will grow as a result of this consistent tactic—and consistent message, which must be communicated strongly, relentlessly, and widely in a way that penetrates the consciousness of the mainstream media.
Objective: Broaden our base of supporters by establishing a Secular Coalition for America affiliate in every state by 2020. In 2020 you will see fifty statewide Secular Coalition for America affiliates. Because we evidence-based secularists believe that people who live in Washington, DC, are, in fact, human beings, we will actually aim to have fifty-one affiliates. Participants will be identified by congressional district in each state. Secular Coalition for America will train volunteers to organize congressional office visits and to convey ourselves as the polite, articulate people we are. When I was in politics I responded to the magic words, “I am your constituent and I really need your help.”
State affiliate volunteers can use the issues listed on the Secular Coalition for America Web site as an easy template for federal issues when they go to meet with their local congressperson and congressional staffers. Consistent with our mission, they will organize to speak out to their state legislature as well.
Secular Coalition for America will continue to build its electronic presence, but when Secular Americans—millions of Secular Americans—have a grass roots and in-person outlet for their idealism and for their passions on issues, we will witness a dramatic effect. The hard crunch of grassroots organizing is something I care deeply about and an area where secularism has been weak.
I once considered running for a legislative seat in a very Republican year, when legislatures across America went strongly Republican. I made at the time what seemed to be a foolhardy decision. What decision? Well . . . Stephen King was the richest guy in Bangor. The folks who owned the local oil company were a close second. The next richest guy owned the local landfill. My foolhardy decision was running for public office in a bad year for Democrats against the third richest guy in town. In fact, my opponent’s roots in Maine stretched back to the 1800s. He paid for the local ice-skating rink—a justifiably big deal in Maine for which he earned deserved thanks. He served on the board of multiple organizations in town. An affable man, he had given generously to our community. I was tagged as a liberal lawyer from Southern California who’d lived in Bangor six years. My opponent had “means” and he spent those funds unhesitatingly. I was broke as usual. I knocked on Stephen King’s door. Stephen King gave me a thousand bucks and voted for me. That was exciting. And I won—which was even more exciting.
But I didn’t win because of Stephen King. I won because I decided to knock on his door, then the door of a guy in a trailer park—and then continued to knock on hundreds of more doors in trailer parks. I was told poor people in trailer parks don’t vote (kind of like I’m now told that Secular Americans are a silent, nonparticipating bunch). But I listened to what people faced in Maine. I was willing to act upon their concerns. Similarly, our ears must remain open to listen for injustice in law based on religious privileging. We will change the world because Secular Coalition for America is now listening nationwide. And our ability to send information to the grass roots and gather information from the grass roots will increase exponentially. We will tell stories that relate the injustice of putting dogma over people, and we will bring our ever-compassionate secular message wherever we go.
Secular Coalition for America’s fifty-state plan is both the single most important step we must take to be an effective lobbying group, and the single most important step we can take to increase the membership of our ten member organizations and our entire secular movement.
Why?
First, in order to increase our clout in Washington, we must increase our clout back home. E-mail and social media efforts are very effective and meaningful, but they must be complemented by people—articulate, passionate, local people—ready to speak out from their home turf and tell their stories to elected officials and their staff in person.
Second, we must strengthen the infrastructure of the secular movement. The percentage of Secular Americans who are involved as activists is small. The existence of state Secular Coalitions will help grow our movement. The Coalition’s affiliate agreement specifically requires that state Secular Coalition for America groups must contact and offer inclusion to our member organizations’ local affiliates within their state. This will allow Secular Coalition for America and its member organizations to grow and to work together to increase the secular movement’s activist base.
You can help establish a Secular Coalition for your home state. It is the single most important step in building our success. Take action now by going to our Web site www.secular.org and reviewing the template affiliate agreement. Well-organized volunteers are the primary leaders of our state affiliates. That could be you.
Objective: Broaden our base of supporters through improved social networking. We must communicate not only with our base but also with the many more who might join and grow our base. We must also connect average people harmed by religious bias in law and we must have an Internet team poised and ready to react to injustice—then energize our compassionate audience with those stories. Our e-mail list, Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers are increasing. We plan to invest more time and resources to promote and advance our cause through social networks, more sophisticated search-engine optimization, and online advertising. But all those techniques are simply that: techniques. I picture a young person in a small fundamentalist town who loves Voltaire, Whitman, Jefferson, Darrow, Einstein, and Darwin. I want that young person to know their values have a public-policy home. I want that small-town person to feel at home with Secular Coalition for America and our public-policy mission.
Objective: Broaden our base of supporters through outreach to the “unconverted.” Many millions of Americans actually share our secular values, but the vast majority of Americans are unaware that there exists an organized voice to represent those values. I know this because, until I got this job, I didn’t know there was an organization that represented my moral values. Secular Coalition for America has many potential allies, including
the science and technology community
the LGBT community
libertarians
women’s rights organizations
peace and justice groups
civil-liberties advocates
; average Secular Americans in need of a home for their policy views
Secular American activism must expand. Well before 2020, Secular Coalition for America must be able to communicate electronically with a supporter list that is at least six-figures strong—so that Capitol Hill will have no choice but to pay attention.
Our outreach staff is essential to what we do. We must hire more dedicated outreach staff. Increased numbers of people means increased clout.
One example: You may disagree with certain aspects of the true libertarian perspective, but true libertarians do not want Big Brother deciding our personal lives on behalf of anyone’s interpretation of the Bible. Many theocrats now in Congress parade as “libertarians,” but they are only playing dress-up (Ron Paul and Rand Paul, for example). Americans may disagree about economic policy, but when it comes to the government staying out of our personal lives, the great majority is a libertarian majority. True libertarians have a passionate following. Secular Coalition for America will tap that idealism and that of the numerous other demographics I’ve listed that share our ideals.
Objective: Become full participants in elective politics. Many get upset about political preaching from the pulpit, a violation of law for a tax-deductible religion. But what about the political speech from fundamentalist extremists that is perfectly legal? They spend millions on political action, including through 501(c)(4)s. Under Citizens United, 501(c)(4) corporations can spend money on political advocacy. By contrast, Secular Americans are often as silent as the grave when it comes to political giving. This must change.
Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It Page 15