A Dire Threat to Religion?

Those damned liberals are at it again. As a recent letter to the editor reminded us (Letters, Dec. 9), these no-good, un-American spoil-sports are continuing their long tradition of showing prejudice against religious people. "Among liberals, bias against religion may be one of the last acceptable prejudices," the author boldly generalized.

As accusations against liberals go, anti-religious fever is among many conservatives' favorite standbys. According to these conservatives, religion in the United States suffers at the hands of liberal elites who run an obsessively secular society. For some reason, the specific names of the anti-religious, liberal bogeymen of the political world never get mentioned. Perhaps the fact that there are so many of them obviates the need to identify specific individuals. But we may rest assured, they tell us, that there exists a wide variety of such specters.

The liberal elites are obviously creatures of a devilishly fiendish intelligence, since they have succeeded in maintaining power over our democracy while discriminating against almost every citizen of the nation. The United States is perhaps the most religious of modern nations, with somewhere from 90 to 95 percent of its citizens believing in a God or some universal spirit, and over three quarters believing that God listens to their prayers. Depending on the estimate, 80 to 90 percent of Americans are Christian, with a similar percentage of seats in Congress and state legislatures belonging to Christians. Yet the anti-religious liberals apparently continue to wield incredible authoritarian power over the embattled religionists.

Meanwhile, most Americans have a strong dislike for non-religious people; only 18 percent of Americans would allow atheists the basic right to assemble in a community's civic auditorium. But somehow, perhaps by a miracle, the nefarious liberal elites still manage to repress religion and exclude it from the political dialogue and the legislative process.

Naive political spectators will tell you that religion strongly influences policy and electoral politics. For evidence, they point to the fact that nearly every member of Congress professes some form of traditional faith and that no atheists ever run for public office because they would automatically lose. They call our attention to events like Congress' vote in the 1950s to put the word "God" onto our paper money, into our national motto and into our Pledge of Allegiance; the Congress and President Reagan's formal declaration that 1983 was the "Year of the Bible"; and the recent increase of the Religious Right's stranglehold on the Republican party's leadership. But the quick mind of the observant conservative will not be fooled. He knows that all of this evidence doesn't count, and that the villainous liberals have made our society and politics intolerant of religion.

Conservative accusers tell us that the anti-religious liberals' influence is considerable and widespread. Perhaps they worry over the liberals' anti-religious effect on members of the executive branch, such as our President, an active churchgoer who also consults pop spiritualists like Marianne Williamson and Anthony Robbins. Maybe the accusers refer to liberals' effect on the First Lady, who is known for extolling the many virtues of prayer. Or do they refer to the liberals' influence over the nation's courts, where obsessive secularism truly reigns?

In the recent case of Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, the liberals of the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in history that taxpayers' money can be used to support sectarian religious proselytizing. In this decision, the Court mandated that a state run university must subsidize an evangelical Christian student newspaper titled Wide Awake, which aims not only at discussing ideas about religion, but also at converting its readers and persuading them to repent and avoid hellfire by initiating a personal relationship with Christ.

The First Amendment's Establishment Clause was written by the predecessors of today's anti-religious liberal nuts. It was drafted with the diabolical purpose of guarding against the levying of taxes for the support of religious activities, a practice that was all too common in the early colonies. Today, a grossly sectarian and evangelical newspaper receives state funding, money that has been taken from everyone's pockets--Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists.

If skeptics remain unconvinced by the anti-religious liberals' influence on politics, their excessive secularization of our public schools should make them weep. Admittedly, children do have the constitutionally protected right to pray in school, individually or in groups, silently or aloud, as long as they don't disrupt classroom activities. But the wicked liberals still insist that we shouldn't be able to force them to pray. The liberals have also kept creationist pseudoscience out of our science class-rooms. Evolutionists already have the unfair advantage of scientific evidence. If we can't get creationism in, we cannot allow evolution to be put in our textbooks, because it gives evolutionists enormous influence. That would be like, say, allowing religious people to put a bible in every hotel room.

Gone are the good old days when religion was respected in America. After all, no one in America feels comfortable publicly thanking God for his or her success in sports, politics, or show business. Whom can we blame for this but the evil, devious, anti-religious liberals? Though we cannot see, hear or smell them, we know that they must be there--in our government, in our schools and even in our homes. Take the advice of your local conservative accuser: protect yourselves, because they're everywhere.

Derek C. Araujo '99 is a physics concentrator living in Winthrop House. He is the president and founder of the Harvard Secular Society.