By LEON HADAR
A FEW years ago, I interviewed a now retired US Congressman who revealed to me that although he represented a district in a Midwestern state aka 'America's Heartland' where God is as American as Motherhood and Apple Pie, he was a non-believer - an atheist.
'But don't tell that to anyone,' he added. 'I plan on getting re-elected.'
Indeed, as renowned British scientist Richard Dawkins has suggested in his book, The God Delusion, documented evidence of the hatred and misunderstanding of atheists in the US makes it easy to conclude that it is 'virtually impossible for a honest atheist to win public election in America'.
Mr Dawkins suggests that if one assumes that the majority of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill are an educated sample of the American population, 'it is statistically all but inevitable that a substantial number of them must be atheists'. Like the Congressman I had interviewed, 'they must have lied, or concealed their true feeling, in order to get elected', Mr Dawkins speculates. 'It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be an instant political suicide for any presidential candidate.'
Interestingly enough, according to a recent Gallup opinion polls, more Americans were willing to vote for a qualified gay person for political office (79 per cent) that for an atheist (49 per cent).
So taking into consideration that kind of prejudice against atheists, including incidents of loss of jobs, shunning by family and even murder, how does one explain the fact that Mr Dawkins' book, which is a very provocative manifesto of a radical atheist - he bashes religious education as 'brainwashing' and 'child abuse' - has been on the top of The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks?
Or that another critic of religion, American philosopher Sam Harris, whose two books attacking the role of religious faith in American life, Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith have also been instant bestsellers, has become a celebrity of sorts and has been interviewed in leading broadcast and print media?
Similarly, a lot of media attention has been focused on a recent conference in La Jolla, California, 'Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival', that brought together leading scientists, most of whom were either atheists or agnostics, who seemed to agree that members of the scientific community need to play a more activist role in combating the influence of religion on American society, culture and education.
Or as The New York Times put it, somewhere along the way, the conference 'began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told'.
So what exactly is going on in a country where according to public opinion polls, a large majority of Americans believe in God, and in fact, more than 50 per cent of them subscribe to 'creationism', the belief in a literal interpretation of specific religious works referring to God creating the universe, as opposed to the explanations based on science? Interpreting the success of the books by Mr Dawkins and Mr Harris and the growing interest in their perspective as a sign that Americans are becoming more atheistic would certainly be an exaggeration.
Instead, it seems that what we are witnessing is an intellectual and public reaction to several decades of rising influence by the member of the so-called Christian Right in America, especially through their dominant position in the conservative wing of the Republican party.
What ignited this response may have been a series of 'tipping points' that
exposed the enormous influence of the Christian Right:
- Efforts by groups associated with the Christian Right to force educational institutions, especially of the local level to embrace the concept of Intelligent Design (which assumes that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause not an undirected process such as natural selection) as a scientific theory that stands on equal footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding the evolution and origin of life.
- The campaign by Christian activists to place constraints on the funding of research on stem cells, including the support President George W Bush and many conservative Republicans have given to the ban on extracting stem cells from surplus, unneeded, frozen embryos left over from in-vitro fertilisation procedures in fertility clinics.
- The (unsuccessful) attempts by religious groups (again, backed by Mr Bush and conservative Republicans) to overturn a decision by a US court to remove the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo who was in persistent vegetative state.
In a way, the rise of the Christian Right has been a reaction to the more libertine counter-culture fostered since the 1960s by liberal intellectual, artists and activists and that helped strengthen the political of power of groups that campaigned in favour of the feminist agenda, gay rights and legalisation of abortion and drugs.
Now it looks as though the political pendulum may be turning into the other direction, with rising public uneasiness over the religious dogmatism and intolerance that the Christian Right and its allies have been cultivating.
In any case, Mr Dawkins, Mr Harris and other proponents of the secular insurgency are proposing that atheists and agnostics try to organise themselves and to exert more political power as a way of countering the influence of evangelical Christians and other members of the Christian Right. According to Mr Dawkins, 'the isolation of American atheists is an illusion, assiduously cultivated by prejudice' and by the reluctance of non-believers to 'come out' of the closet. 'Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them,' Mr Dawkins argues
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