Column: The United States Needs a Secular Political Revival
A Texas protest against SB8. Source: Houston Chronicle
America was founded by religious extremists. The original colonists of New England, the Pilgrims and Puritans, may have been fleeing religious persecution of their own when they embarked on their dangerous voyages across the Atlantic, but their experiences didn’t lead them to be any more tolerant of religious dissent within their own communities. From its earliest colonial roots, the United States has been a Christian nation. Even the establishment clause, which prevents the declaration of a federal religion and is codified in the Bill of Rights, was included with the understanding that there were so many regional denominations of Christianity in the colonies that to impose one of them as dominant would inhibit the freedoms of our fledgling nation. America was created by Christians, for Christians. Understanding that is the first step to understanding how we ended up with a comprehensive abortion ban in Texas that allows citizens to sue people they suspect have undergone or helped someone else attain an abortion procedure (SB8). It is also a realization that is needed to overturn SB8 and legislation like it in the future.
Christianity has been used as a cudgel in US policy-making since the very beginning. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” were among the wise words imparted in George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address. It was Southern Christianity that gave some of the most spirited defenses of slavery, as many Christian Slaveholders argued that slavery was a blessing upon the Africans whom it liberated from their savage and heathenistic origins. It was the Christian Women’s Temperance Movement that spearheaded the push for prohibition in 1920, a policy which most historians now agree was an economic disaster for the country. Evangelical Christians argued with the Supreme Court against desegregation, and when that wasn’t successful, they chose abortion as their new battleground to oust then-President Jimmy Carter.
Evangelicals have held onto their anti-abortion views. In polls conducted by Pew Research Center, 63% of evangelical christians who responded said that abortions should be completely or mostly illegal. That’s in comparison to only 47% of Catholics. Considering that Catholicism has been anti-abortion since at least 600 CE, that’s a significant gap.
Why are we allowing evangelical fervor to govern America? Indeed, it seems like many of the arguments or suggestions that have come up in the wake of SB8 have been doggedly ignoring the origin of our problem. In the weeks after SB8 was signed, high profile figures, including prolific author Stephen King, compared the Texas legislature to the Taliban. In doing so, they were ignoring the reality that this country isn’t being governed by Sharia Law, but it is subject to a loud minority of Evangelicals seeking to police the bodies of people with uteruses. Others called for a boycott on sex until the ban was repealed or overturned, completely missing the point that a refusal to have sex for pleasure (in cisgendered, heterosexual couplings, at least) is playing into exactly what the proponents of the abortion ban ultimately want: to repress the sexuality of AFAB (assigned female at birth) people.
These answers fly in the face of the real issue, which is the hold that Christianity has over our policymaking. It is time to break away from these traditions. The separation of church and state is lauded as a revolutionary idea in public middle schools across the country — it’s time to make that idea a reality, and to let our government representatives know that their religions belong at home and in houses of worship, not in our democratically elected political offices.