HAVING GROWN UP a Catholic at the very end of New England's Protestant supremacy in my town in Maine, having had teachers in the early grades who clearly didn't like Catholics, the separation of church and state to protect equal rights comes rather naturally to me. My first grade teacher and others were decidedly and rather obviously anti-Catholic and discriminated against Catholics. Perhaps if she hadn't been so obviously about it, her appending of the doxology to the Lord's Prayer wouldn't have been something that annoyed me even as a first grader. I wasn't unhappy when the Supreme Court banned the practice of class prayer and Bible readings (the King James version, in my class) from school rooms even though I was quite a religious kid. Since then, of course, like any typically college-credentialed liberal, I became even more convinced of it as a practical necessity of equal justice AS A FORMAL PRACTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT. I also, stupidly, fell for the ACLU horror over totally innocuous stuff like having manger scenes on public property and the even stupider and counter-productive insistence of secularism outside of formal governmental settings. I have, especially in the past twenty years, become ever more skeptical of it as a general part of life and even politics on the most basic level, among We the People. Such popular secularism is, I have become convinced, deadly to egalitarian democracy, it is impotent in the face of the enemies of egalitarian democracy and the equality that it must have as its goal.
Of course, I think the Republican-fascist ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District is a dishonest ruling allowing what I find to be a coercive and offensive display of false piety by a football coach, an American-neo-pagan game which is totally at odds with the teachings of Jesus AND THE ONE PRAYER HE FORMALLY TAUGHT TO HIS FOLLOWERS football does not "forgive us our trespasses, or wrongs, etc. as we forgive those who trespass against us," it is a neo-pagan game of violent, maiming, homicidal (literally) conquest. And it is a violation of exactly that governmental "secularism" which I think is a necessity for civil government in an egalitarian democracy. It is an impious anti-Christian mockery permitted for entirely political reasons by a Republican-fascist court. That said, there are far bigger issues at stake in our civic life at the present time. For the committed secularist ideologues, how's that 60 years of enforced secularism workin' out for us on the large scale of politics and the Court? From what I remember of the ACLU babble about it at the time, this was supposed to be a golden age of equality, freedom and democracy and what they got us was reactionary Republican-fascism, billionaire domination and corporate bought governance. I would certainly challenge all of them on the "christian" nature of a game which certainly isn't about doing to others as you would have them do unto you." I'd love to have an accurate comparison of the sexual continence of this coach's players - football being all about sex and violence and sexual violence, as compared to non-football playing, non-publicly pretending to pray high school students. I'm guessing they screw around more than the average high school kids. Such is the potency of such feigned "prayer."
The great civil rights struggle of the same period I was talking about above was a product, mostly, of the Black Church, one of the most potent, well focused and beneficial of forces in American history along with the "White Church" that agreed with its goal. I have become entirely convinced that its success was a product of the religious belief of those many People who were the strongest force in the civil rights movement, of their faith, of their belief in the story of the liberation of the Children of Israel - the number of references to that in the great spirtuals, speeches and statements of abolition and stealing away to freedom proves that beyond any shadow of a rational doubt. The articles and books and speeches that informed and moved that struggle demanding freedom and equality in religious terms and religious language are certainly more numerous and more influential than those which excluded religion.
And that is only one of the greatest bodies of evidence that religion holding with that the moral necessity of equality is a positive good in that context even as a force for the moving of politics the making of laws and making those positive laws requiring equality and full democratic participation and RESPONSIBLE freedom* there is no more basic mixing of "church" and state than what informs such voters as who participated in the "souls to the polls" efforts being banned in white supremacy controlled states under Republican-fascism. You can bet that if it were the practice of the Republican-fascist "christian" heresy practiced by the white-supremacist "evangelicals" and fundamentalist-fascists that the same white-supremacist states would never do that. You can also bet that such an effort mounted under materialism, atheism or scientism would be as much of a false front as the MAS "alternatives" to Alcoholics Anonymous.
On a more basic, though far less important ground, I am entirely skeptical that the secularism which is a requirement of justice when it is the government is deadly to progress toward egalitarian democracy due in no small part to the claims of materialst-atheists about the impossibility of free thought under their materialistic-determinist ideology, about notions of morality being largely illusory or defining them in terms more aptly claimed by ideologies such as Nazism than egalitarian democracy in terms of racial advantage and other such things commonly insisted upon among those indoctrinated into the modern culture of materialist-atheist-scientism.
There is one certain thing about the holdings of egalitarianism and democracy, those are absolutely and inevitably founded on a real belief that there is a real and consequential moral imperative to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, that that most universal of commandments that is not found in materialism or atheism or scientism but is written on the hearts of many of many different religious traditions IS CONSEQUENTIALLY BINDING ON ALL OF US. That would account for why so much of the materialist-atheist-scientistic, ideologically secularist modernism has been so attracted to anti-democratic ideologies, eugenics, scientific racism, fascism, Nazism, Marxism, etc. Whatever supposedly egalitarian democratic ideas are held by such people they are what the proto-Nazi Nietzsche called "the shadow of the Buddha" which he predicted in the future of materialist-atheist-scientism, would peter out and his wet-dream of Übermenschen enslaving and warring into a non-teleological future of violence and oppression would be the result. I have every confidence that my suspicion that in the pseudo-christianity of the "white evangelicals" and fundamentalists, their like in other pseudo-religious groups, their alleged religion is just such a "shadow of the Christ" or of "Moses" etc. which masks a thoroughly anti-Christian or anti-Jewish agenda of personal gain and hatred of others, especially those Black People mentioned above.
The government should be religiously neutral, which seems to me should be distinguished from "secular" - a word probably as distorted through ideological use as "liberty" or "socialism" or, certainly, "Christianity" into being complicated out of any reliable meaning not requiring extensive modification. I'd like to stop using it except to express my skepticism of it as something automatically believed to be a good in itself. The basis of legitimate government, We the People, will only have egalitarian democracy the extent to which we really and consequentially hold that we are morally required to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, it is the only thing that holds any real form of democracy together and it is something which is not only not present in "secularism" the common received conception of secularism is poison to it. There is no real, effective and consequential materialist, "secular" replacement for believing that God commands us to do what's right. All atheistic materialism or scientism can do is claw at or coerce the suppression of an effective holding of that. Many of the brite-lites of atheist scientism have denied it in no uncertain terms. I've never seen much in the way of a secular refutation of them that holds together under the terms such an ideology insists on.
* There is no real and consequentially effective secular articulation of the moral responsibilities required by those who would exercise freedoms. The "enlightened self-interest" formula of the "enlightenment" ensures those who are smart enough to rig things for their own advantage by disadvantaging all others will feel free do to it and, that regime made law, they won't have any government regulating what they want to do. I am even more skeptical of that slogan of secularism than I am of much of the rest of it. It's no replacement for a real belief that we are commanded to do to others what we would have done to us, it is its negation.
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