The Campus Inquirer

Special Announcement

January 8, 2004

Campus Inquirer is the leading news source for the student humanist and skeptic movement, comprising announcements, news stories, editorials, and features. Campus Inquirer is published monthly by the Campus Freethought Alliance, a campus outreach program of the Center for Inquiry, promoting reason, science, free inquiry, and church-state separation in education.

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One Nation, Under Secularism
Op-ed piece, New York Times
By Susan Jacoby, Director, CFI Metro New York

Susan Jacoby, director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York and author of the forthcoming "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," contributed to the op-ed page of today's New York Times (Jan. 8). It deals with secularism and religion in American politics, with special emphasis on the presidential campaign. If you missed it in the paper, you can read it online for the next week at www.nytimes.com.

"In Campaign 2004, secularism has become a dirty word. Democrats, particularly Howard Dean, are being warned that they do not have a chance of winning the presidential election unless they adopt a posture of religious "me-tooism" in an effort to convince voters that their politics are grounded in values just as sacred as those proclaimed by President Bush.

On one level, the impulse to capitalize on the religiosity of Americans can be seen as transparently, and at times comically, opportunistic. Late last year, Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, earnestly advised his party's candidates to invoke "God's green earth" in supporting stronger environmental laws. Mr. Dean, the candidate stuck with the label (or libel) of being the most secularist Democratic aspirant, seems to be heeding the advice to get religion. He recently informed an Iowa audience that he prays daily, and in New Hampshire last week, he demonstrated his ecumenism by using the Muslim expression "inshallah," which means God willing.

On a deeper level, the notion that elected officials should employ a religious rationale for policy decisions is rooted in the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason. When I lecture on college campuses, students frequently express surprise at being told that the framers of the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God in order to assign supreme governmental power to "We the People."

Dismissing this inconvenient fact, some on the religious right have suggested that divine omnipotence was considered a given in the 1780's that the framers had no need to acknowledge God in the Constitution because his dominion was as self-evident as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet isn't it absurd to suppose that men as precise in their use of language as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison would absentmindedly have failed to insert God into the nation's founding document? In fact, they represented a majority of citizens who wished not only to free religion from government interference but government from religious interference..."

Read the rest of Susan Jacoby's editorial online.

Campus Inquirer is published by the Campus Freethought Alliance, a non-profit educational and advocacy organization that unites students, student groups, supporters and faculty on college and high school campuses in the United States and abroad to promote reason, science, free inquiry, and church-state separation in education.

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