The Tyranny of the Theocrats

This morning, I was engaged in the self-flagellation of reading some of the articles on the Answers in Genesis website, and one in particular caught my eye. This article, calling for the "rescuing" of children from a good science education, was a take on the recent revelations that a Christian school gave a "science" test in which answers that no credible scientist would accept (see the image of the test here) were given a perfect score. The question "Dinosaurs lived with people," was marked as "true" by both student and teacher, for instance, when in fact there is no evidence that humans ever lived with dinosaurs at any place or any time. What was particularly striking about this whole story was not Ham's reaction to it, which is fairly predictable given his usual penchant for identifying anyone accepting evolution as an "atheist," when in fact many Christians and members of other faiths accept the veracity of evolution. No, what is notable about this is the fact that he decided to frame it as religious freedom under siege, writing that atheists "don't want true religious freedom in this country. They want to impose their anti-God religion of atheism, evolution, and millions of years on all children!" This statement, Ham's frustration that creationism isn't taught as truth in all science classrooms, is a window into the mind of the theocrats.

When theocrats like Ham, or Michele Bachmann, or the anti-gay American Family Association's Bryan Fischer talk about religious freedom, they are in no sense talking about the same religious freedom that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. What is provided in the First Amendment is the notion that all individuals have the right to believe whatever religion or mythology that they choose, and that the government will not establish any single religion as an official one in any sense of the word. No religious belief is to be privileged over another, for after the horrors of the religious wars and persecutions that had plagued Europe for centuries the Founders knew just what such privileging of a single faith could lead to and wanted no part of it. But this isn't the idea of religious freedom that many on the fanatical Right, both in and outside of the creationist movement, accept. For them, freedom of religion means the freedom to impose their narrow beliefs on all of society, whether in science education, gay rights, or the reproductive freedoms of women.

Religious freedom is important, but so are individual liberties. A person's right to religious freedom ends where someone else's personal liberty begins. Religious freedom means that you can worship whatever god you acknowledge in whatever way you choose, as long as it is within the limits of the law and does not harm others. If your religious beliefs require you to abstain from alcohol, go to church on Sundays (or Saturdays, or Fridays, or any other day), oppose gay marriage, abortion, or contraception, that is your right. But you cannot force anyone else to observe your personal religious beliefs against their will--because they have their own religious freedoms and personal liberties. You can no more force public schools to teach your narrow, sectarian religious beliefs on human origins than you can force someone else to not eat pork. 

In a similar vein, religious beliefs are not to be imposed upon the public through laws, whether these religious beliefs are accepted by a small minority or a broad majority. If your religious beliefs require you to oppose abortion, then you are well within your rights to refrain from having an abortion, or even from using contraception. It is not your right to force those beliefs on those who do not share them through legislation limiting access to abortion or contraception, or banning it outright. Such actions are viewed as a moral necessity by many who agitate for them, but any laws passed for this reason are not only unconstitutional but downright immoral as they trample on the personal freedoms of fellow citizens of the Republic. Such actions reject the notion that others have the right to make decisions that affect them and that they have their own rights of conscience, whether one agrees with them or not. 

This is the central tyranny of the would-be theocrats of this country, whether a creationist like Ham working to dismantle science education or an elected politician like Trent Franks trying to ban abortion. Under the banner of religious freedom, they would seek to force their own beliefs on every person in this country, ignoring the right of all people to a degree of self-determination in their own lives. They would, by their actions, deny to others the same rights that they claim to hold so dearly, and this is an unconscionable, willful twisting of what freedom of religion really is. 

To see Ken Ham make the statements that he has made really is a window into what exactly he and others like him would like to do, to force their own narrow sectarian beliefs onto everyone else. If they had their way, they would morph the United States into a country where creationism is taught as science in all classrooms, gays are back in the closet, and abortion and contraception are outlawed in every instance. Such a place would be a heaven to them, and a nightmare for most of the rest of us. Our belief in true freedom of religion and personal liberty have helped to make our country the place that it is, and to allow the theocrats to throttle those freedoms would mean that we were no longer truly America. All of us who care about these freedoms, whatever our own beliefs, have a duty to ensure that the theocrats do not win. We need to make ourselves heard and push back against the moral Lilliputians who would deny us those same freedoms, and we need to do it now before they have been eroded beyond all recognition.