Extremists and New Atheists Attack Freedom of Conscience: Intolerance Is Back In Vogue

Religious freedom has been an important American value since before the US Constitution, dating to the "Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom"in 1779. Bill Moyers spoke with experts who agreed how central religious tolerance and freedom are to the American political tradition.

Philip Hamburger: "I think America actually is a remarkable model for the world, precisely [on account of] our religious diversity. This is a place where [right in the] 18th century there was an understanding that people of many different religions including religion other than Judaism and Christianity, can get along."

Dr. Munawar Anees: "The American experience of religious pluralism and democracy, that mixture has historically proven to be unique anywhere in the world."

Here's an official US State Department gloss on that tradition today:
The American traditions of individual freedom and tolerance have accommodated a remarkable variety of religious practices and beliefs. Although about four of five Americans identify themselves as Christian, even this majority encompasses many denominations, among them Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran and Methodist — some of which have further divided into subgroups even as movements like fundamentalism and evangelicalism transcend denominational differences. Other religions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism thrive in the United States. About 8 percent of Americans describe themselves as nonreligious, secular or atheist.

Given the atmosphere of religious freedom, it is not surprising that a number of denominations originated in the United States. During the Revolutionary War, American Anglicans broke with the Church of England to found the Episcopal Church. Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism and the Church of Christ, Scientist, are all 19th century American offshoots of Christianity.

The Nation of Islam, a black Muslim group, dates to the 1930s, and both Conservative (Masorti) and Reform Judaism developed in the United States from European roots, while Reconstructionist Judaism was founded here.

Relations between religions and denominations often are cooperative and close. On Christmas Day 2005, hundreds of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Baha’i volunteers took the place of Christian workers at Washington hospitals and other nonprofit organizations, allowing the Christians to spend their holiday with family.

One week later, a Kansas City, Missouri, area Buddhist Center held an interfaith ceremony featuring Tibetan chanting and prayer, Sufi meditation and a Muslim call to prayer. A Protestant pastor was the featured speaker, and two Roman Catholic nuns received the Bodhisattva Award, honoring enlightened persons who work for the benefit of others... The overwhelming majority of Americans support such efforts and respect the American tradition of diversity and freedom of conscience.

But in the past twenty years the ideal of freedom of religious expression has been under attack from religious fundamentalists, particularly extreme right-wing Christians, who have sought to re-write the American tradition of tolerance into the myth that the US was once an exclusively Christian Nation. (See our post: Debunking the Myth of the Founding Fathers as Intolerant Christian Fundamentalists.)

Here is just one very recent and disturbing example, a protest as a Hindu led the US Senate in prayer for the first time.:
Christian protesters disrupt Hindu prayer in U.S. Senate:

“It was a shocking event for all of us Christians,” the Rev. Flip Benham, head of Dallas-based Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, tells The Hill. “For all of these years we have honored the God of our Founding Fathers. It wasn’t a group of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims that came here. It was Christians.”

TPM Cafe: Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately ordered them taken away — though they continued to yell at the Hindu cleric as they were headed out the door, shouting out phrases such as, "No Lord but Jesus Christ!" and "There's only one true God!"

Washington Post: Several Christian organizations spoke out against the prayer, before and after it was delivered. The American Family Association circulated a petition, urging its members to contact their senator to protest the prayer. "This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world," it read...

Although the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington issued a statement July 17 saying its members were "deeply saddened" by the interruption, no senators present spoke out against it publicly, according to the Hindu American Foundation and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Both organizations said they are disappointed with the legislators, and they sent letters this week to presidential candidates and senators, asking them to condemn the incident. Predictably, religious liberals and moderates were the first groups to speak out against this outrage.

This disgusting scene of religious intolerance in the US Senate gathered relatively little media attention. We have almost come to expect such ignorant attacks on the personal freedoms of non-majority groups from the extreme Christian Right. But more surprising are similar expressions of religious intolerance from the group of so-called New Atheists, who focus much of their hostility at religious moderates.

(To Be continued)
Note: This post is part of a series outlined here, which considers similarities in thinking between religious extremists and the so called New Atheists. The introduction is here.