March 2, 2006

When I was young in the 1960s, religious discrimination was a part of everyday life. Jews and Catholics couldn’t live in certain areas, universities had quotas, and everyone told jokes about Catholics and Jews — really bad jokes.

Still, there was the sense that our national leaders weren’t really interested in that stuff. Politicians didn’t compete to see who sounded most like Cotton Mather. There was a little obligatory talk about “godless Communism,” but we often weren’t sure what politicians believed, if anything. They didn’t seem to care what we believed, either.

Now we open our newspapers and ominous headlines jump out at us. It’s been proposed that health care workers and pharmacists be allowed to withhold services that conflict with their beliefs. Religious groups getting federal dollars for AIDS work preach abstinence and withhold condoms. Public school boards want to teach creationism. The Air Force recently decided to allow officers to “discuss their faith with subordinates” — i.e., proselytize. Our President recently said that he didn’t know how anyone could be president without “knowing the Lord.” Supreme Court Justice Scalia claims that America has always been a Christian nation. Seattle’s own Discovery Institute, now a national fundamentalist force, proclaims that “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

The local scene reflects what’s happening nationally. Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Redmond’s behemoth Antioch Bible Church claims credit for Microsoft’s withdrawal of support last year for state anti-discrimination legislation. Reportedly, he electioneered from the pulpit for Bush’s re-election. (If that’s true, the IRS doesn’t seem to care, although they have gone after a California priest who preached against the war in Iraq.) He led the “Mayday for Marriage” protests in the Washington, DC Mall in October 2004 with the purpose of letting “everyone know God is in control” of the 2004 elections. Joe Fuiten, pastor of Bothell’s Cedar Park Assembly, lobbied successfully in 1998 to outlaw non-heterosexual marriage in Washington State.

Religion has become a factor in the local human services arena also. During the recent Tent City uproar in many Eastside communities, I chided a Bellevue City Councilmember about his attitude toward homeless people. As explanation of his moral position, he referred me to a papal encyclical discouraging government-funded charity — a disturbing enough response in itself coming from an elected official, but he also knows I am Jewish.

Public meetings on the subject of the suburban tent city, with their noisy display of opposing religious views on social justice issues, have provided fundamentalists a handy public forum. Unfortunately, the hard work of First Amendment defense organizations (Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others), many of whom have local chapters, has been all but drowned out in the public press by the internecine battle between Christianity’s local fundamentalist and progressive wings. Even those who know there’s more at stake than which brand of Christianity wins tend to focus on intellectual debate rather than worrisome reality. In the meantime, fundamentalists patiently work to gain even more power.

So, is it possible for ordinary citizens who do “get it” to reverse the tide? We’re trying. Three local Reform Jewish congregations — Temple Beth Am, Temple B’nai Torah and Temple de Hirsch Sinai — have planned a series of public programs exploring religion intruding into politics. The first, “The Assault on Evolution: Defending Religious Liberties,” takes place this Saturday, March 4. David Domke, UW Dept. of Communications, will explain the politics of creationism, and Joseph Felsenstein, UW Dept. of Biology, will outline the science of evolution. Future programs will focus on the erosion of civil liberties, and “charitable choice” initiatives.

We’re also trying to do what civil rights leader Michael Lieberman has urged: build coalitions across religious and party lines. A newly-formed organization, the Northwest Religious Freedom Coalition — whose membership includes many faith traditions, secular and atheist groups, and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League, Faith Forward, and Faith Media Democracy — hopes to fight this battle in our own backyard.

We stand for a quintessentially American ideal: that the religious freedom guaranteed in our Constitution is one that should be available to the most devout religionist, the outright atheist, and the secularist holding any one or more of many varied belief systems. We intend to help this push-back effort by publicizing the relevant positions of state and national candidates for office. You’re invited to join us in this important fight. n