The U.S. Department of State says we’re a Christian nation — American Atheists is fighting back on every front.
The U.S. Department of State just used its official social media channels to spread this message:
“America, more than any other nation in world history, was shaped by the Christian tradition of spreading the gospel unto all nations.”
On International Religious Freedom Day.
An accompanying video narrated by Secretary of State missionary Marco Rubio declares, “Our faith… tell us to preach the gospels to the world… From that command came America.”
It’s hard to imagine a more spectacular misunderstanding of America’s founding, of the State Department’s function, or of “religious freedom.”
In fact, the specific law we commemorate on this holiday, the International Religious Freedom Act, was amended in 2016 to clarify that it includes the right to not profess or practice any religion. Because you can’t truly have religious freedom without freedom from religion.
Secondly, “more than any other nation in world history.” Seriously?
More than England? More than Vatican City? How about the Holy freakin’ Roman Empire? Or Denmark, Norway, and Sweden — where monarchs are required to be Christian? What of Argentina, Armenia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Zambia?
You know which country you won’t find under the Wikipedia entry for Christian states?
Ours. The United States. Very famously not a Christian nation.
Instead, a country that waged and won a war for independence from the King — and Church — of England. Whose godless Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office and the establishment of a religion.
Evidently, the State Department isn’t the only branch of government that needs a reminder. On Wednesday, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno declared that only people who believe “Jesus came here for our salvation” are fit to serve in Congress. Wrong again.
The separation of state and church was not a misnomer or a mistake. It was one of the most exceptional and revolutionary features of our constitutional republic: that our government would never dictate what the people believed.
And it was an acknowledgment that even in the 1700s this nation was shaped by many religious traditions — a “multiplicity of sects,” as James Madison put it — as well as those who questioned or rejected religion.
250 years later, the agency tasked with representing our country to the world believes the United States’ crowning achievement wasn’t establishing a secular democracy where no religion reigns supreme and all people enjoy the freedom of belief, but promoting the very religious tyranny our Founders opposed.
And this is just the latest example of the Trump Administration promoting Christianity over all other religions and nonreligion, of prioritizing religious nationalism over religious pluralism. But religious favoritism is not freedom. It’s exactly what our Constitution was designed to prevent.
American Atheists is fighting back on every front:
Please donate now to support our work.
Because no matter the outcome of next week’s election, the fight to protect state-church separation will continue, and we need your help.
And because religious freedom belongs to you, too.
Nonreligious people don’t need a commandment to care or to tell us that others deserve dignity, compassion, and justice.
Colorado ended mandatory religious twelve-step programs for people on parole. No lawsuit, no law — just years of organizing.
Trump and his supporters are free to think he was chosen by God. But the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for this nonsense.
