(Repost of my comment on AASHOM's blog, "The God Strategy: The Religious Right in America". Check out the videos of the interview with David Domke.)Great interview... I must get this book!
This "Strategy" is precisely my beef, because I've watched it happen while most people I know have remained blissfully ignorant and worse still, fell right in line with the increasing god-talk in politics and the media.
Looky here - an ad from 1981:
(The full-size should be legible)
That ad was in a magazine I helped put out when I was 19.
When I was 29, I worked as an assistant to a stockbroker who had James Dobson & FOF as a client. Jim was kind enough to put Skippy the Broker on his mailing list, so the heathen w/IBD and First Amendment activist leanings became intimately acquainted with Focus on the Family's mission during many and extended shithouse visits. And saw how very profitable it was to sell salvation to Americans in the 1990s. Burnt-out yuppies in need of a replacement for their drug habits, a "new life in Christ" that allowed them to act as though their previous "sinful life" had never even happened. Allows them to claim a superiority and righteousness they hardly deserve, but they feel their due since being washed in the blood of Jesus. Poor white trash flocking to a church amongst their own "kind," not one full of immigrant papists, where they're told that if they pray hard enough and tithe enough, they too can share in the glory of the Lord in the form of earthly abundance and wealth. It disgusted me.
I'm 47 now, and here we are. It's worse than it's ever been, even though anyone with half a brain and one eye can see how religion has been used to manipulate and dumb down the populace. So fuck YES, it's time for people to stand up and tell these religious people to get the fuck out of our political process, and the government to stay the fuck out of the business of religion. There is no "happy medium" outside of clear separation and absolute neutrality. That was my position as a Christian in 1981, a pagan in 1991 and it remains my position as an atheist now.
My moral and philosophical issues with what the American Evangelical movement has done to define Christianity are an entirely separate argument, but one I'm equally as passionate about. My views have cost me more than one relationship over the years, but in the end it's worth it if at some time, somehow, someone learned even ONE thing from me that helped them make their life better in some way. Knowledge is power.
It's my duty as an American to participate in the governing of my country, and I've chosen to throw in my lot with those who know that the First Amendment is what makes us truly free and fight to defend it against all enemies. Those who use God to divide "one nation indivisible" violate the principles of Liberty and we have a duty to shine a bright light on their misdeeds.
[Well shit, now I may as well copy this over to my own blog, too!]