Crossing the line
From Kearny, N.J., of all places comes a story about a public high school teacher who actively and offensively proselytized his students, arguing his fundamentalist Christian faith to them and telling them they will burn in Hell for all eternity if they do not accept his beliefs. After a complaint by a student who recorded his remarks (the above New York Times story has links to excerpts), the school board took confidential action against him.
We expect a story like this out of rural Pennsylvania or anywhere in the Bible Belt South, but not in a state like New Jersey, in a small town just 12 miles from New York City. The boldness of this teacher in taking actions he knew were an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state tell me things are going to get worse before they get better when it comes to relations between fundamentalist Christians and the rest of Christian and non-Christian America. When you factor in the increasing number of fundamentalist Christian officers in the Armed Forces, things get really scary.
At some point in the last five years, fundamentalist Christians decided to no longer honor the invisible line of privacy that had long been drawn between their own flock and the majority of Americans who are moderate or liberal Christians, hold other beliefs, or no beliefs at all. Years of preaching the canard that the "separation of church and state" is a myth because those exact words are not found in the U.S. Constitution have led to the situation where a former student of this teacher proclaims that freedom of religion gives him the right to proselytize his students.
Where once the fundamentalist churches confined themselves to preaching to their own flock and not bothering those who weren't members or seeking to be members, now some do this with abandon. They claim that proselytizing is part of their faith and cannot be proscribed by schools or employers, whether public or private. I found particularly interesting the contempt expressed by the teacher for public schools, saying they were originally supposed to be for "people who cannot afford to pay for their own education." That is dead wrong, yet another piece of ignorance fostered in fundamentalist churches and schools.
On the other side of the line, atheists are becoming more aggressive about publicly challenging Christian belief, something else that didn't happen much in the old days and which I believe is a direct result of fundamentalist boldness on things like evolution and church and state issues. A newspaper reporter, trained to be skeptical of everything, is never skeptical about someone's belief in God. You never ask, "So you believe in a deity that lives in the sky? Where is your proof?" It simply never happens. But if this keeps up, I could see that changing, at least around the edges.
Driving to New York City on Friday, I saw a large sign posted along Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania proclaiming that "Santa Claus is a lie" and that parents who lie to their children endanger their souls, or words to that effect. It was an ugly thrust by a fundamentalist Christian into the privacy of passing families on a public highway, denying them the right to maintain a friendly, harmless myth about where those Christmas presents come from. Some might find this amusing. I don't, because I understand the hatred and ugliness behind it.
My own Episcopal denomination is in danger of being torn apart by conservative Episcopal priests and believers who have never accepted female clergy and hate gays and lesbians. That is the main reason for the dispute, and it crystalized after the ordination of Gene Robinson, a non-celibate gay, as a bishop in the church. These dissidents look to the leadership of Anglican bishops in Africa who hold some of the most retrograde opinions about gays imaginable.
There was a reason the Founding Fathers provided for the separation of church and state. They had seen the horror of religious wars in Europe, and wanted to spare America from having to endure any of that. We now risk a descent into a maelstrom of unknown ferocity by letting the fundamentalists, the American Taliban, take this most precious protection away from us. Let each of us believe what we want without shouting our belief through a bullhorn.