most minimal gun safety legislation, and strongly supports the Israeli destruction of Palestinian national life because he believes God mandates such oppression. Tennessee congressman Scott DesJarlais, a churchgoing, outspoken Christian, doggedly fights against providing affordable health care to the poor—not to mention the fact that he pressured his girlfriend to have an abortion, even though he claims to be antiabortion.18 Evangelical Republican Jim Banks, a congressman from Indiana, works hard to stop stem cell research19 despite the fact that such research could alleviate countless cases of suffering and fight the battle against ailments such as juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, strokes, etc. The Christian governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, denigrated students publicly demonstrating for safe schools as “shameful” and offered up “prayer” as the only solution to gun violence;20 he’s also signed legislation allowing foster care agencies to discriminate against non-Christians.21
The nation’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a hard-core Evangelical who actively seeks to undermine and underfund public education, using her office’s power instead to “advance God’s kingdom.”22 Republican and Christian fundamentalist Greg Gianforte, the congressman from Montana arrested for body-slamming a reporter against a wall and then onto the ground, argues against retirement—because if Noah was still working at the age of six hundred, why should older Americans stop working?23 So much for compassion for our elderly. Republican and born-again Christian Abigail Whelan, a state senator in Minnesota, fights to allow wealthy corporations the opportunity to avoid paying taxes, further increasing the unfair tax burden on working-class people, all in the name of loving Jesus.24 Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama has committed himself so strongly to building a giant border wall to separate Mexicans and Americans that, if his plans are not fulfilled, he has promised to filibuster the Senate by reading the King James Bible.25 Iowa congressman Steve King, a Christian Republican, retweets white supremacist and Nazi posts and openly mocks the student survivors of the Parkland mass shooting and condemns their push for sane gun laws; he also fights against stem cell research, humane animal rights laws, equality for gays and lesbians—he even voted against providing aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
What all of these powerful men and women have in common is that they claim devotion to Jesus and fealty to God and insist that they are moral and proclaim that those who don’t believe in Jesus or God are immoral—and yet their political agenda is flagrantly unethical, in that they seek to destroy mother nature, flood our cities and towns with ever more lethal guns, deny individuals the right to marry who they love, seek to imprison more poor people, seek to turn away refugees in need of safe harbor, and so on.
The bizarre reality is that—aside from the notable exception of churchgoing African Americans—most of the people who fight against structural relief for those in poverty, who fight against equality between men and women, who fight against fairness for gays and lesbians and transgender people, who fight against providing a haven to refugee families fleeing violence, who fight against paid family leave and subsidized health care for the poor, who fight against ending cruelty to animals, who fight against efforts to keep our planet healthy, who fight against stem cell research, who fight against effective sex education, who fight against accurate scientific school curricula, who fight against rehabilitative endeavors in our prisons, who undermine Native Americans’ ability to protect the little bit of land they have left, who are the quickest to downplay or ignore racial injustice and disparage movements such as Black Lives Matter, and who fight for the proliferation of semiautomatic weapons, for the governmental use of torture, for increased use of the death penalty, and ongoing militarism at home and abroad—these folks tend to be the very same Americans who claim to nurture the closet relationship to God.
These are also the very same people who indignantly claim to be the moral beacons among us.
Hating on Atheists
In their sanctimony, God-believers such as Sean Hannity, Jeff Sessions, Oliver North, and Mike Pence not only support regressive policies, but they do so while simultaneously asserting their moral superiority. They insist that they are the ethical ones. Indeed, their supporters are widely known as “values” voters.
Values voters? Talk about a semantic bamboozle—as if the secular men and women among us who fight for human rights, who support marriage equality and protecting the environment, who seek to limit the proliferation of semiautomatic assault weapons in our society, who are troubled by racism and sexism, who think the death penalty is barbaric, who recognize the prison industrial complex as inhumane, who worry about increasing income inequality, who support a woman’s right to control her own body, who advocate peace, who seek universal health care, and who are horrified by the animal-slaughtering industry—have no values?
But you see, such rhetoric shouldn’t surprise us. It’s an old trope of religion, and one of the most successful falsehoods promulgated by the strongly devout: that values and morals are something that only godly folks can have.
“Unbelief,” proclaimed eminent thirteenth-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, “is the greatest of sins.”26
Got that?
Not murder, not child abuse, not sexual assault, not lying, not destroying nature, not slavery, not torturing animals. Rather: failing to believe in God. That is the height of immorality, or rather, the very wellspring—according to one of Christianity’s most brilliant minds.
This idea that one needs faith in God in order to be moral—and that atheism and immorality are thus intertwined—has roots much older than Saint Thomas Aquinas. According to the Bible, as declared in Psalm 14 of the Old Testament, those who don’t believe in God are not only fools, they are not only corrupt, but they are incapable of doing good. In the Christian scriptures of the New Testament, atheists are explicitly associated with wickedness and darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14). Similar sentiments can be found in that most holy of Hindu texts, the Bhagavad Gita, which links the absence of religious belief with immorality, stating that secularity leads to destructive tendencies, and that those who lack religious belief have no way of knowing good from bad or right from wrong.27 And according to the Quran of Islam, those who do not believe in Allah have a diseased heart; they are hell-bound liars28 who are so evil that they deserve to have their heads and fingers cut off.29
Fast-forward through the centuries, and Aquinas’s viewpoint echoes into our contemporary world. For example, in the twentieth century’s first Christian bestseller, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that the very concept of justice requires belief in God; without God, there can exist no urge to do right and act responsibly. Lewis’s better-selling heir, Evangelical pastor Rick Warren, claims in The Purpose Driven Life that people lacking Bible-based religious beliefs have no motivation for being good or moral—their lives are characterized by selfishness and a cold indifference to others. According to convicted felon, accused wife-beater, Twitter racist, Trump ally, and leading conservative Christian Dinesh D’Souza, atheism is “cowardly moral escapism”30 and, as “the opiate of the morally corrupt,” constitutes a delusion promulgated and imbibed by the sexually unrestrained, who insist that there is no God so that they can be free to live lives of sin and depravity.31 Irish American professor of the New Testament John Dominic Crossan suggests that atheists are akin to sociopaths and psychopaths.32 American professor of philosophy and religion James Spiegel writes that atheism is “the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality.”33 Leading American rabbi Shmuley Boteach rants through one YouTube video after another that atheism and immorality are one and the same. Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has declared that “the logical result of atheism . . . is severe moral decay.”34 Former Republican presidential candidate and governor of Ohio John Kasich has argued that when people are secular, they
