Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [18]
These days we have come to expect the right wing to represent any Democratic initiative as a pretext for Christian persecution, but it was not always so. Before the 1980s, religious and right were not fused together. Fundamentalists and evangelicals hailed the election of Jimmy Carter, a former Sunday school teacher, a friend of Rev. Billy Graham, and the first evangelical president of the United States. He was not a president one would suspect of seeking to corrupt Christian youth. But with the IRS proposal, Carter seemed to mutate almost instantaneously in the minds of many evangelicals from good Christian leader to anti-Christian autocrat. What made the transformation seem plausible to them was the appearance of a new villain on the American political landscape in the late 1970s, an ideological network that had cunningly invaded Carter’s government in its fiendish bid to indoctrinate Christian youth with atheistic, immoral, and unpatriotic ideas. It was called secular humanism.
Nailing Jell-O to a Tree
Humanism is a vague term, in use since the Renaissance, denoting the study of human history and culture (hence the term humanities). In the twentieth century, religious reformers used the term to describe an emphasis on human, as opposed to divine, affairs. In this vein, a number of American intellectuals signed a document called the Humanist Manifesto in 1933 that laid out the tenets of religious humanism. The loose movement would later produce a rather insignificant organization of several thousand members (about the size of a single modern mega-church) called the American Humanist Association.
Secularism is also a vague term, coined in 1851 by English atheist and convicted blasphemer George Jacob Holyoake to denote a rejection of theological answers to questions of science and ethics.
Secular humanism is a concept so nebulous that its definition defied even William Safire, who stumbled through a column that compared the exercise to “trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.”31 The term’s gelatinous nature stems from its origins, or rather from its lack of origins in any genuine political movement. For secular humanism is a make-believe doctrine—invented by Christian theologians to blame an imagined enemy for the diminishing influence of religion in modern society. It was later repurposed by the American religious right as a “code word for the precepts and practices of almost anyone this side of Communism who disagrees with them, including liberals, feminists, atheists, civil libertarians, internationalists.”32
The first historical record of secular humanism appeared in 1933, courtesy of Anglo-Catholic Rev. William George Peck, who in a series of lectures predicted the imminent collapse of the “false gospel of secular humanism.”33 Ten years later, the nonexistent Jell-O doctrine had not only avoided collapse, it now threatened Christianity “more powerfully than in any period since the end of the Dark Ages” according to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple.34 And in 1949, a San Francisco conference of Episcopal bishops warned their colleagues, “We have been contaminated by the secular humanism of our time,”35 as if it were toxic slime from the Andromeda galaxy. In 1965, at the end of the revolutionary Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI sounded like a beaten pontiff bowing to the new alien overlords:
Secular humanism, revealing itself in its horrible anticlerical reality has, in a certain sense, defied the