Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [20]
Rev. John C. Macon, head of the Eastern Association of Christian Schools, explained the rationale behind the legal battles against the “contamination” of secular humanism:
When the public school system was founded in the 1850s, it had a strong emphasis on morals. Gradually it was torn down and replaced with John Dewey and secular humanism, and we built our own schools. This legal fight is a way of saying “we’re not abandoning this one; those who have strong religious feelings will not compromise. We will not keep abandoning the ship to the cancerous liberal element that wants to contaminate everything.”44
So when the IRS moved against seg academies in August of 1978, the Christian soldiers were already manning the trenches and deploying advance teams. They knew exactly who was behind the proposal and what its hidden purpose was. A former Nixon staffer and up-and-coming news commentator named Pat Buchanan spelled out the coercive role of the IRS in secular humanism’s stealthy slippery-slope assault:
The so-called “segregation academies” established everywhere that some judge has handed down an integration order or busing decision have long been Public Enemy No. 1 at the IRS. But this new “procedure” is a new departure. And its implications are sweeping. If allowed to stand, every private school in the country can be threatened with loss of its tax exemption if it does not conform with the social values of the secular humanism which is the newly established religion in the United States.45
The response to public entreaties from Weyrich, Buchanan, and other conservative leaders was overwhelming. The IRS received 120,000 letters of protest, more than it ever collected in response to a proposed change.46 Southern defenders of white privilege like Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-NC) joined religious right newcomers like Rep. Steven Symms (R-ID) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in excoriating the IRS.
Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), who exemplified both Southern racism and Christian evangelicalism, was a fitting leader for the legislative counterattack against the “collectivist, totalitarian . . . counterfeit religion” of secular humanism.47 He sponsored a bill to prohibit the IRS from enforcing antidiscrimination rules. This time, the bill passed, and the IRS capitulated, leaving singed globs of secular humanist goo splattered across the steps of Capitol Hill. Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority. The religious right had found its roar.
“The Most Dangerous Religion in America”
Yet for all its ferocity, the roar of the right was like that of a cornered animal. It was a roar of fear. True believers imagined themselves to be beset on all sides by howling humanists who threatened daily to contaminate innocent Christian children with dangerous propaganda. Perversely, the victory against the IRS did not lead the right wing to discount its estimation of secular humanist might. On the contrary, they inflated it—manufacturing a rich mythology of the secular humanist menace that included world domination and all manner of social ills.
In 1979, Duncan Homer, an evangelical preacher from Texas, published a book called Secular Humanism: The Most Dangerous Religion in America. Senator Jesse Helms contributed the introduction. A stream of religious right luminaries endorsed it. The book laid out the secular humanists’ secret plan to destroy Christianity in order to eliminate opposition to the establishment of a “new world order” that was “Anti-God, Anti-Christ, Anti-Bible, and Anti-American.” Sound familiar? Twenty-five years later, Bill O’Reilly would add “progressive,