Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [24]
And with that victory, the once mighty religion of Secular Humanism sank into decline, gradually disappearing from church sermons, newspaper ads, court dockets, and news reports until there was nothing left but a clammy residue. Ask anyone under the age of thirty what they think about secular humanism, and you will likely get a blank look. Paradoxically, the most obvious remnant of the hysteria is a still-active organization called the Council for Secular Humanism. Humanist Paul Kurtz founded the organization in 1980 to exploit the publicity generated by the right-wing hysteria. The organization’s Facebook page has 1,126 fans.
Secular Humanism’s Spawn
But though the dream has faded, the war against secular humanism left a rich legacy that conservative strategists have tapped again and again. Bill O’Reilly’s “progressive secularists,” for example, are direct descendents of the mythical secular humanists of yore. Though the progressive secularists focused on Christmas spirit rather than textbook indoctrination, they shared the secular humanists’ objective of a “brave new progressive world” and their penchant for Christian persecution. Indeed, many influential secular humanists, including the ACLU, the activist judges, and the liberal media, evidently converted to progressive secularism en masse sometime in the 1990s, joining forces with new secular schemers like George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Media Matters.org.
In 2010, Glenn Beck stripped O’Reilly’s progressive secularists of their secularism, leaving them bare “progressives.” He told listeners:
What we’re talking about is an ideological movement that has set its sights on the destruction of the Constitution and the fundamental transformation of our Republic. It is called the Progressive Movement.65
Beck’s progressives, led by Obama, Pelosi, and documentary director Michael Moore, are even more vicious and ideologically amorphous than their predecessors. Combining the revolutionary ambitions of 1950s communists with the repressive tendencies of the 1970s secular humanists, the progressives don’t actually stand for anything except the destruction of all that is good in America. Every cause they champion is just part of their master plan to seize power and tyrannize everyone. But that’s a story for another chapter.
More broadly, conservatives found in the chimera of secular humanism and the IRS desegregation threat a new strategy for extending and mobilizing their political base: invent a liberal conspiracy that indoctrinates children with immoral, anti-Christian ideas. They have repeatedly exploited the fear of malicious brainwashing to provoke outraged hostility toward anything they oppose, including women’s rights, gay rights, sex education, pornography, and the teaching of evolution, as well as to incite resentment against a certain president who “may be a Marxist.”66 In the process, they began to hew a new fissure in American society, transforming modest political divisions into a ferocious unbridled conflict between white Christian conservatives and their imaginary persecutors on the left. The fissure has grown steadily through the decades, exacerbating factionalism and undermining mutual trust until it reached a point where the president of the United States cannot speak to America’s students about the value of education without provoking a nationwide paroxysm of paranoid hysteria.
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MORE OR LESS NORMAL PEOPLE
Plumbing the Paranoia of Persecution Politics
Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.
—Charles Manson
AT POINTS IN THE BOOK, we’ll take a break from our wildlife safari to ask what it all means and why it’s happening. For instance, in this chapter, we will talk about the phenomenon of social paranoia and its relation to persecution politics. While you may be tempted to charge ahead to ogle more right-wing craziness, I