One of the chapters from the book discusses the prospect of an atheist getting into the Oval Office and Paul was kind enough to let me reprint it here (I’ve omitted all the footnotes below, but I assure you they are there):

The 2000 film The Contender featured as its protagonist an avowed atheist senator, selected to fill a vacant vice-presidency. The contender in question was eventually confirmed, but even the character’s portrayer, Joan Allen, found the prospect unrealistic. “That’s where the film takes latitude,” she has said. “It’s idealistic, I knew it was a very gutsy thing for my character to say. But I don’t think Americans could tolerate an atheist in that office.”

Allen’s political analysis is right on. As the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in 2000:

Forty years [after John F. Kennedy was elected president] religious prejudice, which never carried quite the sting of racism, has never been weaker. Only nonbelievers are left out of the atmosphere of ecumenical warmth: it is inconceivable that a professed atheist or agnostic could be elected President today, and even an unchurched Deist like Jefferson wouldn’t stand a chance.

Had Kennedy been an atheist, he would have never been given a chance to tell the country what it ought and ought not ask of its country. Gallup polls leading up to the 1960 presidential campaign showed heavy resistance to a hypothetical atheist candidate, with outright refusals to vote for such a person never dipping below 74 percent. Not until the turn of the millennium did polls begin to show that a majority of Americans would at least refrain from ruling out voting for a well-qualified atheist candidate for president. In 2000, a Zogby poll showed that figure to be at 59 percent, dipping seven years later to 51 percent. In the 2007 survey, no group fared more poorly on the presidential level than atheists. 39 percent declared that atheism would rule out the possibility of their vote, while gays, Mormons, and Arab-Americans all outperformed atheists.

Different surveys from the same period can yield very different results on the question of the acceptance of an atheist presidential candidate. While some polls did show the tide turning in the 2000s in the atheists’ favor, a Princeton survey in 2006 showed the percentage of Americans who would vote for an atheist candidate mired at 33.

In 2006, a Gallup poll showed that a meager 14 percent of Americans thought their fellow citizens were “ready” for an atheist president. Democrats were the most pessimistic for nonbelievers’ chances, with only 8 percent thinking the country prepared, as compared to 14 percent of Republicans and 21 percent of independents. This is mirrored in a 2007 Fox News poll that had the number at 15 percent confidence in the prospect. One must take into thorough consideration, however, what is meant when a poll asks whether the respondent feels America is “ready” for one kind of candidate or another. Certainly, the question can be heard as to ask the respondent what they think of the current cultural climate, but it can also be filtered by the biases of the respondent or the prejudices of their immediate surroundings. To what the respondent thinks they are responding can make a great deal of difference, and may not reflect the reality of the public’s attitudes as a whole.

In the face of these daunting numbers, Christopher Hitchens, characteristically, scoffs. “How do they know they wouldn’t [vote for an atheist]?” he asks, “They haven’t had an offer from a decent atheist yet…if Republicans had been asked in the seventies, ‘would they vote for a divorced ex-movie actor for president,’ they probably would have said ‘no.’”

John C. Green of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life knows that an atheist would have great trouble reaching national elective office, but offers a remedy: “A good way to change perceptions is to have effective atheist candidates and officeholders.” In other words, some atheists will have to throw their hats in the ring to begin making gains for future office seekers. Of course, Pete Stark is the beginning of realizing this prescription, but there is little else on the horizon.

But if we suppose the polls look harsher for atheists than is actually the case, what would happen if a plausible atheist candidate took a run for the White House? Fearing for the prospects this candidate, atheist blogger Brent Rasmussen has written in fervent opposition, believing that the current political climate allows only for a major backlash against atheists should such a candidate run. “I believe that a candidate who made an issue of their atheism would become a laughingstock gimmick,” he has written. Rasmussen thinks the only chance for an atheist candidate is for a series of closeted atheist politicians to declare themselves to the point that the concept becomes dull and insignificant. But for now, he insists that someone waiting for an atheist to throw his hat into the ring is “dreaming,” saying, “It’ll never happen in our lifetime. In fact, if the country swings back towards the conservative end of the spectrum again in a few years…I wouldn’t be surprised if atheists were rounded up and placed into detention camps — just for being atheists.”

If an atheist were to fight his or her way to the general election, that candidate would almost certainly be a Democrat. Those describing themselves as liberal were far more likely to support an atheist candidate for president, according to a February 2007 Gallup poll. 67 percent of liberals showed a willingness to support an atheist candidate, versus 48 percent of moderates and only 27 percent of conservatives. (Blogger Robert Ellman, however, imagines an atheist presidential prospect rising from the Republican ranks, musing, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if an attractive atheist candidate with a photogenic family took on the GOP’s radical Christians? I suspect many secular minded civil libertarians would be both relieved and appreciative.”)

If there is to be any plausibility to such a run, national political figures who are not atheists themselves (and none of them seem to be) will have to do some convincing on nonbelievers’ behalf. Indeed, very few of any import since George H.W. Bush have gone so far as to utterly dismiss atheists as potential commanders-in-chief. Al Gore was asked in 2000 whether it would bother him if a non-believer ascended to the presidency, to which he responded:

No, it would not. I think that it would depend on who the person was, of course. But do I believe that someone can have an understanding of our Constitution [and] a true spirit of tolerance without affirming a particular and specialized belief in God? Yes, I do. I think that is incumbent upon anyone who affirms a respect for tolerance.

Such a candidate would face their first hurdle vying for the nomination of their party, and for argument’s sake we will assume the party to be the Democrats. As we have seen, the nonreligious are most plentiful in the West, and that may well be where our atheist Democrat makes his or her stand, gathering up delegates in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. In order to make it out West, though, the atheist candidate would need to prove themselves in the first slate of contests. The Iowa caucuses may be trouble for such a candidate, but the first actual primary may hold more hope. New Hampshirites were given the chance to expound on their attitudes concerning politics and irreligion as their state was readying to be invaded by the 2008 primary season, and emblematic of the Granite State’s penchant for independence, 61 percent chose, in a hypothetical match-up, the candidate who was an atheist that shared their political views, versus only 21 percent who would opt for the candidate of their same religion, but did not agree with them on the issues. If New Hampshire is a bellwether, as it often is, the atheist candidate could find the potential for an early victory, or at least a respectable showing, here.

Still, the prospect for a presidential Bright looks, well, dim in the current political climate. Short of a major cultural change toward tolerance of the irreligious, such a candidate would likely need to benefit from a disaffected party that is refraining from turning out for primary elections, leaving many contests to the energized secularists who finally have one of their own on the ballot. Maybe, just maybe, the party of Jefferson might then nominate the personification of the wall of separation.

The general election would be an even steeper hill to climb, of course. The GOP would likely need to have nominated someone as fervently religious as the Democratic candidate was nonreligious, someone so zealously right wing as to turn off the moderate center of the electorate. Even that seems less than plausible, as a Pew survey in 2007 revealed that 69 percent of Americans felt that a president should have “strong religious beliefs,” while only 27 percent disagreed. As Kenneth Woodard of Newsweek once advised, “If you want to be president of all the people, invoke a generic deity everyone can salute.”

Of course, Michael Medved rejects the idea of an atheist president out of hand, writing in a column that there would be no way to bridge the spiritual gap between the president and his religious constituency, given that belief “drives the life and work” of the vast majority of Americans, and asserts that a president who rejects such a fundamental belief held by so many will be seen as condescending, no matter his or her intentions. There is certainly some truth to this claim, especially at a time in American politics when condescension is seen as the most mortal of sins (as Barack Obama has learned following comments that “bitter” religious Americans “cling” to their faith due to difficult and unsure times).

America may need a generation or two before such an atheistic ascension could truly take place, and it would almost certainly have to be an America in which Muslims and homosexuals could be considered to have respectable chances for the same (we have established now that Jews, African Americans, women, and Mormons are no longer relegated to the back bench, even if they have not yet sat in the Oval Office).

The work would have to start now, of course. Atheist politicos would need to begin nurturing and training candidates for offices at all levels, and be prepared to lose many, many elections, if only to begin to wear down Americans’ resistance, and make the idea of atheist candidates commonplace. They will have to make common cause with organizations and interests in areas unrelated to faith or lack thereof. They will have to prove to religious voters, at least liberally religious voters, that they pose no threat, and will be a friend.

Those candidates will have to be charismatic, eloquent, and approachable, and spotlessly moral. They must tap enthusiasm within Americans for things that are not limited to the supernatural, but tied to the best of what humans can do right now, right here on Earth, both for themselves and for the many generations they will leave behind. Indeed, atheists will need their own Great Communicator, less reactionary than the policers like Michael Newdow, and less confrontational than instigators like Sam Harris.

If so, perhaps Pete Stark is right about Ron Reagan Jr. What better name to ease the concerns of Americans who wish to see a new morning in America? Atheist Americans will not have faith in this possibility, but they might have hope.

Is there really any hope for atheists in the political arena? What do we have to do to make a secular America a reality? What would a victory even look like? Those are the kinds of questions Paul addresses in Under the Stained Glass Ceiling and the book is now available on Amazon.

That’s the crux of the conflict in a fantastic graphic novel called Americus (First Second Books, 2011) by MK Reed with illustrations by Jonathan David Hill:

The story centers around 14-year-old Neil Barton, a shy kid living in Americus, Oklahoma. He loves the fictional fantasy series “The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde.” It’s really popular, but, you know, it features witches and magical spells and talking dogs so it must be anti-everything-good-and-right-with-the-world. His best friend Danny loves the books, too, but Danny’s mom is leading the charge to get them banned:

During an argument, Danny tells his mom a secret that gets him sent off to military school and she channels her frustration into getting the city council to ban the books from a local library.

The non-essential characters don’t have a lot of depth to them and neither do most of the side-stories, but there’s enough material to flesh out these ideas in future books if the author ever wanted to do so.

There’s some criticism that the Christian mother is a “Bible-thumping caricature,” too stereotypical, too one-sided, too bats hit crazy, but I don’t buy that. Let’s face it: These people really exist. And Reed makes it clear that the mother loves her kids and wants what’s best for them… she is just completely misguided in how she goes about it. You wish her husband would get the courage to stand up to her, but he never quite gets there in the book.

The other characters include Neil’s single mother, a boy who helps Neil discover new music, girls in Shop class who have to put up with sexist shit from their male classmates (but who take a liking to Neil), and a wonderful librarian who has to deal with the book banners and tries to fight back against them:

The book is aimed at younger kids, but I still liked it. It was a quick read and a nice story focusing on a topic we (unfortunately) still have to deal with today. If enough people had the strength and courage to fight against censorship — and Neil is learning how to do just that throughout the book — maybe events like Banned Books Week would become superfluous.

(Images reprinted with permission from First Second Books)

While men still outearn women, the gap is shrinking. When it comes to young adults, women are graduating from college in greater numbers, have higher GPAs and for the first time ever, are more likely to earn a PhD than a man is. Women are also getting married and becoming parents at younger ages, while men are still more likely to live with the 'rents. What is the cause of this growing divide?

On the flipside, William J. Bennett, CNN contributor, and author of The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood recently wrote that, “for the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men.” The New York Times reported in 2010 that women account for more than half of college students and nearly half of the work force.

It should be a woo-hoo!-women moment. And it is. But it’s hard to be completely happy about the fact that while women are becoming more successful, men seem to be regressing.

Bennett writes:

Today, 18-to-34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to-17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways.

Articles from Hanna Rosin (The End of Men), Kay S. Hymowitz (Where Have the Good Men Gone? and Fiona Roberts (America’s Lost Boys: Why ARE so many young men failing to grow up?) have also highlighted the plight of young men in America.

According to the Daily Mail article by Roberts, psychologists blame the man-baby trend on a range of factors, from boys becoming disillusioned at young ages about their roles in society to the rise of video games and the internet.

Research like the ones cited above might hit close to home, considering many atheists are young and male. Research from Ariela Keysar (2007) reports that one-third of American atheists are under 25 years old, and half are under age 30. About one-fourth of 25-year-old white men lived at home in 2007 — before the latest recession — compared with one-fifth in 2000 and less than one-eighth in 1970 according to the New York Times article cited earlier. However, research also tell us atheists tend to score high on measures of IQ, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy.

So what is the problem with men these days? Or is there even a problem?

Immature men get a "Hall Pass" from their wives in this 2011 film.

It’s not like there are a ton of great role models out there. Ashton Kutcher? Chris Brown? Ben Roethlisberger? Even the usually brilliant Richard Dawkins got some heat last year for mocking Rebecca Watson after she said she felt uncomfortable when a man propositioned her in an elevator.

Mark Driscoll, noted sexist and a founding pastor at Mars Hill Church, thinks more young men need the Bible to grow up.

Earlier this month, Driscoll wrote:

I’m a pastor, and I know this will seem crazy, but let’s put down the remote, set aside the porno, and see if maybe the Bible has any wisdom since what we are doing isn’t working.

In an older RELEVANT magazine interview, Driscoll said that men have entered an extended adolescence as “guys.”

It’s just extended adolescence, where 20s, 30s, sometimes even in his 40s, he doesn’t really want to get married, doesn’t really want to have kids, doesn’t really want to pursue a career. He has a lot of hobbies, got a lot of buddies, watches a lot of porn, gambles, has a lot of fun, maybe plays in some band or is in a guild of World of Warcraft, or something ridiculous like that… I think part of the problem is, as well, that the Church in large part has accommodated that.

Those guys tend not to go to church. If those guys do show up at church, it’s usually just to find a couple of gals to break the commandments with. And the Church doesn’t really know what to do with them, so the least likely person in America to go to church is a guy in his 20s who is single. Without knowing what to do with those guys, they commit crimes, they get women pregnant, they’re a drain on social services, they don’t raise their kids, they don’t contribute to church, they’re not getting ready to lead the next generation. I’d say it’s nothing short of a crisis, it’s a real problem.

According to an article on The Catholic News Agency’s website, “Nearly 40 percent of post-abortive women in one study reported that partners pressured them into having the abortions.” Emory University professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is quoted as saying “the most enthusiastic fans of abortion have been men — at least until they have children of their own.”

Christian blogger Ruthie Dean also writes that women have been damaged by dating immature guys who don’t want families — immature guys like the one she calls “Mr. I Don’t Believe in Organized Religion.” She wrote on a christanitytoday.com blog post last week:

…standards should not be created based on the worst examples but instead on what God deems right…. humans cannot change people. God is in the business of changing and redeeming men’s hearts.

I know someone who agrees with Driscoll and Dean. She told me she wishes the guy she is seeing (he is 23ish) would move out of his parents’ and go to church. She mentioned his atheism as if it was a problem that would keep him from maturing. I took offense to that.

OK, well, sure, there are some basic, positive concepts that could benefit anyone in the Bible.

But there’s a whole lot of scary stuff, too.

Should women be treated like property and killed if they don’t cry out for help while being raped? Should men be willing to give their wife sexually to a pharaoh as a bargaining chip like Abraham did? The Bible is a literary cornucopia of men behaving badly.

As a pre-teen in Bible school, I heard the story of David, Bethsheba and Uriah. When my Bible teacher read the verses where God described David as a man “after my own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22), it made me feel like if a murderer and pervert was the closest person out there to God’s heart then humanity had to be absolutely hopeless. The message I got was that something was wrong with each and every one of us.

Now I’m a little older and a little smarter. And what I hope for is to not marry a man like David. And I don’t want my future kids to have a dad like Abraham, who would sacrifice his son because he heard voices. I definitely wouldn’t want to marry a man who prays upon and bases his ideology on the Bible, especially not with messages like these:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. — 1 Timothy 2:11

If men need fiction to grow up, I’m thinking books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaid’s Tale, If This is a Man (not fiction), and Brave New World are good starts. To me, Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium series offers more of a solid condemnation of violence done to women than the Bible does.

What do you think? Are the statistics concerning the growing immaturity of men overblown? And if not, what will help?

(Image via Shutterstock)

Katherine Stewart

Katherine was gracious enough to answer questions about her book and our exchange is below:

Hemant: The book’s subtitle is “The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.” Can you explain the “stealth” part of that? What exactly is the Christian Right doing that’s somewhat secretive or sneaky?

Katherine: Many of the initiatives I looked at rely to a surprising degree on misdirection and deceit of one group or another. The Good News Club itself, for example presents itself to parent and administrators as an outside group. But it creates the false but unavoidable (and, as far as I can tell, intentional) impression in young school children that its form of religion is officially endorsed by the school. It describes itself with nonthreatening labels such as “nondenominational” and “interdenominational,” which makes people think it’s broadly Christian, when in fact it’s highly sectarian. And it pretends to offer “Bible study,” when really it’s about indoctrinating kids in a fundamentalist form of religion. Anyone who doubts that should read the Statement of Faith on their workers’ applications.

Other religious initiatives are equally sneaky. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools curriculum courses, for instance, present themselves as nonsectarian study of the Bible as a work of literature and history. But that’s just a thin cover for sectarian proselytizing. The “pizza evangelists,” who come into the schools under the pretense of offering instruction on bullying, anti-drug awareness, or character education turn around and use the platform to create opportunities for proselytizing. I should add that many of the activists I spoke to, and whom I describe in my book, take a delight in the sneakiness of their approach.

Hemant: If parents need to give permission for their children to attend meetings of the Good News Clubs, why does the fact that these groups meet in a school setting matter? Wouldn’t these parents just teach their children the same things in their own house or at a church if the school wasn’t an option?

Katherine: With older kids, that approach makes some sense. But remember, Good News Clubs focus on very young kids, in their first years of public schooling; a centerpiece of their program is the “wordless book,” which can be used to convert children as young as four and five years old. Kids at that age simply aren’t able to distinguish what takes place in a school and what is endorsed by the school.

Remember: we’re talking about little kids here. In their minds, no institution has as much authority as the public school. For them, if it is taught in school, it must be true.

I have seen several instances, including at my own elementary school, when the Good News Clubs were offered cheaper and better space at a church immediately next door to the school, and they declined. They want to be in the school because they know that kids will think their Club is endorsed by the school. Another important factor is that by placing the Clubs in the school, it becomes easier for Good News Club instructors to persuade the children enrolled in their groups to work to recruit other children in the school.

Hemant: What was the significance of the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School? How does it come into play today?

Katherine: The Milford decision removed any serious Establishment Clause concerns in connection with Good News-style activities, and at the same time it said that to exclude such activities represented an unconstitutional violation of speech rights. The net effect has been to propose that whenever a school creates what is technically known as a “limited public forum,” which is to say, as soon as it opens its doors to outside groups of pretty much any kind, it must allow religious groups such as the Good News Club. This decision opened the way for church planting in public schools and a host of other religious initiatives in schools.

In effect it gives a trump card to religious groups, because it is only in the case of religious groups that to exclude them amounts to a violation of their speech rights. So now schools can exclude a soccer club, or martial arts, or political groups, or a theater group if they wish, but the one category they may not exclude is religious groups.

The Good News Clubs made quick use of this trump card. Their numbers in public schools went up 728 per cent in the ten years since the Milford decision. And church-planting in New York City’s public schools went from 0 to 160 over the same period.

This decision is problematic, in my view. Schools routinely exclude partisan political groups from meeting in the school building, for instance, and nobody imagines that we are discriminating against anybody’s viewpoint. But now, when religious groups are excluded, they complain that they are being discriminated against. The Milford decision also undermined the idea that peer pressure or coercion are important factors in school-related cases.

Hemant: Do all these Christian groups need to pay the schools rent for use of the space? Do they pay what other similar groups pay? And can they get away with not paying if it’s a school-sanctioned club like many other after-school groups?

Katherine: Generally they pay what other outside groups pay, which is not very much. But in many instances, you can’t call it “rent” — it is generally a use fee or a custodian’s fee. In the instance of churches planted in public schools in New York City, it amounts to a state subsidy. Instead of paying for their own buildings, buying their own furniture, paying for heat, electricity, air conditioning, renovations, and upkeep of the facility, the churches in question simply paid a custodians’ fee. That’s not “rent” by any stretch of the imagination.

Hemant: I only know of a handful of high school atheist groups and possibly only one middle school atheist group. Do any other religious groups (or atheist groups) try to form in elementary schools or is that strictly a Christian phenomenon? Either way, would that be a good idea for those of us who are not Christian?

Katherine: I don’t know of any atheist groups in elementary schools, but I think it would be a bad idea for the same reason that I think it’s a bad idea for the Christian groups to do it. However, it would be interesting to know what would happen if people were to try to set up an atheist group in a public elementary school that went after “churched” kids, the way Good News Clubs go after “unchurched” kids. If such a club were disallowed, that would highlight problems with the current policy and might potentially be used to challenge it.

Hemant: Would you rather see schools allow *all* religious groups to meet in the building (outside of class time) or should they close the doors to religious groups altogether? Are both legal options?

Katherine: Again, if we are talking about elementary schools, I would exclude religion as a category, just as we exclude politics as a category. It used to be legal to exclude religion as a category, and it is legal in a limited way in certain contexts. However, in most of the country, as a result of the Milford decision, it is no longer legal to exclude religious groups.

At the high school level, I think after-school groups in general should have maximum leeway. But bear in mind that a number of the religious groups make an effort to insert themselves in school-related activities, such as athletics. If Christian athletes want to get together after the game and after school to talk about their religion or engage in acts of worship, that seems perfectly fine. But many groups now attempt to make their religion part of the game, inevitably forcing everyone on the team to take a public stand.

We should not get overly legalistic here. Some things are legally or constitutionally permissible, but that does not mean that they are the right thing to do. If a school in a diverse community is to function well, its members need to show a certain amount of civility and respect toward one another. We are all free to practice our faith, if any, in our homes, houses of worship, and any number of other places. Do we really need to turn our public schools into religious battlefields?

Hemant: At one point in the book, Pastor Rich Lang compares the methods of the Child Evangelism Fellowship (which runs the Good News Clubs) to the Hitler Youth because of the way they target children. Is that a fair comparison?

Katherine: Some of the evangelical missionaries that I have read explicitly cite the Nazis, the Taliban, and the Bolsheviks as models of other groups that focus on children. Not every effort to preach to the young is a form of fascism, but fascism characteristically involves indoctrination of the young.

Hemant: Other than getting educated on the issues, what would you like readers to do in response to reading your book?

Katherine: They should support groups working for the separation of church and state. They should support politicians and political movements that work to bring better people to the judiciary. They should strengthen programs and policies that promote tolerance and civility in our public schools. They should inform themselves about what is taking place in their local schools, and they should educate others about this movement in our midst.

The Good News Club is available today in the four bookstores left in the country and everywhere online.

The book (which comes out today) is called The Good News Club, and as innocuous as that sounds, it is the scariest story I have read in a long time. Coming from a horror story fanatic, that is saying something.

The Good News Club — the organization, not the book — insinuates itself into public schools posing as an innocent after school Bible study group. They are backed by the CEF, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, an organization hell-bent — if you’ll excuse the pun — on breaking the public school system and bringing education back to homes and churches. They are Bible-believing Christians who believe America was founded on Christianity and it is their holy mission to bring the American people back to Christ.

Stewart explains how the Good News Clubs come into our communities unnoticed and how they “harvest” children for their cause. “Harvest” is actually the word the CEF uses for this. Children need permission from their parents to attend the meetings, which is part of how they are allowed to have these Bible study groups in public schools in the first place. The solution seems to be to just not let your child attend, but there are many moderate Christians who will. The children are indoctrinated to believe that only Bible-believing Christians will go to heaven and that you are only good if you believe in Jesus. What is almost worse, is that the children are left with the natural-but-false impression that these teachings are endorsed by their school. This indoctrination breaks up schoolyard friendships, which breaks up communities, but it also penetrates the homes and breaks up families. The CEF makes no excuses; this is exactly their goal. Through the children they want to bring more families to their church and anybody who is not convinced simply isn’t saved.

The book gives many examples of the frightening methods these people use to infiltrate public schools. The author calls these people Christian Nationalists based on their view that Christianity is the foundation of modern day America. At one point, when speaking to Rich Lang, the pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church, there’s an even more sinister comparison:

… In Lang’s view, the American public remains inexcusably ignorant about the new religion in its midst. The new fundamentalism, he insists, is not “historic Christianity.” In fact, it’s not uniquely Christian, nor is it uniquely American. “Fundamentalism is a global phenomenon, and it has come back on steroids since the 1970s and 1980s. Whether you’re talking Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, all forms of fundamentalism are on the rise,” he says.

“And they all want the kids,” he adds, looking at me meaningfully. “Kids are so, so vulnerable at that age, just like little sponges. They don’t talk back to adults, they are not in dialogue. So it’s clear why the children are being targeted. It’s no different than the Lord’s Army in Africa. It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement.”

He pauses to make sure I’ve heard him correctly. “That’s the word, ‘fascism,’” he repeats. “Nobody likes to use it in this country. But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time. The CEF is part of a movement, and you have to call it what it is — ‘Christian Fascism.’” (p. 32-33)

Normally, that comparison would disappoint me. Godwin’s Law states that any discussion, if taken far enough, will eventually lead to one party comparing the other to the Nazis. Using this comparison usually means you lose the argument by default. In this book, however, Stewart has a point. There is hardly a more persuasive way of showing how horrifying this all is than having a pastor compare the CEF’s tactics to those of Hitler and his cronies.

Moreover, Pastor Lang has a point. The Good News Club is like the Hitler Youth, with their indoctrinations, their separatist ideals, their “we are so much better than they are”-style of teaching, and their creepily friendly way in which they instill themselves in the community. German parents in the early 1920s did not know either what they were doing when they allowed their children to join the Hitler Youth. Like any other youth group, it seemed like a good way to instill some discipline and morals into your child. But twenty years later, when the group became mandatory, it was too late. This book serves as a warning to us not to let the Good News Clubs get that far.

Stewart is not an atheist. She doesn’t go into this story telling the reader how awful religion is. She shows us how awful abuse of religious power is. She shows us how moderate Christians will be fooled into allowing this to happen. She makes it believable that such a thing could happen to us. The book does not read like a report of a fact-finding mission, but more like the story your neighbor will tell you over a cup of tea. She will tell you how this happened at the school of the child of a friend of her cousin’s hairdresser’s sister. And you’ll tut and nod and shake your head at all the right places. But when she leaves, the story niggles. You wonder if this could happen at your child’s school. But you would never stand for that, would you?

You need to read this book. Then you need to have all your friends read this book. Especially all your religious friends and all your religious and non-religious family and extended family members.

The book does not give a solution to this frightening phenomenon of religious indoctrination coming to public schools, but forewarned is forearmed. The main weapon of the Good News Club is their innocent façade. The more people know the truth, the sooner this façade is broken and maybe, just maybe, they can be stopped. Read the book. And be prepared to lose some sleep.

(An interview with the author will be posted later today is here.)

Now, Harrison is back with a new book called 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. (Details for how you can win a copy of the book are at the bottom of this post!)

Not surprisingly, the book offers rebuttals to (among many other things) psychic powers, homeopathy, Holocaust deniers, and moon hoaxers.

And anti-vaxxers.

The excerpt below is from Harrison’s chapter on why vaccines are safe and sound and avoiding them hurts us all:

DEADLY CONSEQUENCES

Heated debates that pit science against pseudoscience — evolution versus creationism, for example — rage on and on. But few of them rack up casualties and have the potential for mayhem like the anti-vaccine controversy. This particular clash between reason and irrational belief is literally killing children right now. Vaccination rates have plunged in parts of America and the United Kingdom because of misinformation and unjustified fears. According to the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency, a drop in vaccination coverage levels has again made measles endemic in the UK after it had already been wiped out by vaccines decades ago.

Much of the fears were stirred up in 1998 when British doctor Andrew Wakefield published research claiming that the measles vaccine causes autism. He said the vaccine inflamed intestines, causing harmful proteins to leak out that then made their way to the brain, where they caused autism. This generated considerable coverage in the mainstream media which, of course, sent waves of fear straight into the hearts of millions of parents. Many of them made the decision not to vaccinate their children as a result. Predictably, this was followed by outbreaks of preventable diseases that killed children. Soon after Wakefield’s announcement, MMR vaccine rates dropped from nearly 90 percent to as low as 50 percent in some areas of London. Now comes the kicker: It turned out that Wakefield’s research is garbage. Other scientists could not confirm his findings. Something was wrong, very wrong. But not only has his work been deemed scientifically flawed, it has ethical problems as well. Investigative journalist Brian Deer reported that Wakefield’s study was funded by a lawyer who also was representing five of eight children used in the study for a suit against pharmaceutical companies. In 2010, the Lancet medical journal formally retracted Wakefield’s study that they had published, and the General Medical Council removed Wakefield’s name from the medical register. He can no longer practice medicine in England.

In the late 1990s, antivaccination activists set their sights on a preservative used in some vaccines called thimerosal. No studies suggested that thimerosal might cause autism, but pharmaceutical companies removed it as a precaution anyway. Now, years later, autism rates have continued to rise. “After all the research,” writes Michael Specter in his book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, “thimerosal may be the only substance we might say with some certainty doesn’t cause autism; many public health officials have argued that it would make better sense to spend the energy and money searching for a more likely cause.”

Multiple studies have failed to find evidence of an autism-vaccine link. In Japan, the feared MMR “vaccine cocktail” was withdrawn and replaced by single vaccines. A study of thirty thousand children there found that autism rates continued to rise even in MMR’s absence. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Sweden removed thimerosal from vaccines only to see autism rates continue to rise. Meanwhile, researchers in Finland looked for an autism-vaccine link by analyzing the medical records of more than two million children. They found nothing.

It seems to me that vaccines are victims of their own success. People who are fortunate enough to live in countries with strong vaccination programs have been lulled into a false sense of security. Diseases once feared are not so scary anymore. Measles, for example, does not strike fear in the heart of the typical American. But it’s not a disease we should take lightly. It causes brain swelling and high fever and is often fatal. In the past, measles killed millions in Europe and America. It still kills more than one million children per year in the developing world today. Nevertheless, many parents are being scared away from the measles vaccine by warnings with no credible science behind them. The percentage of unvaccinated children in the United States has doubled since 1991. This is as infuriating as it is absurd. We are moving backward.

Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is one of the world’s leading experts on vaccines. He is also currently waging a professional war against the antivaccine movement. But it is also clearly personal for him. His frustration and concern for children are often readily apparent when he describes the irresponsible decision to deny vaccines. “The problem with waning immunization rates in the United States isn’t theoretical anymore,” he told me. “Recent outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, mumps, and bacterial meningitis show a clear breakdown in population immunity. Children are now suffering the diseases of their grandparents. It’s unconscionable.”

…

“THEY’RE NOT STUPID, JUST IGNORANT”

Nurse Shawn R. Browning is in the trenches on the frontlines of this issue. She has nearly two decades of experience in the medical field, most of it working with the US Navy. She regularly administers vaccines to military personnel and their families. She also has been involved with immunization education for many years. Irrational fears about vaccines are nothing new to her.

“I have had plenty of parents and patients that are misinformed about vaccines,” she said. “When they tell me they don’t want to get a particular vaccine, the first thing I ask them is, ‘why’? I have heard everything from the thimerosal content is bad for you, vaccines cause autism — particularly the MMR vaccine — and everything in between. By law I give them the VIS [vaccine information statements], but in addition I also educate them on the pros of receiving the vaccine versus not. What I have learned is that more times than not, people are willing to get the vaccine once it is explained to them in words they can understand and relate to. They’re not stupid, just ignorant. They have listened to their neighbors, the media, and everyone else and have formed an unjustified opinion. Drives me crazy! Many parents and patients have expressed their gratitude that someone has taken the time to explain things instead of just sticking a needle in them without any explanation. I think our particular patient population is more vaccine hesitant than antivaccine.”

Like most healthcare professionals, Browning is concerned that this reluctance to vaccinate might lead to major outbreaks of preventable diseases:

The biggest fear is that preventable diseases will rise to epidemic proportions again. Infants and children are going to die or be disabled because adults are ignorant and won’t vaccinate themselves or their children. The outbreak of pertussis [whooping cough] is the latest. People think that since they are adults, they don’t need a vaccine. Yet how many die from complications from the flu every year? [Influenza virus, the flu, kills as many as five hundred thousand people each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.15] It’s very scary. We also have an obligation to get vaccinated to protect those [who] can’t be vaccinated due to various reasons [such as immune system problems].

There was this mom [who] came into our clinic a little more than a year ago to get her one-year-old daughter her immunizations. The corpsman that brought them back to the room started to explain the vaccines the child would be getting and their potential side effects to the mom. The mom politely interrupted the corpsman and proceeded to explain that this child was not her first baby. She had once been “one of those moms” who didn’t believe in vaccines, and her first little girl had died when she got the measles. Just how do you respond to that? Your heart breaks.

Offit adds, “The science is largely complete. Ten epidemiological studies have shown MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism; six have shown thimerosal [preservative once used in vaccines] doesn’t cause autism; three have shown thimerosal doesn’t cause subtle neurological problems; a growing body of evidence now points to the genes that link to autism; and despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 2001, the number of children with autism continues to rise.”

In 1997, 4,138 children entered California kindergartens without being vaccinated because they had exemptions. By 2008, that number had more than doubled. Parents citing religious or philosophical objections to having their children vaccinated are putting not only their own children at risk but the lives of many others as well. Babies who are too young to be vaccinated can be infected and die. Children who have immune system problems and cannot be vaccinated have to rely on others around them to be vaccinated in order to keep the diseases at bay. When vaccination rates drop, danger to these vulnerable groups increases. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expert, a parent’s decision to refuse vaccination means his or her child is thirty-five times more likely to get measles and twenty-two times more likely to come down with pertussis (whooping cough). Please don’t think for a second that this is exaggeration or fearmongering. Children are paying a price for this madness in small pockets across America now, and the potential for much greater suffering is real. In April 2011, for example, a private school in Virginia had to close because half its students were infected with pertussis. None of the children had been vaccinated. Many of the parents had obtained religious exemptions that officially sanctioned their negligence. News of several recent infant deaths in California due to pertussis either had not reached those parents or failed to impress them.

Why subject children to this unnecessary danger? To protect them from autism? Very large, thorough, and expensive scientific studies did not find any reason to conclude that vaccines cause autism. Therefore it simply makes no sense to withhold such important protection from a child.

From 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True (Prometheus Books, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

If you’d like to win a copy of the book, just leave a comment telling us about a belief you used to hold and what ultimately led you away from it! (God doesn’t count. We’ve heard that one before.) Please include the word “Bermuda” at the end of your comment if you’d like to be considered for the prize!

The book will be released on March 6^th. Some more information on it can be found here.

Like many Christians, for a long time I fell into a grey area of “hate the religion, love the believer.” I was attuned to the hurt that I saw religion inflicting on the people around me, particularly the horrifying effect that the doctrine of “submission” had on my female friends and relatives, but I was also indoctrinated to believe that morality is contingent on religious belief (with a more youthful understanding and interpretation, I thought that only Christians were truly moral, but later -– how gracious of me -– extended the ability to be moral to persons of all religious faith). For a long time, I was able to get by with blaming “the institution” and letting its individual participants slide — hey, they were only doing what they were told, right? And they’re just a little misguided… right?

It wasn’t science that eviscerated that weakened platform that my religious belief was built on: it was books. Fiction books.

Lots and lots of fiction. And an education that forced me to develop some critical thinking skills in order to interpret said books and write papers about them.

The books that contributed to my deconversion were books that made me re-think the ground-level assumptions I had about how the world worked. Through books, my eyes were opened to new ways of living and new ways of thinking and, most importantly, the ambiguity of the right or wrongness of any one way of life. The books that most challenged me were the ones where my own supposed superiority was challenged. Or forced me to see what I thought were familiar issues from a brand-new perspective. Or forced me to confront my own complacency on certain issues. Or artfully demonstrated the possibilities and limitations of my own agency in the world. Or… so on and so forth. Books that really made me think.

While not everyone has access to a laboratory, most people have access to a library.

Best of all, purposeful, careful reading of media — books, blogs, movies, music, television — doesn’t require a formal education. Like PZ Myers, I believe that one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves, when presented with new or conflicting information, is “how do you know that?” Coupled with even a rudimentary understanding of cognitive biases, the pursuit for truth will be ruthless and unforgiving. Ask the difficult questions, the “how” and “why” questions, which serve to foster critical thinking more than the easily-solvable black-and-white “what” and “when” and “where” questions.

After that, it’s up the individual and what sort of ink on paper excites them. There is much to be said about society, humanity, and culture in nearly every genre of fiction (not to mention the possibilities in other mediums I am neglecting in this post — non-fiction, poetry, art, film, theater, and music). For me, the most challenging pieces of fiction were authors that explored themes of gender, culture, and imperialism across the globe: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherman Alexie’s Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

Each of these books, hand in hand with the overwhelming amount of poetry and short fiction that I didn’t mention, played a role in developing my understanding of how the world worked and fueled the desire to make such an understanding as reality-based and objective as possible. Reading fiction sparked a desire for understanding that has extended into the realm of science writing; I think the two make a rather handsome couple.

In the atheist community, science is the unchallenged king. Science answers, or attempts to answer, the big questions about life: where we come from as a species, where and how our planet came to be, and why we are the way we are. For many years, religion has had a chokehold on these questions, squirreling them away behind the protective edifice of the Mystery of the Universe, but science — and the individuals who can harness its energy — has a peculiar tendency to ignore such threats, and carry on the tedious business of filling in a god’s gaps.

Science is undoubtedly deserving of its spot on a shining pillar, but if you’re like me, there were more books, movies, and video games under the Christmas tree than microscopes and medical journals. I can understand why we revere science so much and the contributions it makes to society, but I can’t for the life of me understand why we neglect the potential power of the stuff that makes up the bulk of our consumption and pleasure.

What about you? Did fiction play a role in your journey toward atheism, and if so, how? Does bookishness lend itself to the flighty, wishy-washy stereotype, or has it had a profound impact on your thinking?

Most importantly: what books were critical in your journey?

And that brings us to the promotional campaign for his book — a number of billboards in Birmingham, Alabama with a picture of Stalin and the words “Imagine no religion? So did he.”

Wow… It takes cojones to do something that utterly ignorant.

Taunton thinks that because Stalin was an atheist, he committed awful acts of genocide. That argument makes as much sense as saying his mustache was the cause of all the horrors. It’s also an argument that’s been refuted over and over and over again.

Stalin didn’t kill anyone in the name of atheism. There’s no “atheist doctrine” other than disbelief in any god. Stalin preached dogmatism in political ways, not anti-religious ones. He replaced god with himself.

But, you know, admitting that would undermine the entire premise of Taunton’s book so he just ignored all those facts.

Here’s the truth: People can be good or bad no matter what their religious views are. If someone tells you he’s a Christian, you know very little about how he treats other people. If someone tells you she’s an atheist, all you know is that she doesn’t believe in a god. You have to talk to them or listen to them to get a better sense of who they are as people.

Does Taunton really believe we’d be better under Christian rule?

We have had Christian presidents and an overwhelmingly Christian Congress for decades now and look at what we have to show for it: thousands of dead soldiers from unnecessary wars, GLBT people denied equal rights under the law, women unable to get safe abortions (or even birth control) in many parts of the country, etc.

We need leaders who are willing to be criticized and who make decisions based on the evidence and not their religious (or dogmatic) beliefs. Stalin didn’t fall into either of those categories.

And Taunton ought to be ashamed of himself for promoting a fully-debunked myth.

One of the chapters, Morality versus Worship, is republished below:

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” — Quote by Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (26 April, 121 – 17 March, 180).

I would like to begin with this quotation because it outlines very eloquently one of the most popular arguments against Christianity, though it can be applied to many theistic traditions. Christians often preach, and The Bible states, that there are prerequisites for entrance into heaven beyond simply following the moral teachings of The Bible as you might interpret it, including the requirement of having accepted Jesus of Nazareth as Lord and Savior. The Bible explicitly indicates that acceptance of Jesus as Lord is a necessary condition for entry to heaven in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” This verse is, however, only one of the many indicating the necessity not of moral behavior to be saved, but of accepting Jesus Christ — who, according to doctrine, is supposed to have lived thousands of years ago and for whose existence we have little to evidence, neither as a man nor as part of the divine Christian God-head. It is on the basis of this acceptance requirement that missionaries began their crusades to spread the word of Christ, because those who have not heard the true word of Jesus would be sure to suffer eternal damnation. From this we can infer two things: firstly, that those who have heard of Jesus the Christ and deny him will not receive the gift of eternal communion with God; and, secondly, that those who have not heard of the teachings of Jesus will likewise be condemned as all humans are sinners according to this tradition and, in order to be forgiven for any sins, you must accept that Jesus Christ is God incarnate.

According to missionary authorities (Statistics according to “The Joshua Project” global mission statistics), somewhere around 2.74 billion people have not heard the “gospel of Christ” and are therefore subject to the punishment of God. The problem with this lack of Christian universalism lies within the worship/morality barrier. Would a just God sentence a morally good individual to hell for never having heard of him? And for that matter, would a just God expel a morally good individual to hell who has heard of Jesus, but simply finds no evidentiary reason to believe? According to any reasonable interpretation of Christianity’s key doctrines, the answer is a simple and firm “yes”. This is because, according to Christian dogma, it is impossible to be “moral” without Jesus Christ; I disagree with this on a fundamental level. It seems to me that this claim indicates that if a Christian were to lose his or her faith, he or she would no longer know right from wrong — a scary concept, to say the least. Yet, if there exists a person who follows biblical moral code strictly but doesn’t believe in Jesus’ divinity, the “merciful” Christian God promises eternal damnation. If it is the case that nonbelievers are punished based solely on nonbelief, and this is the purpose for early Christian missionaries to spread the Gospel, then we can conclude that those individuals who haven’t heard or cannot understand the teachings will be likewise damned. The problem is therefore extended from nonbelievers to those ignorant of Christ’s teachings to those incapable of believing due to mental defect or age. For example, because The Bible teaches that no man is without sin and does not mention the specific status of children in the afterlife, it is easy to conclude that, logically, children who die when they are too young to know of Christ’s word may not have a place in eternal communion with God. This debate led to various sects creating new Christian teachings promoting different purgatories and limbo-like layers of afterlife for unbaptized children. Many “modern” Christians stray away from this rather unpopular concept, but the fact remains that, biblically, it is impossible to enter heaven without first accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The requirement to obey and acknowledge God and Jesus Christ has caused the teachings of the Christian tradition to stray from morality to idol worship, creating a world in which a murderer can be forgiven and sent to heaven, whereas a loving and caring skeptic would be cast into damnation.

Not only do I believe that it is possible to maintain moral standards without the crutch of religion — but I would argue that it is the only way to achieve true goodness and express real altruism. Free from the constraints of organized religion, a human being is able to express decency from one’s self — as opposed to attempting to appease whatever higher power he or she may believe in. By separating worship and morality, we can act in accordance with our own human morals and be able to be less selfish in our motivations for kindness and moral behaviors.

If you’d like to win a copy of David’s book, all you have to do is tell us your favorite Biblical inconsistency

Just make sure the word “Mittens” appears at the end of the comment.