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Speaking on the Issues: Talking about FFF

Talking about the issues.

Is America a Christian Nation?

You Can Quote Us - Influential Ideas on America's First Freedom

Sermons for Religious Leaders

The F3 Bookshelf: Authors who Support FFF


C. Welton Gaddy and Barry W. Lynn First Freedom First: A Citizen's Guide to Protecting Religious Liberty and the Separation of Church and State	Barry W. Lynn Piety & Politics	Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation	Michael Weinstein With God on our Side

Michael Standaert Skipping Towards Armageddon	Mel White Religion Gone Bad	Robin Meyers Why the Christian Right is Wrong	Eugenie C. Scott, Et Al Not in Our Classrooms

Linda Seger Jesus Rode A Donkey	Joan Roughgarden Evolution and Christian Faith	Si Khan and Elizabeth Minnich The Fox in the Henhouse	Wayne Besen Anything but Straight

Esther Kaplan With God on their Side	Sheila Suess Kennedy Charitable Choice at Work	Michelle Goldberg Kingdom Coming	Peter Irons God On Trial

Diana Butler Bass Christianity for the Rest of Us	Jennifer S. Butler Born Again	Dr. Marty Klein America's War on Sex	Joel Westheimer Pledging Allegiance

Bishop John Spong Jesus for the NonReligious	John Bice A 21st Century Rationalist in Medieval America	Robin Morgan Fighting Words	Bruce Dierenfield The Battle over School Prayer

Rev. Oliver "Buzz" Thomas Ten Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can't...)	Simcha Weinstein Up Up and Oy Vey! l	Susan Harding The Book of Jerry Falwel	Joe Mackall Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish

Randall Balmer Thy Kingdom Come	Richard Sloan Blind Faith	David Domke and Kevin Coe The God Strategy

Issues

The U.S Constitution guarantees each of us the right to make decisions about how we live our lives. The First Amendment forbids government to promote or oppose religion or interfere in the free exercise of faith. However, our freedom to make private choices about personal issues is now endangered by public officials who seek to impose narrow religious views into law and public policy. Our “first freedom” will be preserved only by safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty.

Academic Integrity

Public schools must give our children the best possible education, without preferring one religious tradition over others. Nearly 90 percent of our nation’s students receive their K-12 education in public schools funded with our tax dollars.

Safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty ensures that public tax dollars will not be invested in teaching religion as science or funding private religious education. Some advocacy groups want to change the science curriculum to reflect their religious beliefs. However, mainstream scientists flatly reject “intelligent design” and other forms of “creationism” as a thinly veiled attempt to bring religion into public schools.

The battle here is political, not scientific. Other advocacy groups seek to divert public funds to private religious schools through vouchers and other means. Americans must be free to contribute to the religious groups of their choosing. We should never be taxed to support religion. Vouchers and other similar programs violate this freedom by forcing us to support religious education. These programs also damage our children’s education by diverting critically needed money away from public schools. Safeguarding the separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty ensures that none of us are coerced into funding religious education through our taxes, just as it guarantees people freedom to privately fund religious education if they wish.

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Partner Organizations

The organizations featured below are encouraging their members and supporters to sign the First Freedom First petition to safeguard separation of church and state and protect religious liberty. Click their logo to learn more.

Democracy NOT Theocracy

Decisions about religion and spirituality are deeply personal. The government’s only role in these matters is to protect individual choice. That’s what separation of church and state and religious liberty are all about. These values protect the rights of believers and non-believers alike to make personal, private choices about faith.

Sometimes we take these inherent rights for granted, but we shouldn’t. Safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty are the foundation stones upon which our country was built. If government is allowed to prefer one religious viewpoint over another or favor people of faith over non-believers, then we are sacrificing our heritage of freedom.

Some pressure groups want to change federal tax law and allow houses of worship to endorse or oppose political candidates using tax-exempt donations. But this is an unwise proposal that would be deeply divisive in a nation as diverse as America. It would harm our democracy and jeopardize the integrity of our religious organizations. Many houses of worship would be torn apart over partisan politics. We must not politicize our houses of worship. Certainly, we all hold different beliefs, but it is our first freedom -- to privately choose our own beliefs -- that is our most important American value.

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Partner Organizations

End of Life Care

End of life decisions are among the most personal we will make. These private decisions are best made personally, by individuals and their families. They cannot and should not be made for us by politicians who seek to impose a religious agenda.

When we make these deeply personal decisions, our choices must be respected. Our private, personal choice should never, ever be made political.

At one time or another most American families face difficult decisions about end of life issues. As in the Terri Schiavo case, these decisions must be made by individuals, families, and doctors, not by politicians. Legislation that imposes one religious definition of life over other beliefs would be discriminatory and a violation of religious liberty.

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Partner Organizations

No Religious Discrimination

The First Amendment requires government to remain neutral on matters of religion. But the so-called “faith-based initiative” violates that constitutional requirement and anti-discrimination laws. Created without congressional approval, the program allots billions of taxpayer dollars to social services run by favored religious organizations, allowing them to exercise religious discrimination in hiring and to proselytize people in need.

Americans should never be discriminated against on the basis of our religious beliefs. Government-funded jobs must be open to all qualified applicants regardless of their opinions about religion. Publicly supported programs should never require anyone to take part in religion. Non-discrimination is the American way.

If religious organizations use government funds to provide social services, they must not discriminate in hiring on religious grounds or deny services to people based on beliefs about faith. For people to be denied participation in a publicly funded program because of their beliefs about religion is simply un-American.

Religious organizations may define the content of their community services and hire only those who share their faith tradition in privately funded programs if they wish. But when using our tax dollars, it is not right for faith groups to discriminate in employment or in the provision of services.

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Partner Organizations

Reproductive Health

All Americans must be free to make choices concerning their own health in keeping with their personal beliefs.

Opponents of reproductive freedom often seek legislation based on their own religious doctrines. Creating laws that are grounded in religious belief, however, conflicts with the separation of church and state and compromises our religious liberty. We must be allowed to live our lives according to our own beliefs.

At the center of the reproductive health debate are important questions about individual conscience. Decisions about family planning and emergency contraceptives should be resolved privately, based on our personal beliefs. Individuals may look to their own faith or other ethical considerations as they make these choices, but the government must never mandate that all Americans must follow the tenets of one religious viewpoint. Religious liberty is a basic right guaranteed to all Americans. We must not deny women this basic freedom.

Offering a variety of choices around reproductive health offers each of us the opportunity to make the best decisions about our options.

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Partner Organizations

Respect For All Families

Some religious leaders and politicians want to use the government to define marriage in a way that favors some religious traditions over others. Religious-political interests are seeking a Federal Marriage Amendment -- or similar state constitutional amendments -- that would limit marriage only to “the union of a man and a woman.” This would discriminate against the growing number of faith groups that perform same-sex marriages.

Houses of worship have the freedom to consecrate marriages based on their theology. As required by the Constitution, the government must accommodate the diversity of beliefs on this issue. Denying rights based on specific religious traditions is unconstitutional and is not the American way.

Americans value families in which love and commitment, not politics, define the home. Happy, healthy families deserve respect and should be free to live according to their own beliefs. As responsible adults, it is our freedom to make personal choices about family life and raising our children, without coercive politics invading our homes and privacy.

America’s various faith traditions take different approaches to marriage. Respecting the rights of those in our diverse communities of faith who deem same-gender marriage to be consistent with their religious creed ensures that the United States will continue to protect the religious liberty of all Americans.

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Partner Organizations

Sound Science

Advancing the health and well-being of all Americans requires medical research and policy that is grounded in sound science. Unfortunately, because of their own narrow religious beliefs, some people would prefer to sacrifice sound research that could help all Americans. We deserve to benefit from the best scientific and medical research possible -- it just makes sense.

Our tax dollars fund most of the medical research in this country, and the government regulates many advances in the medical and health fields. It is critical that our publicly backed scientific institutions and policies are guided by objectivity, facts, and evidence, and not by ideology. Unfortunately, some people would prefer that their religious beliefs guide our government's scientific endeavors -- even if it means sacrificing potentially life-saving technologies that could benefit all Americans. This is the case with stem cell research, which is essentially prohibited using federal dollars due to objections based on certain faiths. Public funding must be invested in advancing science that benefits all of us.

Sound science has also been limited in other ways. The FDA, for example, has overruled the findings of doctors and scientists and obstructed our ability to obtain emergency contraceptives. This action seems to have been taken based solely on the religious beliefs of political appointees and those who influence them.

Manipulating scientific advancements because of narrow religious beliefs endangers us all.

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Partner Organizations

Worship... Or Not

Religious liberty and the separation of church and state allow all of us to make our own private choices about faith and how we practice what we believe. What makes America different from other countries is that our right to make decisions about our beliefs is a private matter protected by the Constitution.

Some advocacy groups want to change the First Amendment and allow elected officials to make decisions about when and how people pray. Sometimes these misguided efforts are focused on introducing coercive prayers at public schools; sometimes they are focused on imposing sectarian devotions at meetings of governmental bodies.

Our private choice to worship, or not, must be protected when we go to work and to school and when we participate in our communities. It is never up to politicians or public officials to coerce us into supporting religious expressions in which we do not believe.

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Partner Organizations

Talking About the Issues

No Religious Discrimination:

Democracy Not Theocracy: Decisions about religion and spirituality are deeply personal. The government’s only role in these matters is to protect individual choice. That’s what separation of church and state and religious liberty are all about. These values protect the rights of believers and non-believers alike to make personal, private choices about faith. Sometimes we take these inherent rights for granted, but we shouldn’t.

Safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty are the foundation stones upon which our country was built. If government is allowed to prefer one religious viewpoint over another or favor people of faith over non-believers, then we are sacrificing our heritage of freedom.

Certainly, we all hold different beliefs, but it is our first freedom -- to privately choose our own beliefs -- that is our most important American value.

Worship, or Not:

Respect for All Families:

Reproductive Health:

All Americans must be free to make choices concerning their own health in keeping with their personal beliefs.

Offering a variety of choices around reproductive health offers each of us the opportunity to make the best decisions about our options.

Sound Science:

Manipulating scientific advancements because of narrow religious beliefs endangers us all.

Academic Integrity:

Some advocacy groups want to change the science curriculum to reflect their religious beliefs. However, mainstream scientists flatly reject “intelligent design” and other forms of “creationism” as a thinly veiled attempt to bring religion into public schools. The battle here is political, not scientific.

Other advocacy groups seek to divert public funds to private religious schools through vouchers and other means. Americans must be free to contribute to the religious groups of their choosing. We should never be taxed to support religion. Vouchers and other similar programs violate this freedom by forcing us to support religious education. These programs also damage our children’s education by diverting critically needed money away from public schools.

Safeguarding the separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty ensures that none of us are coerced into funding religious education through our taxes, just as it guarantees people freedom to privately fund religious education if they wish.

End of Life Care:

When we make these deeply personal decisions, our choices must be respected. Our private, personal choice should never, ever be made political.

By signing the First Freedom First petition you are safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty.

Is America a Christian Nation?

IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION?

A Dialogue On Religion And Politics In The 21st Century

The Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy leads the national nonpartisan grassroots and educational organizations, The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, and serves as Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster (Baptist) Church in Monroe, La.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and a member of the Supreme Court bar.

GADDY: Well, is this a Christian nation? The correct answer to that question is of profound importance for every phase of our corporate life -- commerce and community, education and environment, public policy and private liberty -- as this, the most religiously pluralistic nation in the world, moves into the 21st century.

Let me direct your attention to Article 11 of the Barbary Treaties signed in Tripoli on Nov. 4, 1796, approved by President John Adams, and ratified by the United States Senate. Drawn up to protect the country’s merchant ships from Barbary pirates, this agreement -- interestingly, written in Arabic -- begins with these words: “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”

In 1797, the founders of our nation were eminently clear that the United States is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation. Rather, it is a nation in which government is appreciative of religion but resistant to any entanglement with religion. Wise people who understood and valued religion rejected the very idea of a government-established national religion or even the slightest possibility of a religion-controlled government.

A very unlikely coalition of Baptists, Unitarians, Secularists, and Deists gave us the First Amendment’s two-pronged guarantee barring laws “respecting an establishment of religion” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

LYNN: Our earliest Presidents really took this idea to heart. Thomas Jefferson refused to even sign bills declaring national days of prayer or thanksgiving. James Madison even objected to counting “clergy” in the 1790 census.

This separation of church and state, though, didn’t run absolutely smoothly, of course. There were literally riots in Philadelphia prior to the Civil War over which version of the Christian Bible should be used for daily readings in the public schools. Members of unpopular religious groups were frequently told they could not preach in public and, indeed, non-believers were barred from holding many elective offices.

Finally, in l947, the United States Supreme Court put real teeth into that phrase “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Justices made it clear that this prohibition did not just mean that Congress could not set up one “national religion,” but that it couldn’t give some religions preference over others or even promote religion over non-theistic beliefs.

For several decades, the Supreme Court used that standard to declare unconstitutional a variety of practices by governments including government-written or government-selected prayers that public school students were expected to recite, bans on teaching evolution, and direct government funding of private religious education. It also struck down most restrictions on reproductive choice, which had, as a practical matter, been implemented primarily because of powerful religious interest groups.

Although some of these protections have been watered down over the past 25 years, the essential principles remain strong. They are, however, under relentless attack from those who ignore our history.

GADDY: General respect for our first freedom persisted, with broad-based support within and outside the religious community, until about the 1960s and 1970s. Then, individuals skilled in the manipulation of religion began to attack the religion clauses in the Constitution in order to advance a very narrow political agenda. A shotgun marriage took place between ambitious politicians and religious clerics eager for more recognition and power.

Politicizing religion and religi-o-fying politics as a matter of strategy, the Religious Right launched a campaign to demonize secularism and to warn people that, apart from one particular kind of religion, the nation was in trouble.

LYNN: Perhaps two events encapsulate what Welton has just described. First, some powerful religious interest groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention, which had historically actually provided leadership to preserve religious freedom, found itself “taken over” by far-right members of its own denomination -- people who were openly hostile to the separation of church and state and to governmental neutrality in matters of religion.

And at the same time, the Rev. Jerry Falwell had been recruited as the dogmatic leader of a membership organization known as the “Moral Majority,” the original lynchpin of what has become known as the “Religious Right.” The Moral Majority tried to get governments to actively promote specific religious ideas and viewpoints on a variety of contentious social issues. These included unsuccessful efforts to amend the Constitution to bring back government-promoted prayer in school and to completely outlaw all reproductive choice. Over that period of time, we also found that they were interested in censorship of books in libraries and finding ways to fund their own religious institutions.

During 2005, the ten largest Religious Right advocacy groups took in over $500 million. They continue to treat the Constitution as if it were the first draft of a freshman political science paper, and although they resist the idea that they should be called theocrats, what else do you call someone who tries to orchestrate government policy along narrow religious lines?

GADDY: Today, protecting religious freedom and guarding against entanglement of the institutions of religion and government are more important than ever. The founders bequeathed to us an absolutely brilliant formula for sustaining diversity and providing for religious pluralism without destroying freedom for or from religion.

But that guarantee is now in serious danger.

In recent years, people have sought to redefine both religion and government -- measuring the authenticity of religion by policy positions on four or five issues and evaluating government by its support for sectarian views, programs, and institutions. The result has been a blurring of the lines between what is religion and what is government. As a result, we have seen threats to government because blurring those lines represents bad government and bad religion.

Ignoring religious liberty and church-state separation threatens, in the long run, to compromise the integrity of religion and to blunt the vitality of democracy -- thus creating a crisis relating to our nation’s commitment to our first freedom, and raising serious concerns about our support for other freedoms and rights.

LYNN: Many of you are perhaps familiar with some of the recent efforts to use religious dogma to supplant sound science, curtail fundamental fairness in American institutions, and also intrude into deeply personal decisions from the moment of conception until the moment of death.

And here are just a few examples: In 2003, the Dover, Pa., school board passed a resolution requiring that ninth-grade biology teachers provide a verbal “disclaimer” before they taught about evolution. The statement indicated that there was a so-called “scientific” alternative called “intelligent design” which was discussed in a book that students could look at in the library. Conveniently, 60 copies of that book had been donated by the local fundamentalist church.

A lawsuit, sponsored in part by Americans United, led to a decision late last year that prohibited such a disclaimer as an effort to slip religion, not genuine science, back into public school classrooms.

Second, in 2005, we issued a report demonstrating systemic religious discrimination at the United States Air Force Academy by evangelical Christian officers against cadets from other religious traditions. How bad did this get?

We found that the football coach had festooned the locker room with a banner reading “Team Jesus.” And we found a Mormon cadet who was repeatedly assigned to the lowest floors of the barracks -- told in this way, he would be closer to Hell, the place he would end up anyway, if he didn’t convert to “real” Christianity.

And finally, in an issue affecting literally every American family, the Religious Right actually convinced Congress to pass legislation that would have nullified 10 years of lawsuits in the state of Florida that had finally permitted Michael Schiavo, the husband of Terri Schiavo, to carry out her wishes and remove a feeding tube as she lay in a persistent vegetative state. Wisely, the federal courts themselves ruled that Congress had no such power to try to alter the outcomes of the deliberations of these state court proceedings.

GADDY: It is time for us to renew our national commitment to this nation’s first freedom and to state in unequivocal terms our support for religious liberty and for the separation of church and state. Some people will do this out of their love for religion and others, quite frankly, will do it out of their fear of religion, and still others will do it out of respect and appreciation for secular government -- government free from the competition, controversy, and violence that often erupts in the absence of religious freedom and in the presence of a merger between religion and government.

That is the intent of First Freedom First. The Interfaith Alliance Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State aim to call the nation back to its first freedom and to encourage individuals to engage in a tangible expression of a renewed commitment to religious liberty by signing a petition of support for this precious treasure.

LYNN: First Freedom First is using a variety of methods to tell the common-sense story of why separation of church and state was the right model for America over 200 years ago, and is still the right model in 2006 when we find 1,500 different religions and 20 million freethinkers, humanists, and non-believers all working and living together in our country. Indeed, this principle of separation may be the greatest intellectual contribution of the United States to thinking around the globe, an exemplar of what other nations might follow.

We “previewed” this campaign at some old fashioned house parties on the Fourth of July; we have just unveiled a new internet website which informs visitors about the core issues of the project, and enables them to sign a petition with very specific objectives - a petition to be presented to the heads of major political parties before the 2008 Presidential election cycle. While absolutely avoiding the endorsement of any candidates, we want these issues to become a significant part of the public policy debate.

GADDY: So much is at stake in this effort that is of essential importance in the preservation of the uniqueness of our national experience -- every person free to worship or not to worship, to believe or not believe, with no political advantage or denial of access to civil rights assigned to either one of those postures, and assurance of civil and social respect, liberty and justice for all.

My first day on the job of being president of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, the great American icon -- still known as “the most trusted man in America” -- took me aside to speak to me of the challenge of my work. Walter Cronkite, who, I am delighted to say, is one of the first signers of the petition, said to me: “Nothing less is at stake in this work which you do than the fate of democracy as we have known it.”

And so it is in our work to reclaim the priority of protecting and guaranteeing our nation’s First Freedom. We need every one of you to be supportive of First Freedom First and to be involved.

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