Scapegoats under your bed!

The Religious Right is masterful at manufacturing monsters. At the slightest provocation, they clutch their pearls and shout: “Lions and tigers and The Berenstain Bears, oh my!” There’s even a Dr. Oz. 

From jazz to rock and roll to desegregated buses to Dungeons & Dragons to imaginary litter boxes in public schools, U.S. history is littered with moral panics. ‘Cause when nobody’s buying your vision, you can always sell a villain. 

And now that the Trump Administration appears to have exhausted its scare campaigns against immigrants, Muslims, and transgender Americans, it has reached deep within the bag of political tricks and pulled out a most infamous boogeyman: the godless communist.

A review by Reuters found the president alone mentioned communism over 80 times since late June, calling so-called adherents “animals” and a “cancer” that must be “cut out.”

This week, cabinet members Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, and Scott Bessent all spoke at length about the supposed existential threat. And Speaker Mike Johnson defended his party’s request for hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars to fight “Communism on our own shores.”

Whether you’re an atheist who loves the free market or who is somewhere left of capitalism, you might reasonably wonder: What’s my preferred economic system got to do with nonreligion? 

I’ll let the administration explain.

• Rubio: “The world communism envisions is a world without God.”
• Johnson: “Our rights come from our Creator God, they do not come from the government. The communists believe the opposite.” 
• Rubio again: “They may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, communists, or anarchists, or Marxists. But the fundamental character is always the same…” 
• And Johnson again: “Congress put ‘In God We Trust’ above the rostrum because they wanted to remind everybody who would ever serve in this body in Congress that there’s a huge distinction between us and the Soviets’ philosophy. Communism, Marxism, Socialism… begins with the premise that there is no God.”

You see, this administration doesn’t bother itself with dictionary definitions. That’s woke! Instead, just as McCarthy once did, it employs communism (or anarchism or socialism or Marxism or whatever) as a catch-all accusation against anyone who doesn’t fit within the White Christian Nationalists’ idea of an American. And there is, of course, no scarier scapegoat than the atheist.

In their view, if we don’t believe our rights come from their God, maybe we just don’t deserve them as much. 

That there is the true threat to democracy and the actual anti-American agenda: a hyper-partisan and -sectarian state deciding some folks should be freer than others. 

It is the opposite of what the Founders envisioned. The only mentions of religion in the Constitution were to limit the influence of sectarianism. And the Declaration, which Johnson so often invokes, did not declare that rights come from “our God” but from “their Creator,” a powerfully pluralistic plural possessive (say that fast). Both documents have withstood multiple rounds of edits, ratification, and 250 years of scrutiny.

Johnson’s desk didn’t say “In God We Trust” until 64 years ago. 

And that engraving exists not because it reflects a founding principle but because politicians embraced it during another era of Christian outrage: the backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision in Engel v. Vitale. Then, as now, the Religious Right insisted the nation and its public schools were under siege from godless communists.

And then, as now, they were wrong.

In fact, what Justice Hugo Black wrote in Engel, with a nod to James Madison, was that religion was “too personal, too sacred, too holy to permit its ‘unhallowed perversion’ by a civil magistrate.” Justice William O. Douglas concurred, adding: “The philosophy is that the atheist or agnostic — the non-believer — is entitled to go his own way. The philosophy is that if government interferes in matters spiritual, it will be a divisive force.”

That Court, the Founders, this organization — founded amid the same backlash to Engel — all understood something the pious panickers have never grasped: the freedom of religion is impossible without and inseparable from the freedom from religion. 

From Salem to the Satanic Panic, every generation gets its boogeyman. But there is no need to waste precious time searching beneath your bed for monsters. Just pull back the curtain to see who was pointing there. 

The fearmongers’ goal has never been to protect or expand freedom, no matter how loudly they claim otherwise. It is, instead, to distract and divide and conquer, by creating enemies among us while the real villains of democracy decide who is worthy of rights and who is less so. 

Our human tendency towards intolerance and even totalitarianism is precisely why our godless government was designed: to protect those who are unpopular, outnumbered, and different — including, maybe especially, atheists. 

Because constitutional rights aren’t reserved for the people a majority approves of. They exist for the people a majority might reject. The freedom to believe means nothing without the freedom to question. The freedom to worship means nothing without the freedom to walk away. And religious liberty for some isn’t religious liberty at all.