Dear Friend,
Those are the words Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas and Chairperson of President Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission”, used to describe church-state separation.
And if the draft report just released by the Religious Liberty Commission — along with its Christian Nationalist wish list of recommendations for policy changes — is any indication, Patrick’s (mis)belief that church-state separation is a lie was the unanimous position of the commission.
Of course, that should come as no surprise. A panel made up of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians and just a single (conservative) Jewish member does not represent the religious diversity of our nation. Their views on, well, everything are dramatically out of step with everyday Americans — and in some cases, the majority of their coreligionists.
The recommendations from the panel include both the boring (a “Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty” award, “Know Your Rights” posters, and a reporting hotline) and the five-alarm fire for equality (repealing the Johnson Amendment, completely turning the understanding of the Establishment Clause on its head, and a massive giveaway of your tax dollars to religious schools).
But this was all a foregone conclusion. From the moment this commission was appointed, we knew exactly what the recommendations would be. We knew whose views would matter to them and whose stories would be heard. And we knew whose wouldn’t.
The defining belief of the White Christian Nationalist movement is that to be a real American — and to have any say in government or any authority to exercise political power — you have to belong to a certain religious group. And this is a commission stacked with Christian Nationalists.
They didn’t hide the fact that they were only interested in telling the stories of certain kinds of Christians. Because to them, those are the only stories that matter. Those are the only people who matter.
Despite the report’s executive summary claiming that religious liberty “protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” the report spends 224 pages proving they don’t actually believe that. Atheists and the nonreligious appear nowhere else in the document except as an ideology to be defeated.
Why? Because the Commission made no effort to hear from members of the atheist community.
They don’t care about Victoria Anderson, a member of our team, whose family was forced to flee their home in West Virginia after facing harassment, violence, and even death threats for speaking up against discrimination in their child’s school. They don’t care about Andrew Miller, an atheist who was denied parole for the sole reason that he refused to complete a pervasively religious substance use treatment program. And they don’t care about the thousands of stories of discrimination we’ve collected from members like you all across the country.
It’s not just that they deny that we might have a shared commitment to freedom of conscience. Rather, it’s that they believe we don’t exist at all except as enemies of their freedom.
Possibly the most chilling line of the entire report makes that belief crystal clear: “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”
This line is not the statement of a single commissioner nor the testimony of one Christian Nationalist politician. This is an all-out declaration of war against the very idea of religious neutrality, drafted by a government commission and presented to the President of the United States in the Oval Office.
This sleight of hand, replacing the secularism we fight every day to defend with something unrecognizable, is what Christian Nationalists do. To them, anything other than government privilege is an attack on their freedom. Neutrality is unthinkable.
As we told the commission directly, this entire project has been a farce and an insult to all Americans. And the narrative they’re trying to fabricate is truly one of the biggest lies that’s ever been told.
In solidarity,
Nick Fish
President
