Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, makes the point in this September 24 article:

Extremists of all stripes are having a field day.

Loony rabble-rousers at home — the people behind “Innocence of Muslims,” the film insulting Muhammad — have succeeded in giving loony rabble-rousers abroad a golden opportunity to promote violence in the name of their own sick, twisted vision of Islam and the world.

The filmmakers join the ranks of Terry Jones, Fred Phelps and other American extremists who will say and do anything to make headlines and provoke outrage.

But however vile the filmmakers’ motives and however odious their speech, we must defend the indefensible by upholding their right to freedom of expression.

Needless to say, much of the world doesn’t agree.

Even in the land of the free, protecting the right to offend is a tough sell. According to a 2009 survey by the First Amendment Center, 43 percent of Americans do not think people should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to religious groups.

The U.S. Supreme Court does allow some restrictions on speech under the First Amendment, including speech intended to incite imminent violence. This film doesn’t meet that test.

Although the filmmakers surely knew that their film would provoke angry protests, they aren’t responsible for radical groups halfway around the world using the film as an excuse to kill.

If the United States were to react by attempting to censor speech that offends religions (as in some European countries), or speech that is blasphemous (as in some Muslim countries), Americans would forfeit the right to freedom of speech and religion.

Once government has the power to punish speech deemed “offensive” or “hateful,” the First Amendment is effectively repealed and no one’s speech is safe from prosecution and no one’s religion is safe from government interference.

Some religious and political leaders counter the American defense of the right to offend by claiming that “Innocence of Muslims” and other expression insulting religion violates what they call “religious freedom.”

In this alternate universe, freedom of religion is defined as freedom from offense. Interpreted this way, religious freedom gives religious leaders the right to determine when speech is sufficiently offensive to warrant government action.

Religious liberty as freedom from offense would be the death knell of authentic religious liberty, as the Supreme Court made clear in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), a landmark case defining free exercise of religion.

In that case, Jesse Cantwell, a Jehovah’s Witness, played a record with a strongly anti-Catholic message in a heavily Catholic neighborhood. Two men who heard the record called the police.

A unanimous Court upheld Cantwell’s right to proclaim his message, noting that “the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor.” But, the Court reasoned, “in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of citizens of a democracy.”

In other words, a free marketplace of ideas — including ideas many find wrong or repulsive — is a necessary condition for ensuring that people are free to pursue the truth.

Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the First Amendment Center. His email is chaynes@freedomforum.org.

Reason Rally a Roaring Success!
Tens of thousands of rational people rallied in Washington, D.C. Saturday, March 24, for the largest gathering of secular people in world history! The message was clear: we’re here, we’re secular, get used to it! (to borrow the turn of a phrase). Through a very soggy day, we stood resolute…nay, enthusiastic!…committed to science, reason, critical thinking, and the absolute separation of church and state. Singers, scientists, philosophers, and comedians flowed in a seamless procession on and off the stage with a message of support for secular ideals, encouragement to “come out of the closet,” and excitement for our growing momentum. For more on the rally, see the article below in “Humanism in the News.”

Teresa MacBain was featured on All Things Considered April 30 2012 (see link below) as part of NPR’s series of stories on losing faith. A week later, Neal Conan interviewed both Teresa and Jerry DeWitt, execute director of Recovering from Religion, on Talk of the Nation. You can listen to this very interesting interview here.

This is the first in a series of stories on losing faith.

Teresa MacBain has a secret, one she’s terrified to reveal.

“I’m currently an active pastor and I’m also an atheist,” she says. “I live a double life. I feel pretty good on Monday, but by Thursday — when Sunday’s right around the corner — I start having stomachaches, headaches, just knowing that I got to stand up and say things that I no longer believe in and portray myself in a way that’s totally false.”

MacBain glances nervously around the room. It’s a Sunday, and normally she would be preaching at her church in Tallahassee, Fla. But here she is, sneaking away to the American Atheists‘ convention in Bethesda, Md.

Her secret is taking a toll, eating at her conscience as she goes about her pastoral duties week after week — two sermons every Sunday, singing hymns, praying for the sick when she doesn’t believe in the God she’s praying to. She has had no one to talk to, at least not in her Christian community, so her iPhone has become her confessor, where she records her private fears and frustrations.

“On my way to church again. Another Sunday. Man, this is getting worse,” she tells her phone in one recording. “How did I get myself in this mess? Sometimes, I think to myself, if I could just go back a few years and not ask the questions and just be one of those sheep and blindly follow and not know the truth, it would be so much easier. I’d just keep my job. But I can’t do that. I know it’s a lie. I know it’s false.”

MacBain made that recording in her car on the way to Lake Jackson United Methodist Church several weeks before the American Atheists’ conference.

Finding Atheism

MacBain, 44, was raised a conservative Southern Baptist. Her dad was a pastor and she felt the call of God when she was 6. She had questions, of course, about conflicts in the Bible, for example, or the role of women. She says she sometimes felt she was serving a taskmaster of a God, whose standards she never quite met.

For years, MacBain set her concerns aside. But when she became a United Methodist pastor nine years ago, she started asking sharper questions. She thought they’d make her faith stronger.

“In reality,” she says, “as I worked through them, I found that religion had so many holes in it, that I just progressed through stages where I couldn’t believe it.”

The questions haunted her: Is Jesus the only way to God? Would a loving God torment people for eternity? Is there any evidence of God at all? And one day, she crossed a line.

“I just kind of realized — I mean just a eureka moment, not an epiphany, a eureka moment — I’m an atheist,” she says. “I don’t believe. And in the moment that I uttered that word, I stumbled and choked on that word — atheist.”

But it felt right.

About a year ago, MacBain found The Clergy Project, an anonymous online community of clergy who have lost their faith. Now she had allies, but no easy escape. She began applying for jobs, but when prospective employers asked why she wanted to leave the ministry, she didn’t know what to say. She recorded her worries on her iPhone.

“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” she asks in one recording, her voice sounding desperate. “Really, the options are work at something like Starbucks or McDonald’s — and even there they’re going to ask those questions. I could even clean houses and not make a great amount of money — but at least nobody would be asking me questions.”

Driving to church on Sunday, March 18, MacBain realized she could no longer bear her double life.

“I got to come out. I got to get out of it,” she told her phone. “It used to terrify me, what people’s reaction would be. But it’s been so long now and I’ve done this for so long, I don’t even care.”

The sermon she gave that day was her last.

The ‘Freedom’ Of Coming Out

On March 26, at the American Atheists’ convention in Bethesda, MacBain seems almost giddy. The day before, she decided she would go before the conference’s 1,500 or so nonbelievers and announce that she is officially an atheist.

“I am nervous,” she says, “but at the same time I am so excited. I slept like a baby last night because I knew I wasn’t going to have to live a lie anymore. Such freedom.”

Moments later, in the darkened, cavernous conference room, MacBain steps onstage.

“My name is Teresa,” she begins. “I’m a pastor currently serving a Methodist church — at least up to this point” — the audience laughs — “and I am an atheist.”

Hundreds of people jump to their feet. They hoot and clap for more than a minute. MacBain then apologizes to them for being, as she put it, “a hater.”

“I was the one on the right track, and you were the ones that were going to burn in hell,” she says. “And I’m happy to say as I stand before you right now, I’m going to burn with you.”

A few minutes later, MacBain strides off the stage into a waiting crowd. One man is crying as he tells her that her speech is “one of the most moving things I’ve seen in years.” Another woman says she, too, had been a born-again Christian. “Join the club,” she says as she hugs MacBain.

“I have never felt so appreciated and cared for, you know?” MacBain says later, noting that she has left one community — Christianity — for another. “New member, just been born — that’s what it feels like.”

The Fallout

Two days later, MacBain returned to Tallahassee — and to reality.

“I didn’t know how far or how explosive her coming out would be, but, then again, nobody did,” says MacBain’s husband, Ray MacBain. “The next morning, we got up, I went to work and my son Alex texted me and said it went viral.”

The local TV station, WCTV, ran a series ofstories about MacBain, interviewing her boss but never MacBain herself. Hundreds of people wrote comments on the site, and MacBain says they were painful to read.

“The majority of them, to begin with, were pretty hateful,” she says, although some nonbelievers soon came to her defense. “For somebody who’s been a good guy their whole life and been a people pleaser, it’s really hard to imagine that overnight you’re the bad guy.”

MacBain tried to see the church’s district superintendent to explain, but he canceled the meeting. She was immediately locked out and replaced, so she flew out to Seattle to meet with her colleagues at The Clergy Project. There, sitting alone in her hotel room on Palm Sunday, MacBain again turned to her iPhone.

“I don’t want to go home,” she muses in the recording, deflation flattening her voice. “I don’t want to have to be in Publix or Wal-Mart or somewhere and worry about who’s going to see me and who’s going to corner me and just tell me off.”

But MacBain did go home. People shunned her. Job interviews were canceled. The Humanists of Florida Association offered to pay her salary for a year, but there’s no guarantee. Only two of MacBain’s friends called her and took her to lunch. Meanwhile, her family was a refuge, even if they didn’t all agree with her new views.

“I believe in God,” says her husband, Ray. “And to be honest, I pray for her every night, I got friends praying for her.”

But he says he adores his wife and defends her right to disbelieve. “That’s why I spent 23 years in the Army. That’s why I’m still a police officer. We have freedom of speech and freedom of thought. And God never forced anybody to believe, so who am I to step up?”

‘Life Is Just Different’

A few minutes later, Teresa MacBain goes for a drive to the church at the center of her story. She says she has butterflies — this is the first time she’s seen her church since she went public. Its 11:20 a.m., nearly time for the sermon. She’s glad she’s not inside.

“Not because of the people or anything,” she says, “but because if I were in there, I know what I’d be doing. And that would be standing up and proclaiming something that I no longer believe in. So, yeah, I’m relieved that I don’t have to do that.”

Back at home, MacBain doesn’t hesitate when she’s asked what she misses most about her old life.

“I miss the music,” she says. MacBain sang in church choirs and worship bands most of her life, and even though she no longer believes the words, she still catches herself singing praise songs.

She says she also misses the relationships — she’ll often pick up the phone to call someone, then realize she can’t. And she misses the ritual and regularity of church life.

“It’s what I know. It’s what I knew. And I still struggle with it. Life is just different,” she says.

When it’s pointed out that she hasn’t said whether or not she misses God, MacBain pauses.

“No, no,” she says. “I can’t say that I do.”

BALTIMORE — Capt. Ryan Jean wanted to perform well on the Army’s psychological evaluation for soldiers. But he also wanted to answer the questions honestly. So when he was asked whether he believed his life had a lasting purpose, Jean, an atheist, saw no choice but to say no.

Those and other responses, Jean says, won him a trip to see the post chaplain, who berated him for his lack of faith.

“He basically told me that if I don’t get right with God, then I’m worthless,” said Jean, now an intelligence officer at Ft. Meade, Md. “That if I don’t believe in Jesus, why am I in uniform, because this is God’s army, and that I should resign my commission in order to stop disgracing the military.”

Jean says experiences such as that confrontation three years ago, when he was serving at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, have spurred him to seek Army recognition as a humanist lay leader — on par with the lay Christians, Jews and Muslims who help military chaplains minister to the troops.

Jean is one of as many as a dozen atheists throughout the U.S. military in the process of applying for the status, which they and their supporters see as necessary to secure acceptance and support for nonbelievers. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON — The latest attack on the “godless public schools” — a staple of Republican primaries past — is a new ad in Iowa by Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign proclaiming there’s “something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

Advocating for “school prayer” is, of course, a poll-tested winner for politicians seeking to stir voter outrage — and establish Christian conservative bona fides.

Michele Bachmann also took up the cry at a recent town hall in Iowa, declaring that government censors religion in public schools. She added a new twist to the charge by saying that Muslims get to practice their faith in schools, but “Christian kids aren’t allowed to pray.”

The claim that public schools are hostile to Christians may rev up caucus-goers in Iowa, but there’s only one problem: It isn’t true.

Truth be told, students of all faiths are actually free to pray alone or in groups during the school day, as long as they don’t disrupt the school or interfere with the rights of others. Of course, the right to engage in voluntary prayer or religious discussion does not necessarily include the right to preach to a captive audience, like an assembly, or to compel other students to participate.

Visit public schools anywhere in America today and you’re likely to see kids praying around the flagpole, sharing their faith with classmates, reading scriptures in free time, forming religious clubs, and in other ways bringing God with them through the schoolhouse door each day.

As for celebrating Christmas, students are free to say “Merry Christmas,” give Christmas messages to others, and organize Christmas devotionals in student Christian clubs.

It’s true that some public school officials still misunderstand (or ignore) the First Amendment by censoring student religious expression that is protected under current law. But when challenged in court, they invariably lose.

In fact, contrary to culture-war mythology, there is more student religious speech and practice in public schools today than at any time in the past 100 years.

When politicians demonize the courts for banning God from schools, they count on public confusion about the First Amendment distinction between government speech promoting religion, which the establishment clause prohibits, and student speech promoting religion, which the free-exercise and free-speech clauses protect.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that kids can’t pray in school. What the Court has done — and continues to do — is to strike down school-sponsored prayers and devotional exercises as violations of religious liberty.

As a result of those decisions, school officials may not impose prayers, or organize prayer events, or turn the school auditorium into the local church for religious celebrations.

Students, however, aren’t the government; they can — and often do — openly pray and share their faith in public schools.

When asked to clarify his claim that students can’t pray in schools, Perry said he was objecting to the Supreme Court’s prayer decisions in the 1960s because he thinks local school boards should be free to organize prayers if they so choose. He didn’t say whether he understood that kids are currently free to pray in school on their own.

Apparently, Perry wants to return to the days of school-sponsored prayer, overturning Court decisions by what he calls “activist judges.” If elected, he promises to push for a constitutional amendment to allow it — something Newt Gingrich tried and failed to do when he was in Congress.

If state-sponsored religious practices are what Perry, Bachmann and other candidates mean when they call for “prayer in school,” then why don’t they just say so — and stop telling voters that kids “can’t pray in schools”?

Could it be because they know that most Americans, if given the choice, would prefer the religious freedom students now have over a return to government-mandated prayers?

NPR program Intelligence Squared sponsored an excellent debate on the following proposition: “The world would be better off without religion.”  Two proponents and two opponents argued the proposition.  It was an excellent debate, well worth listening to.  Check it out at http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-religion/

From Center for Inquiry…

As you may have already heard, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a resolution reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the national motto. The non-binding measure, H. Con. Res. 13, also promotes the display of “In God We Trust” in public schools and other public buildings. It passed 396-9, with 2 abstentions.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) strongly condemns this resolution as a hollow, divisive, and unnecessary gesture toward monotheistic faith. It is irresponsible and shameful for lawmakers to use faith as a political tool to divide the nation along religious lines, especially at a time when America is confronted with multiple pressing national issues.

Congress only adopted “In God We Trust” as the national motto in 1956, when American leaders sought to distinguish the United States from the communist Soviet Union. Yet the motto ignores and reinforces the outsider status of the nation’s many nonbelievers, as well as members of minority religions that do not recognize a monotheistic god (including, for example, Buddhists and Hindus). Polls show that 16 percent of Americans have no religious identity, while over 40 million Americans do not identify with a monotheistic God.

A far better motto for the nation is the Latin motto adopted in 1782 as part of the national seal: “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of many, one.” America’s original motto accurately describes the nation as a unity comprising people from many religious and nonreligious perspectives.

H. Con. Res. 13 now moves to the U.S. Senate. CFI will track its progress and lobby against its passage.