FFRF Action Fund’s “Secularist of the Week” is longtime secular ally U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman for his recent Daily Beast op-ed highlighting the dangers of Christian nationalism and of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
Published over the past weekend, Huffman’s piece, “It’s Not Just Free Speech. The Trump Administration Is Coming for Religious Freedoms,” addresses the surge of Christian nationalism under the Trump administration and warns that the movement will only worsen. Huffman points as evidence to the Religious Liberty Commission, which was created in May and tasked with crafting policy recommendations on how best to protect so-called religious liberty in the United States. Huffman is the only currently identified agnostic in Congress and is co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Freethought Caucus.
Huffman details the Christian nationalist figures that make up the commission, including Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, TV personality Dr. Phil, a former beauty pageant contestant and a televangelist, among others. He warns that the commission will “likely work to flood the zone with [Christian nationalist] revisionist history,” using the work of pseudohistorian David Barton, who “sacralizes America’s founding as a Christian covenant with God, and reinvents our Enlightenment-era founders as proto-evangelicals.”
Barton “opposes the separation of church and state, and promotes a vision of the United States in which our laws are based on evangelical Christian beliefs,” Huffman writes. “The narratives he has curated are now echoing through the rhetoric of the Religious Liberty Commission, and there is a lot more to come.”
Huffman continues, “Once the wall of church-state separation is breached, expect Christian supremacists to charge through on a second myth also being promoted by Trump’s commission: the ‘naked public square.’” He explains that the argument “caricatures nonreligious Americans” as “radical secularists who’ve banished Christianity from civic discourse.”
Huffman points out that this scare tactic ignores the fact that “Christians dominate every corner of public life” and that “the public square is anything but naked.” He underscores, “What Christian nationalists can’t accept — and what triggers their moral panic — is that the public square belongs to all of us. Sharing it equally with other faith perspectives is essential.”
Huffman concludes his compelling piece with a final warning: “Americans who value secular democracy, pluralism and public education should pay close attention. Because when fascism comes to America, it will wave a flag and carry a cross.”
FFRF Action Fund sincerely thanks Rep. Huffman for consistently working to raise public awareness of the ever-growing Christian nationalism movement in this country.
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.