People who favor America being more a secular society do so because of the great damage that religious passions can cause. Religious believers tend to regard religion as an (almost) unmitigated good, but the truth is that it creates a great deal of harm as well. Preventing that harm can be accomplished, in part, by restricting the ability of any one religion from amassing too much political power.

Susan Jacoby writes for Free Inquiry:

[I]t is a mistake for secularists to view the rise of religious correctness as a phenomenon driven exclusively by right-wing money and political clout. An equally important factor—indeed, an indispensable condition for the successes of the ultraconservative minority—is the larger American public’s unexamined assumption that religion per se is, and always must be, a benign influence on society. The extreme Right has exploited that assumption brilliantly and succeeded in tarring opponents of faith-based adventurism as enemies of all religion, as atheists, as “relativists.” ... [R]eligious correctness demanded that President Bush deny the existence of any connection between the events of September 11 and “real” Islam. The problem, of course, is not religion as a spiritual force but religion melded with political ideology and political power. Since the religiously correct do not acknowledge any danger in mixing religion and politics, evil acts committed in the name of religion must always be dismissed as the dementia of criminals and psychopaths.

This problem of the "religiously correct" is something we see in religious liberals at least as much as in religious conservatives. It is, after all, the religious liberals who so often complain that the conservatives or fundamentalists have "hijacked" their religion and twisted its teachings.

They don't understand or simply won't acknowledge that the conservatives and fundamentalists are following aspects of their religious tradition that are very bit as valid and those followed by the liberals. The social and political consequences of those traditions may not be welcome, but that doesn't make them illegitimate. Conservatives and fundamentalists are no more "hijacking" a religion than are the liberals.

Once the religious liberals fully understand and embrace the fact that the traditions followed by the conservatives are legitimate (even if undesirable), some actual progress might be made in reducing the harm they cause. More importantly, some progress might be made in reducing the harm that religion in general can cause as well.

For secularists to mount an effective challenge to the basic premises of religious correctness, they must first stop pussyfooting around the issue of the harm that religion is capable of doing. ... It is precisely because secularists do understand the power of religion, and the possibility that any intensely felt drive for righteousness may overwhelm dissenters in its path, that they insist on the fundamental importance of separation between church and state. Bin Laden is an easy case; the hard cases, which the Constitution was designed to prevent, involve political decisions in which both virtue and evil may be in the eye of the beholder. ... Nor is it enough for secularists to speak up in defense of the godless constitution; they must also defend the Enlightenment values that produced the legal structure crafted by the framers. Important as separation of church and state is to American secularists, their case must be made on a broader plane that includes the defense of rational thought itself.

Defense of rational thought isn't easy. It certainly won't be accepted by followers of politicians like George W. Bush, people who deride those who insist on clear standards of evidence or rationality as members of a "reality-based community" who are inferior. It also won't appeal to many on the religious left who ignore reality or reason if it serves their religious and political prejudices.

The need for a strong secularist defense of science is particularly urgent today, because many of the antisecularist right’s policy goals are intimately linked to an irrational distrust of science. There is a particularly strong utilitarian and philosophical connection between the revival of antievolutionism since 1980 and the political attack on separation of church and state, because the Christianization of secular public education has long been a goal of the forces of conservative religion. ... The attack on science is a prime secularist issue not because religion and science are incompatible per se, but because particular forms of religious belief—those that claim to have found the one true answer to the origins and ultimate purpose of human life—are incompatible not only with science but with democracy. Those who rely on the perfect hand of the Almighty for political guidance, whether on biomedical research or capital punishment, are really saying that such issues can never be a matter of imperfect human opinion. If the hand of the Almighty explains and rules the workings of nature, it can hardly fail to rule the workings of the American political system.

This is important: opposition to reason, rationality, science, and secularism ultimately entails opposition to the principles of liberal democracy as well. If it's unclear what that might be so, consider what one supports as the opposition to those principles: irrationality, pseudoscience, and theocracy.

What unites the staunch supporters of Bush, supporters of creationism, opponents to gay marriage, etc., is the insistence that we have to derive our values, principles, and understanding of the world from faith rather than reason. God must be consulted about how life formed. God must be consulted about who should be president. God must be consulted about the structure of our marriage laws. Humans play no role in this except to passive, obedient followers of the self-appointed high-priests who are convinced that they have divined the Will of God.

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Religious Right News
• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Secularism 101