Ann Coulter is not the only conservative to use the label “godless” as a political smear, but she has used it far more than anyone else. Because of her efforts and the efforts of others, it’s become common in America to treat “godless” like a scarlet letter. For some reason, many of these same people imagine that accusing godless liberalism of being a “church” would constitute a further criticism. Why would people who make a big deal out of being religious believers themselves think this?
Some, like Ann Coulter, claim that liberalism is both a religion and godless. Many will regard these labels as mutually exclusive, but they are not: some religions are indeed godless, either because they explicitly reject any gods or because the existence of gods is irrelevant. Despite that kernel of truth, the accusation that liberalism is a godless religion is wholly without merit. Liberalism is not a religion, godless or otherwise, and not all liberals themselves are godless.
Ann Coulter has also alleged that liberalism is a godless “church” as well as a religion. Although it is true that godless people can form a “church” of some sort, it’s not true that liberalism qualifies as a “church.” Liberalism is a political philosophy, no different from conservatism. Atheism is not a church either, just as it is not a religion — it’s not even a philosophy. Even if we apply the labels “church” and “religion” metaphorically, liberalism doesn’t fit any more than conservatism.
Conservatives like Ann Coulter who oppose legal abortion have accused liberals of treating Roe v. Wade, the court decision legalizing abortion, as a type of holy scripture. This is an attempt to deny that liberals can be Christians whose holy scripture is the Bible. It also denies the possibility that a person can oppose abortion in principle but be unwilling to criminalize it, throwing women and doctors in jail for having and performing abortions. Even some atheists oppose legal abortion.
An important enemy of the Christian Right is America’s public schools because they are godless, which means they don’t promote any one religion or any one conception of any one god. This creates a secular space where children of all religions and no religions are equally free. Lies are spread about prayer being forbidden and belief in gods kept out. Godless schools are not a church, they are the absence of a church; teachers are not clergy, they are public servants who are there for everyone.
Just about the only genuinely religious characteristic which Ann Coulter and others try to attribute to liberalism is the presence of a cosmology. She and conservatives like her claim that the liberal cosmology is based upon evolution and the belief that humanity is an “inconsequential accident.” None of this is true. Many who accept evolution do not believe that humanity was an accident and many conservatives recognize that evolution is true.
Sometimes, conservatives who attack liberals and atheists try to claim that they follow a “religion” based around worship of some “higher power” other than God. Popular candidates include oneself, money, the United Nations, and so forth. This misrepresents atheists, who by definition don’t believe in any sort of god; it misrepresents liberals who do believe in God just as much as conservatives but who simply don’t believe in exactly the same way.
People like Ann Coulter use the label “godless” as a bigoted smear. They obviously don’t mean it as a compliment or as a neutral observation of fact. Godless is used in conjunction with liberalism for the same ideological reasons that it was once used in conjunction with communism: in order to communicate the idea that the everything immoral, un-American, and anti-religious is to be associated with liberalism and liberal political beliefs. There is no parallel smear for conservatism generally.
There appear to be two reasons for making the obviously false claims about liberalism being a religion or a church. First, it's an attempt to create a parallel with Christianity in order to implicitly deny that liberals can be Christian. Second, it allows one to argue that if liberalism is a religion, then all liberal beliefs must be removed from government and schools — a hypocritical argument since such people don't believe this should happen with Christianity.
There is nothing very new about the use of “godless” as a political smear — conservatives have been using it for decades as part of their attack on communists and everything even remotely associated with socialism or Marxism. There is something curious to note about this: it apparently wasn’t enough to attack communism for be totalitarian or for being enforced by dictatorships; instead, it was necessary to attack communism because it was “godless.” Every other bad aspect of communism was in turn described as stemming from its godlessness.
Basically the same thing is happening today when conservatives attempt to smear liberals as being godless. It’s not enough to simply criticize liberal policies on the basis of real or even perceived flaws; instead, conservatives must claim that the real and fundamental problem with liberalism is that it is godless and then proceed to describe every real or perceived flaw as stemming from that godlessness. Communism isn’t inherently godless, but at least the communism being attacked by conservatives really is godless. Today, though, the liberalism attacked by conservatives isn’t actually godless. This means that they start out with a lie before proceeding to reveal their bigotry against atheists. Or is it simply a lack of imagination that prevents them from coming up with any other insult?
It’s all part of a process of demonization. Addressing the actual issues which liberals or atheists advocate would mean treating both the ideas and the people with some measure of respect. Smearing them as godless eliminates the need to offer any respect — the label is designed to mark the person and whatever they suggest as unworthy of serious consideration. If liberals are derided as godless, then they are implicitly marked as anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-everything which the nation stands for or values. Once that is accomplished, conservatives don’t need to engage liberals’ ideas on a substantive level.
