Bending The Democratic Party Toward Secularism

Last night, I attended my county’s Democratic Party nomination convention and unlike the last few years, there was no religious invocation and no one missed it.

A few years ago, I noticed that there was a non-sectarian religious invocation at the beginning of the meeting. Despite what political parties like to pretend, they are private organizations and not part of the government. This means that the rules concerning church/state separation don’t apply to political parties and they have every right to have any invocation they desire.

However, the Democratic Party is not the Republican Party. Atheists, agnostics, humanists, and “nones” make up a good bulk of the Party and even non-sectarian invocations are somewhat of a turn off for people like me. So, following the convention a few years back, I sent an e-mail to the new county chair expressing my uncomfortableness.

Last year, the religious invocation wasn’t even close to non-sectarian. It was flat out evangelical Christian. On one hand I wasn’t surprised since the Party endorsed a Creationist to run for county council. On the other hand, I was surprised because the Party chair is Jewish. So again, I e-mailed the chair and expressed my much stronger objections to an evangelical invocation.

Victory! This year there was no invocation and no one even noticed. It wasn’t missed at all and during the entire convention religion was only invoked once by a congressman’s “God bless America” comment at the end of his speech.

I cornered that very same congressman afterward and asked him to co-sponsor next year’s Darwin Day resolution. He said, “of course” and then told me to send his office a reminder. Of course he probably won’t. While he is a very progressive congressman in a very safe district, I had sent his office a request previously to support Congressman Rush Holt’s resolution and his office never responded and didn’t co-sponsor. Still, I made my presence known to the congressman and will be sending him a follow-up e-mail.

A nearby convention attendee overheard my comments to the congressman and expressed his interest. We chatted for a few minutes and he seemed very interested in this issue. I also chatted with a few other attendees about various secular issues. I for fortunate enough to sit next to a member of the local school board and chatted to him about keeping science in the science class and keeping religion out of the science class. While I did not use the “A-word,” I made it pretty clear that I wasn’t a religious believer. He commented that he wasn’t very religious, but that he was a believer in a “higher power.” Still, he supports secularism in government and in the schools.

As always, I made sure to pledge my allegiance to the flag loudly, without “under God,” and without a pause to allow other’s to catch up. I just love throwing everyone off that way.

Lesson for the day, don’t hide your atheism in politics. One person joked about how in political meetings it isn’t polite to talk about religion or politics but I just love talking about both. There will always be religious believers who love to talk about their religion in public without regard to anyone; why should we be the quiet ones? For the record, I do not support hijacking the meeting to talk about atheism in the way that so many religious believers do with their beliefs, but I do support politely mentioning my atheism where appropriate, not hiding my atheism, and talking about the issues of secularism.