In May last year, US President Donald Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission. Last month, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding, it released a 224-page draft report titled, “Americans’ First Freedom”.
I gather the current government and its key support base, the religious right, consider American society too secularised – to such an extent that it amounts to systemic religious discrimination.
That’s what the commission is tasked with rectifying. The report advocates a different understanding of the separation of church and state, and it makes various proposals to reverse entrenched secularisation in education, government, the military, employment and public healthcare. It also suggests setting up hotlines to rat out people in positions of authority who “discriminate” against people’s religious liberty.
Whether the US becomes a Christian theocracy, democracy or autocracy is none of my business. But as a lifelong student of philosophy, I do find it intriguing that the commission singles out Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre to blame for the secular corruption of American society. That’s rich coming from Trump and his allies in the religious right.
On page 41, under “Building Walls of Separation between Church and State”, the report says: “In the 1900s, however, a new philosophy emerged in Europe, which laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty which persist even today. Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and others famously embraced the belief that ‘God is dead’, rejecting God and dismissing ideals of objective truth and morality as simply pretences used to gain power.”
But so what if some dead European guys were atheists?