As a further sign of the times—that is, of the increasing secularism in the U.S.—we have an editorial from a major newspaper, yesterday’s Sunday Los Angeles Times, that calls for an end to marginalizing atheists, demonizing them, and calling them “unpatriotic.” The editorial is signed by the “Times Editorial Board,” thus representing the consensus opinion of the paper.

Read the piece, “Patriotic Americans have the right not to believe in any God“; it will hearten you even if they did put “God” in caps, implying a specific god (the Abrahamic one) rather than gods in general.

To show you how out of touch I am, the authors motivate their opinion by citing two recent incidents, and I was completely unaware of the Mississippi bill. That one will certainly violate the First Amendment, but it’s probably just for show, to give lawmakers a chance to posture and compete at showing their love of Jesus. The Greece, New York case was of course common knowledge.

A few snippets from the editorial:

In Mississippi there is currently a campaign to amend the state constitution to acknowledge the state’s “identity as a principally Christian and quintessentially Southern state, in terms of the majority of her population, character, culture, history, and heritage, from 1817 to the present; accordingly, the Holy Bible is acknowledged as a foremost source of her founding principles, inspiration, and virtues; and, accordingly, prayer is acknowledged as a respected, meaningful, and valuable custom of her citizens.” (Bizarrely, the text says the amendment “shall not be construed to transgress either the national or the state constitution’s Bill of Rights.”)

That last statement about the First Amendment is of course the height of mendacity.

The commingling of citizenship and Christianity isn’t confined to the Bible Belt. In May, the Supreme Court upheld a New York town’s practice of opening its public meetings with invocations that overwhelmingly were offered by Christian clergy members who frequently prayed in Jesus’ name. The notion that the U.S. is a Christian nation also underlies claims, fanned by talk show hosts and other non-serious hysterics, about a secularist “war on Christmas” and the continued complaints about Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s that ended the practice of beginning public school classes with prayers and Bible readings.

And then the paper gets down to business:

We believe that entanglement of religion and government runs the risk of risk of marginalizing citizens who don’t share the religion of the majority. That is especially a concern at a time of growing religious diversity and an increase in the number of Americans who tell pollsters they aren’t affiliated with any religion. In a 2012 Pew Research Center poll, 19.6% of adults said they were “religiously unaffiliated.”

. . . equal treatment for organized religions, while it avoids the evil of “establishing” a single faith, can still carry the message that those with no religious beliefs at all are second-class citizens. That is why this page has opposed even nonsectarian prayers at meetings of local government bodies. Political leaders, especially those who frequently engage in religious language, should acknowledge that there is no religious test for being a good American. Obama did just that in his first inaugural address when he said that “we are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers.” We’d like to see more public officials recognize that reality; one way of doing that is to include nonreligious speakers in solemn public events. (That wasn’t done when public officials, including Obama, came together last year to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, despite a request that the speakers include a representative from the Secular Coalition for America.)

The ending is great:

Organized religion undeniably plays an important and often constructive role in the lives of many Americans. Religious figures have been instrumental in political causes from abolitionism to the civil rights movement. No one should seek to banish them from political debate. But we reject the notion that religious faith in general or adherence to a particular creed is an essential attribute of being American. The only creed to which a citizen of this country should have to pay homage is the Constitution.

You can’t promote secularism more strongly than that, and I’m enormously chuffed to see this coming from an important journalistic organ in the U.S. Now if only the New York Times—or even the New Yorker, which is always soft on religion—would say something like this. After all, it’s not like this message is strident, for it adheres scrupulously to what the founding fathers of our country intended, and during times that were at least as religious as now.

h/t: Robin