Sean Faircloth talks about Catholicism at Notre Dame

By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:39:55 UTC

Sean Faircloth is former director of the Secular Coalition for America (SCA) and now Director of Strategy and Policy at the Richard Dawkins Foundation. He was brought up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools, but is an atheist, and author of a good new book, Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms America—and What We Can Do About It. I recommend it, at least to American readers, though folks from other countries might like to read how bat-guano crazy the U.S. is about religion.

I have only two reservations about the book: the chapter on sex seems a tad excessive, almost obsessive, and his prescription for how to create a secular America seems appears to consist almost entirely of helping the SCA or donating money to it. Oh, and the cover, a cartoonish drawing, detracts from the gravitas of the book’s message:

The book paints a scary picture of how, despite America’s official policy of church/state separation, our laws and our legislators are still deeply imbued with irrational religiosity. (Read his summaries of the 50 most religiously insane American senators and representatives.) It’s also very eloquent and convincing about how the “Founding Fathers” of America—people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin—were by no means religious, but were at best agnostics, and certainly did not form the U.S. government on Christian principles. That’s a must-read section if you want to go after the common religious claim that “America was founded as a Christian nation.”