All I want for my Birthday is the Spread of Secularism

So, I started off my birthday with a New York Times magazine article that is positively terrifying. There is some debate as to how influential the Texas Board of Education is throughout the country, but the determination of the conservative Christians intent on emphasizing their biblical worldview in the public education system is made alarmingly clear. It's a fairly long read but definitely worth checking out.

This article typifies for me an idea I would like to convey in short here, and hopefully expand upon in a later post. That is, the realization that the fight for secularism is two things: a difficult, uphill battle, but tragically urgent and essential to the future of America and the world.

This may seem an obvious observation, but I think it is important to remind ourselves (secularists) that our opposition really believes in what they're doing. They really believe that by revising American history to emphasize the either (in some instances) debatable or (in others) disproved notion of the country's Christian foundation, they are eliciting the Christian (and therefore moral) potential the founding fathers wished to realize. These people really need to be either reasoned out of their unsupported beliefs or marginalized to the fringes of society. The difficulty in changing someone's mind on this subject (or any as it turns out), and the popularity that fundamentalist Christianity currently enjoys in our society (or at least Texan education boards) indicates that neither the former nor later is very likely to happen. This is what I mean by secularism being an uphill battle. Yet, reason and science (what secularism basically boils down to) are what empowers humans to understand their circumstance and thus improve it. Reason allows us to form coherent ideas about the facts of the world that science describes. The support of these ideas is vital for our country's intellectual, moral and economic future. Where else but disaster is a nation headed that revises history and obscures science to cohere with religious and political ideology?

But secularism seems to be fraught with misconceptions and misunderstandings in the minds of most Americans. The word inspires suspicion and outright hostility in large swathes of the electorate. Education is the answer to this discouraging fact, and, perhaps not incidentally, exactly what is being undermined by conservative Christianity. This obstacle is intimidating and bewildering, and I genuinely don't know how else to combat it but make noises of this sort. So, for my birthday, I'm asking my readers to do whatever they can in this struggle, even if it only amounts to making noise.