With the 2016 presidential race fully underway, the growing population of nonreligious voters across the country is deciding who to support. While Donald Trump remains the most talked-about candidate, the clear frontrunner nationally and in many of the upcoming primaries is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
At first glance, Clinton appears to be a potential champion for secular Americans as well as progressive religious folks when it comes to the separation of church and state. Clinton's past statements show she opposes federal funding of voucher programs that would defund secular public schools (and thus use taxpayer money for religious schools). Clinton went as far as to say, "There is simply no evidence that vouchers improve student achievement...but what they have done is to divert much-needed public funds for the few and have weakened the entire system."
Clinton even recently addressed the issue of governmental secularism:
I am very supportive of the separation of church and state. I think it's good for both the state and religion. And we have so much diversity of thinking in the country, and part of the reason why this American experiment has lasted is because there's a lot of different ways for people to express themselves, to believe what they want to believe, or choose not to believe, so I think the separation of church and state has served us very well, and I will certainly defend it.
Based on these policies and statements, humanists, atheists, nontheists, and secularists would likely support another Clinton presidency, especially when her opponents, like former Governor Mike Huckabee, have warned that "we cannot survive as a republic if we do not become once again a God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God." But it's important to note that Clinton does have drawbacks when it comes to religious intrusion in government.
As if we didn't have enough religious grandstanding from the other major political party, she went out of her way to critique her opponents' religious theology at a rally in Iowa. And as Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported in Mother Jones, "Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Family." This is the same infamous group that was exposed in the investigative novel The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by journalist Jeff Sharlet. Members of this semi-clandestine group include some of the leaders of the Religious Right, such as former Senator Jim DeMint, Governor Sam Brownback, Senator James Inhofe (famous for Snowballgate), and other politicians who wish to inject conservative Christianity into our nation's laws by placing restrictions on abortions and trying to legislate away other practices deemed to be sinful or heretical.
In fact, Clinton, along with arch-conservative Rick Santorum, co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act while she served in the Senate in the mid-2000s. This bill would, in a similar way to the recent Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs) that have been introduced across the country, allow religiously motivated discrimination in the workplace against employees and even recipients of services. RFRA has been used as a defense by state employees who refuse to grant LGBTQ couples marriage certificates and is currently being used by business owners who refuse to serve certain customers. It's disturbing to think that a similar bill was sponsored by a candidate for the presidency who claims to support church-state separation.
Though Clinton now supports gay marriage, she once opposed marriage equality based on her religious beliefs -- apparently unaware of the problems associated with government acting on private religious belief. She supported her husband when he signed the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law in 1996 and then later advocated for repealing the provision of DOMA that prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages.
While we need leaders who will stand up for what's right regardless of whether or not it's trending. Clinton's position on church-state separation is inconsistent. While she was a strong advocate for secular education, she's also supported religiously backed discrimination in the past and is close to a number of Religious Right leaders. It's difficult to predict how she would handle these issue once in office.
Candidates are still developing their positions on a wide array of issues. So hopefully, Clinton and other candidates will recognize the enormous importance of church-state separation and of the nonreligious community and will support policies which align with the secular values upon which this country was founded.
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