Over the weekend I had the distinct pleasure of getting up close and personal with the religious right at the Values Voter Summit held in Washington, DC, on September 18 and 19. Sponsored primarily by FRCAction, the Washington lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, and co-sponsored by all the major religious right heavy hitters and also by the right-wing corporatist think tank the Heritage Foundation, the annual summit is the premier religious right organizing event of the year. This year around 1,800 people attended, including activists, pastors, journalists, and some of the leading right-wing politicos of today (not to mention of the last few decades too).

I was struck by several ideas over the course of the experience. First, as fellow attendee Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted in a blog entry after the event, the Values Voter Summit was an explicitly partisan affair. Obviously the religious right has never really found a welcoming audience in the Democratic Party, while at times in recent history they’ve practically held the reins of the Republicans. Even so, this movement is ostensibly nonpartisan, as it is primarily religious in nature and is presumably more attached to particular values than to particular politicians (not to mention the nonpartisan tax exempt status of all the sponsoring organizations). Nevertheless, several leading aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination for 2012 made speeches there, including Governors Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Tim Pawlenty (Governor Rick Perry made a well-received speech as well; he’s not planning a run for president, but rather is going to face a hard primary fight for another term as governor of Texas). In addition, several of the leading Republican voices in Congress, including Senator Mitch McConnell and congressional representatives Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mike Pence, and Roy Blunt, all addressed the summit attendees.

Between all of those political speeches, it seemed to me that only about four ideas were expressed: 1) Anything President Obama wants to do, from health care reform to negotiating with America’s supposed enemies to fighting climate change, is bad. 2) Abortion and marriage equality must be stopped. 3) America has suddenly run completely out of money, and it is all Obama’s fault. 4) Values Voters need to rise up and take their country back. I think that I listened to about a dozen speeches centered around those ideas, all of them packed with pandering applause lines that kept the audience repeatedly rising and sitting, rising and sitting, until the room looked like an exercise class.

While politicians were the big stars of the show, they weren’t the only people to appear on stage. In an effort to motivate the millennial generation (Americans between the ages of 18 and 29), the summit featured several younger speakers who mainly discussed activism and outreach (although Carrie Prejean, the dethroned Miss California who became a heroine to the religious right after making a statement against marriage equality at the Miss USA pageant, decided rather to make a stunningly narcissistic speech about her experience as a fallen beauty queen). Sandhya Bathija of Americans United, also in attendance, discusses more about the youth angle in a blog post here; what really struck me, though, was the enormous elephant in the room that no one, not even Esther Fleece, the director of millennial studies for Focus on the Family (and a millennial herself) ever mentioned, not even once, which is the increased secularization of young people in the United States. While several speakers noted that the vast majority of young voters voted for President Obama, they never noted that from 30 to 40 percent of people in their twenties are now unaffiliated with any religion. Needless to say, this has some profound implications for the future of the religious right, if the younger voters in America are not only less to the right, but also less religious!

Most enlightening for me, though, out of the entire weekend, was the opportunity to hear a succinct and impassioned explanation of the religious right’s general view on the separation of church and state and religious freedom in the United States. This was delivered by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who presented the stunningly radical view that the First Amendment of the Constitution not only does not prevent the government from favoring Christianity (he argued that the establishment clause only prevents the government from favoring a particular denomination of Christianity over another), but also that the wording of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) indicates that it applies only to Congress and not to any other level of government. He stated:

What that means is that by the First Amendment the Founders intended to restrain only the actions of Congress…if Congress is the only entity that is restrained by the First Amendment, it is constitutionally impossible for a governor, or a state legislature, or a mayor, or a city council, or a school administrator, or a school teacher, or a student speaking at graduation to violate the First Amendment. Why? Because they’re not Congress!

Key to his interpretation is his push back against the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment applies the Bill of Rights to the actions of state governments. But without this constitutional principle, a lot of the Bill of Rights would be moot in the day-to-day lives of Americans; imagine what it would be like if the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment did not apply to state governments! I doubt that the applauding audience thought through the implications of Mr. Fischer’s ideas.

Right Wing Watch has more to add on Fischer’s extremist views. Needless to say, this is a terrifying and radical view of religious liberty in the United States.

There is no doubt that the religious right has less influence than in years past. But we ignore them at our peril. They still envision a future of Christian supremacy, where no one’s rights must necessarily be respected except for their own. And with so many leading politicians and aspiring presidential candidates pandering to the activists in attendance, it’s clear that the path to success for many aspiring national leaders still goes through the religious right, at least for now.

At stake is our vision for a more tolerant future for America, where diverse religious viewpoints flourish and everyone’s rights are respected. Progressive secular and religious people alike must push back and hasten the demise of the influence of the religious right in America.