I am pretty sure it is too much to hope for, but just maybe some of the national attention former East Waynesville Baptist Church pastor Chan Chandler has brought our fair town will, when his and our 15 minutes of fame are up, instead shine where it rightly belongs: on the extent to which the religious right has hijacked religion to advance its political agenda and divide the country. Hopefully, our embarrassment will serve as an object lesson in the dangers of mixing church and state, and why our founding fathers, although (or, more accurately, because) they were religious people, understood these dangers and wisely drew a line between the two.

Of course, the constitutional separation of church and state is an inconvenience to the theocratic aims of the religious right, so it is not surprising, even if it should be alarming, that a major part of their cant is that NO SUCH LINE EXISTS at all, that the notion that church and state should be separate comes not from Thomas Jefferson, but from the ACLU, or some other anti-American extremist group from the lunatic fringe. Within five minutes of talking with someone who has been indoctrinated with religious right propaganda, you will get the same revisionist history (“the founding fathers only wanted to protect the church from government, not the other way around”), the same red herrings (“one nation under God” is in the Pledge of Allegiance — yes, but not until the 1950s), the same cries of panic (“THEY have taken God out of the classroom, now THEY are trying to drive Him out of America entirely”).

The latter is an especially powerful weapon in the arsenal of the religious right, since it is usually fired in response to some court ruling that a teacher may not use the classroom as a bully pulpit to lead children in prayer, or some other circumstance in which someone‘s religious views are imposed on others. It is simply and clearly a lie — a lie told again and again by the religious right — that children are not allowed to pray in school anymore. Who would prevent this, and how, and why? A child, or anyone else, may pray anytime, anywhere, so long as it is not coercive, connected to the school’s endorsement, or an interruption of classes. In every single circumstance I know of, all the courts have tried to do is prevent coercion, or the school’s endorsement of anyone’s particular religious beliefs over another’s, which is the only real way to preserve the religious freedom guaranteed in the Constitution.

Even as I write these words, I feel the need to try to explain that my position is pro-religion, and not anti-religion, as it would no doubt be cast by the religious right. And that is the truest symptom of the religious right’s real power, and the real reason Chan Chandler was emboldened enough to effectively force out members of a church they had belonged to since before he was born. The religious right has succeeded in framing every issue it takes on as us versus them, right versus wrong, Republican versus Democrat, moral versus immoral. Issues don’t have complexity — they only have sides. And there can only be one right side. If you are not with us, you are against us, and there are consequences for being against us.

If you recall, President Bush framed the war in Iraq on this same us versus them principle — if you didn’t support the war, you supported the terrorists. Simple formulation. If you don’t support George W. Bush, regardless of the lies he told over and over to rally support for the war, you are not a good American, and do not belong. Sound familiar?

Chan Chandler may lack his hero’s political experience and guile, but using God to push his political views is right out of the religious right playbook. Chandler simply made the mistake of overplaying his hand — the idea is to drive them out, not throw them out, to demonize those who disagree, not make martyrs of them. I’m sure his handlers explained all of this to him before he resigned — making a martyr of himself was the only viable play he had left — and that he could, with a little more training and polish, be an excellent congressman in the not-too-distant future in that shining city on the hill.

Until then, I look forward to that blessed day when the religious right devotes as much attention to caring for the poor (which of the Commandments compels us to support more tax cuts for the rich?) and loving its neighbors as it does on imposing its theology on every American.

(Chris Cox is a teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at chriscox@prodigy.net.)