Fish Stark, executive director of the American Humanist Association, spoke to the HumanistsMN Religious Freedom Forum about the importance of separation of church and state to America’s democracy and the fight against tyranny. The text of his remarks appears below.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in the late summer of 1775, King George III issued a document called the “Proclamation of Rebellion”. It was a cold, clinical piece of writing. In it, the King condemned his rebellious subjects for, quote “forgetting the allegiance they owe to the power that has protected and supported them”. He commanded his loyalists to root out and punish the subversive elements that dared to question his divinely granted authority.

And he signed it with four words that defined the old world: God Save the King.

Hidden in that signature was a theory of power. It was the assertion that morality, truth, and the right to rule were handed down from a mountaintop, through a divine bloodline, to a single man who was answerable only to the heavens. In that world, you were not a citizen; you were a subject. You didn’t have rights; you had permissions.

But then, in January of 1776, a young, argumentative firebrand named Thomas Paine—a humanist who famously declared “to do good is my religion”—published a feisty little pamphlet called Common Sense. And in it, Paine was arguing for something bigger than freedom for the American colonies. He was striking at the heart of the old world’s theory of power. He looked at the King’s “divine right” and called it for what it was: an affront to nature. He argued that “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind”. And he replaced “God Save the King” with a more daring, humanist proposition: that the law is king, and the law belongs to the people.

Not any one man. Not any God. Not the wealthy, not the priests, not the righteous, the elect, or the saved.

All of us. Equally.

To talk about religious freedom in 2026 is to talk
about the very soul of the American project.

We are here today to talk about religious freedom. But to talk about religious freedom in 2026 is to talk about the very soul of the American project. We are standing on the precipice of our nation’s 250th anniversary, and we find ourselves litigating questions we thought were settled in the 18th century.

Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls”. He was talking about tyranny, and the psychological wound of knowing you are living with something less than liberty. We are living in such a winter again. In just the last few weeks, we have seen an administration that treats the Constitution like a suggestion and the human rights of our neighbors like a nuisance. We have seen thuggish violence from Venezuela to right here in Minneapolis. We see an administration that doesn’t just find the law inconvenient—they mock and scorn it because they believe they have a divine right to rule.

When we see billionaires using their platforms to amplify the most dehumanizing rhetoric against our transgender neighbors, when we see the President prosecuting his political enemies, when ICE separates families in the middle of the night to send our neighbors to camps where they are tortured for the crime of being the wrong race at the wrong time, and when they make clear to us that they believe the price for protest should be to have your car tear gassed with your children inside, or to be shot in the face and called a “fucking bitch” – we are seeing the modern version of King George’s “Proclamation of Rebellion”.

And when Vice President Vance attempted to justify the murder of Renee Nicole Good, claiming that ICE has “absolute immunity,” what I heard – what we heard – was not a leader in a democratic society – but the servant of a mad king.

The religious right loves to tell a story about the founding of this country. They want you to believe that America was founded as a “Christian Nation,” a sort of New Jerusalem where the law was meant to reflect a specific, narrow interpretation of their scripture.

But the history tells a different story.

We’ve all heard the rebuttals to the right’s argument that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation. John Adams said it definitively as possible: “The United States government is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” Thomas Jefferson said, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was, part of the common law.” George Washington expressed it perhaps more eloquently in his landmark Newport letter on religious freedom: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

But we need more than a rebuttal to their story of what America isn’t.

We need our own story about what America is.

America is not a Christian nation.
America is a humanist project.

And if you look at the words of the founders – if you look at the values they were fighting for and the values of the monarchs they were rebelling against – it is impossible to escape the truth.

America is not a Christian nation. America is a humanist project.

It was grounded in our values, not theirs. Freedom over coercion. Equality over hierarchy. Dignity over cruelty. Reason over dogma.

The men and women who built the foundation of this country—from Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson to the abolitionists and the suffragists—were rebelling against the idea, held by the old world kings and the new wave of Christian Nationalists, that people were born to be subjects to a higher authority. Regardless of their personal religious beliefs and moral codes, the leaders who built America shared the common principle that authority and power were not divine gifts but common goods. The story of America’s founding is not the story of a group of conservative Christians designing their shining theocracy on a hill but a religiously diverse group of leaders building a new nation around humanist values that demanded freedom of speech and thought and equality for all regardless of how or if they pray.

Jefferson, a man of profound contradictions, nevertheless understood that “liberty of conscience” was the supreme American innovation. He knew that if the state could tell you how to pray, it could eventually tell you how to think, who to love, and how to live.

And he warned us about this very moment. In his post-presidency writings, he said “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

The Axis of Nonsense

Our country has been hijacked by an unholy alliance of billionaires, bishops, and bigots: what I call the Axis of Nonsense.

The billionaires, who have profited obscenely from our labor and our data, now tell us that empathy is a weakness. They want us to see each other as competitors in a zero-sum game, because if we’re fighting over crumbs, we won’t notice they’ve stolen the entire cake. They calibrate their technologies to hijack our attention and push us further apart, because an isolated and anxious populace is a profitable and pliable one. They represent a cynicism that is the enemy of the heroic spirit.

The bishops, who have lost their moral authority through decades of scandal and their embrace of raw political power, tell us that freedom is dangerous. They tell us that our bodies are not our own, that our love is a sin , that our desire for knowledge is an affront to God. They demand submission, and they preach a gospel of original sin, the perverse idea that we are born broken and unworthy, and can only be made whole by bending our knee in their direction. Their dogmatism is the enemy of the free mind.

And the bigots, who are animated by a deep-seated fear of a changing world, traffic in the cheap, addictive drug of resentment. They tell us that the path to feeling strong is to make someone else feel weak. They offer a sense of belonging that is based not on shared values, but on a shared enemy. They represent supremacy, which is the enemy of the open heart.

They believe their wealth or their worship or their whiteness gives them a divine right to rule.

Their goal is to replace the cause of America with the cause of the monarchs. They believe their wealth or their worship or their whiteness gives them a divine right to rule.

Nothing about what they believe is American. America at its best has always rejected cynicism, dogmatism, and supremacy, and building a nation and a world on those humanist principles: free minds. Open hearts. Heroic spirits.

We need to be clear about why the Axis of Nonsense is so obsessed with tearing down the wall of separation between church and state. It isn’t about freedom, it isn’t about loving thy neighbor, it isn’t just about prayer in schools or manger displays in public parks.

It is about power. And it is about profit.

We have a cynic in the White House who invokes the language of God because he reveres not Jesus but power, and the language of God has been used again and again and again by corrupt and incompetent hacks like him because it is the best way to tell people that truth and power and morality does not rightfully reside with all of us equally but somewhere else.

And when you ask humanists where morality lives, where power belongs, where truth resides, the answer is always: in all of us.

We believe that the higher power we are searching for is our common humanity.

And this terrifies the authoritarians.

When religion becomes the law, the law no longer belongs to the people.

It belongs to whoever can wield the most power to claim he represents the authority of God.

The separation of church and state is not a luxury belief.

It is the foundation of democracy.

It is the levee holding back the flood of tyranny.

And the separation of church and state is an issue of social and economic justice.

Think about it:

Why is Elon Musk talking about God?

When libertarian billionaires team up with theocratic bishops, they aren’t doing it out of a shared love for the gospel. They are doing it because the very idea of secular law protects the working person. If a corporation can claim a “religious exemption” to opt out of providing reproductive healthcare, or to ignore civil rights protections, or to bypass environmental regulations, then the laws that protect us are no longer universal—they are optional.

That is the outcome the billionaires want, and if they have to fake a little piety to get it, they’ll do it. They’ve done worse.

The idea of secular law is the idea that there is no authority that can supercede democracy. And that is very inconvenient for people who would like to milk the working class for as much money as they possibly can. Look how quickly we went from employers claiming that their religion should prevent them from having to pay birth control to employers claiming that their religion should prevent them from having to pay unemployment benefits.

In a Christian nation you are going to find the CEO of Exxon Mobil find religion real quick and demand exemptions from environmental law because the Bible says man is to have dominion over the earth. You are going to find the CEO of Amazon get in touch with his religious side and say that his holy book doesn’t say a damn thing about the minimum wage.

In every society where it’s ever been implemented, religious law has always bound the working class and let the wealthy through its loopholes.

They’ll still be able to get birth control and abortions for their mistresses under theocracy. In every society where it’s ever been implemented, religious law has always bound the working class and let the wealthy through its loopholes.

When “religious freedom” is weaponized to allow a hospital to deny life-saving care or a landlord to deny housing to an LGBTQ family or a megacorporation to skimp on health insurance and pocket the profits, it is a return to the world of King George. It is the assertion that some people’s private beliefs give them the right to rule over other people’s public lives.

And the bishops are on the take just as much as anyone else. They want to funnel our tax money into megachurches and private school vouchers while slashing SNAP benefits and Medicare. They use religion as a tool of control to keep us at each other’s throats while the billionaires pick our pockets.

And what about the bigots? The third part of the axis of nonsense?

The bigots are in the streets right now, masked and armed, getting paid handsomely to test out their new role as the enforcers of this new order, and empowered to act out their violent impulses. Every theocracy has its inquisitors.

The assault on our secular foundations is strategic, well-funded, and relentless. We are seeing a “Long March” through our institutions by those who despise the very idea of a pluralistic democracy.

They are using three primary levers to dismantle the secular state:

They have spent decades packing the judiciary with ideologues who treat “religious freedom” not as a shield for the individual, but as a sword for the powerful. They seek to redefine our fundamental rights out of existence, replacing them with a patchwork of theological exceptions.

By aggressively pushing for school vouchers and the funneling of taxpayer dollars into religious institutions and for-profit products owned by the billionaires, they are attempting to bankrupt our public education system. They want to replace schools that teach children how to think with institutions that tell them what to believe, and milk our kids for a little ancillary revenue.

And they are leveraging the racist structures embedded in American law to enact minority rule, using state legislatures to strip power from secular, progressive cities like Minneapolis, preventing them from raising the minimum wage, protecting tenants, or enforcing civil rights.

This Axis of Nonsense has a simple goal: to consolidate their own economic, cultural, and political power.

Their strategy is to make us feel helpless.

And their strategy is to make us feel helpless. To convince us that the problems are too big, the forces too powerful, the divisions too deep, the risks of speaking out too great. They want us to retreat into our corners, to numb ourselves with endless scrolling, to give up on the promise of democracy and the possibility of progress. They want us to believe that no one is coming to save us, so we might as well just give up.

And on that point, they are half right. No one is coming to save us. Because we are the ones who are coming to save us.

The cause of America is the cause of all mankind.

So what do we do now?

We are not in this position because this is what Americans want. Large majorities of Americans support the separation of church and state, and oppose the authoritarian excesses happening in Minneapolis right now.

We are in this position because so many Americans feel dispossessed. My generation can’t afford to buy the homes our parents owned even if we have the same jobs they did. We work more hours to afford less. Our voices go less far in a democracy diluted by racist redistricting and unlimited billionaire money in politics. They have successfully taught us to fear our neighbors and we are lonelier than ever before. We are increasingly made to feel that our worth is conditional. It’s a perfect storm to create a crisis of purpose.

The Axis of Nonsense captured a political party and promised people purpose. It promised them power. It promised them prosperity.

And I wouldn’t even say that most Americans bought it. But it didn’t help that the opposition party, which I am a consistently supportive and intermittently proud member of, can barely tie its shoelaces on a good day.

The confidence, the certainty, the moral clarity of the religious right will always win if the opposition can’t even tell you the sky is blue without first running it by Reid Hoffman and AIPAC.

But more and more Americans realize that they’ve been lied to. They are angry. The promised prosperity hasn’t come to anyone but the billionaires.

Which means we have a chance.

It’s easy to feel the power on the other side is totalizing. Impossible to overwhelm. But that’s a trick of the light that authoritarians play. Their goal is to make you feel that they are invincible.

But they’re not. That’s what Thomas Paine knew.

How the AHA is fighting back

I’ll tell you what the American Humanist Association is doing to fight back, and the larger theory of power behind it.

Our legal center has been rebuilt to focus on the terrifying issue of people losing their jobs, their healthcare, or even custody of their children because they have different religious beliefs than people in power. We are challenging state governments in Florida and West Virginia that try to use taxpayer dollars to promote religion over human needs. And we are winning. This year, in West Virginia, in the heart of Trump country, we blocked five million dollars from being stolen from the water fund and used for religious education, in a state where the coal companies poisoned the rivers and the water runs brown from the taps.

We have lost the luxury of framing our arguments in intellectual terms. We can talk about the Constitution in rooms like this to fire up our base. But to make our neighbors who are not here pissed off about religious nationalism, we have to show them the way it affects their daily lives.

At the AHA, we are growing the Congressional Freethought Caucus, the interfaith group of Congressmembers who are committed to the separation of church and state. It grew over 50% in the past year, and added two new members on Friday, making it larger than the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

The religious right won by spending years carefully and quietly building institutions that could sustain their power. There is no way around the fact that to win, we have to do more than one thing. We have to be in the streets and build coalitions in the halls of power.

And we have to realize that the fight in this country is not between people who believe in God and people who don’t, but people who believe this country belongs to all of us and people who believe it belongs to only them. Humanists will never win this fight without embracing our allies in faith communities and progressive people of faith will never win this fight without embracing those who do not believe. If we hold each other at arm’s length, they will break us apart, but if we are inseparable in the fight for democracy then we still have a chance.

We are officially off the sidelines in the culture war and playing to win.

At the AHA, we launched the Humanist Creator Fund to invest in storytellers—YouTube creators, podcasters, and TikTokers—who reach millions of young people searching for a home outside of the grievance-fueled nonsense of the far right. Charlie Kirk got started with $10,000 from a billionaire megadonor who bet on him as the next face of the religious right, and our new fund is spending $10,000 a month to find the Charlie Kirk of the humanist left. We are officially off the sidelines in the culture war and playing to win.

Because we have to reach people where they are and bring them to where we want them to go. The religious right wins because they are willing to recruit you. They will go to you and speak to you in your language, on your terms, on your turf. We spent too much of the last ten years saying to people “it’s not my job to educate you” and Jordan Peterson and Turning Point were incredibly willing to educate them.

And the irony here is that most of the young people sucked in by the right-wing’s favorite content creators, the mouthpieces for the axis of nonsense, are asking questions that we have the answers to. They are asking how to have agency and meaning and purpose in their lives. The right offers them the cheap high of supremacy, but a cheap high never lasts, which is why their following is so angry. And humanism has always offered answers about how we create our own agency and meaning and purpose, not steal it from someone else.

At the AHA, we are building humanist chapters across the country where people can go to find community and fight back. To clarify their beliefs. To gather with people who have those beliefs in common and strengthen them. To know and love their neighbors better and to act on behalf of what’s right. We have added dozens of new chapters to the AHA this past year and we are still growing.

Because ultimately we are wired for connection. We will not win if we are clinical. We will not win if we are cynical. We will win if we build a community and invite people in, if we ask people to be our friend before we ask them to be our ally, if we can provide something for people to belong to before we ask them to fight for it. The Axis of Nonsense works so hard to divide and distract us because they know that when we discover solidarity it is over for them.

We will not win if we are clinical. We will not win if we are cynical.
We will win if we build a community and invite people in.

We are doing this all on the budget of less than one megachurch.

And yes, that is absolutely me reminding you that we need money to do this work. That’s not me trying to solicit you to give money from the AHA but it is me telling you to give money to something. Now is the time. You can’t take it with you when your assets get seized for engaging in subversive activity. If you are thinking about giving a pro-democracy organization a gift in your will, they need it now. We need to act with the speed and urgency of the opposition, and we can be scrappy but freedom doesn’t come for free.

But I also say that to remind you that a lot is possible even with a little.

I recognize that talking in hopeful terms about “the cause of America” and “liberty for all” can feel hollow in a moment of such profound cruelty. It is easy to look at the scale of the challenges we face and feel small.

And I have gotten into arguments with people about this. I got into an argument the last time I came to Minneapolis, in fact, with someone who’s been in this movement a long time and said “I don’t like the way you talk about hope. I don’t think it’s responsible. I don’t think it’s rational. It gives people unrealistic expectations and sets us up for failure. The only thing we can do at this point is harm reduction.”

And I’m sorry, but I’m going to be blunt. That way of thinking is dead wrong and if we indulge it we will lose. Letting our righteous anger calcify into cynicism and calling it rationalism is something we should leave in 2025. Treating hope as a fairytale is to reject the lessons of history. Treating hope as an ineffective strategy for organizing is to reject the lessons of brain science.

Before I came to the American Humanist Association, I studied child psychology at Yale and Harvard and worked in tech building apps for mental health. I studied the work of humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, John Dewey and Dr. Spock. Yes, the people who created client-centered psychology, the hierarchy of needs, revolutionized public schools and the way we care for children were all card-carrying humanists.

They taught us something vital about the human spirit: we grow from hope.

When people like Rogers came on the scene, psychology was captured by people like Freud, who saw people as problems to be solved. They looked at their patients with a deficit mindset, tried to save them from themselves. It’s one of the many ways conservative Christian theology has infected our thinking – the idea of original sin has become embedded in our culture makes us see our neighbors as inherently wicked, needing to be controlled.

And what people like Rogers theorized – and then proved – is that people make more progress if they have an ideal in mind for themselves and believe it is possible to achieve. That hope in the possibility of a better future is not just a nice, fleeting feeling but the fire that sustains us through hard winters. That hope we can grow into our ideal selves, whether as people or as a nation, is what makes us work harder, push further.

The religious right wins because they have a story of certainty. They believe, in their fanatical fervor, that they are destined for victory because they are doing the work of a Supreme Being. They have an expectation of victory that kept them motivated even in the moments like 2008 where it seemed like a secular democracy was won forever.

We have no such blind faith. We are rationalists. We look at the data. And sometimes, the data looks grim. But we must not let our fear of the worst outcome catapult us into cynicism, because cynicism is just another form of submission.

Hope is not a feeling; it is a discipline.

Hope is not a feeling; it is a discipline. Humanistic psychology teaches us that a strong, positive sense of self-efficacy is the bedrock of a fulfilling life. We fight harder and we perform better when we believe better things are possible. Our hope is not based on the unprovable. It is a reasoned hope based on the history of the humanist cause winning again and again.

When the world said a King was divine, humanists like Paine and Jefferson said the people are sovereign. And we won.

When the nation said Black Americans were property, humanists like Frederick Douglass and A. Philip Randolph and James Baldwin and Zora Neale Thurston said dignity is inherent. And we moved the arc of history.

When women were denied the right to their own bodies, humanists like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem led the fight for reproductive freedom. And we changed the world.

When polio was paralyzing our children, a humanist named Jonas Salk refused to patent the vaccine because he believed scientific knowledge belonged to the people. And we saved millions.

Hope is the fuel that allows us to act back against a world that tries to strike us down. It is the “calculated hope” that we have it within us to harness our best instincts toward a better world.

The American story moves in seasons, and we are in a hard winter.

But humanists fought for this democracy, and we won it, and we improved it, and we will not lose it to a bankrupt game show host, his fawning sycophant sidekick who is so emasculated in his quest for power he lets racist degrade his wife and asks for more, and a billionaire man-baby who makes dumbass exploding trucks.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation, we have to take up “the cause of America” once again. It is a cause that requires us to be courageous. It requires us to show up for the families targeted by ICE. It requires us to defend the secular public schools that are the laboratories of our democracy. It requires us to build communities where the disease of loneliness is cured by the medicine of solidarity.

Thomas Paine reminded us that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again”. The story of America is still being written. It is a grand, sprawling, and unfinished story of progress. And the only thing that has ever made this country great is the courage of those who refuse to stand still.

We will not be moved by fear. We will not be silenced by dogma. We will not be divided by the cheap tricks of the billionaires, the bishops, and the bigots.

They have no loyalty to the American ideal. They revere money, power, racial supremacy, and moral superiority.

And we who believe there is nothing more supreme than democracy, whether we are humanist or Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or anything in between – in our reverence for democracy we honor our country and we honor each other.

As for me and my house, we will serve America.

Thank you.