The issue at hand.

YOU MAY RECALL, this past December, a few Protestant evangelical leaders in the United States declared there was a "war on Christmas" because business and government were avoiding the name of the holiday in favor of secular terms like winter. Even President George W. Bush was treated as part of the problem because the greeting cards sent from the White House gave only generic "best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness" without ever using the holy words, "Merry Christmas." (This was followed in February by a less-noticed "war on Valentine's Day" in which conservative Christian parents complained that valentines bearing religious messages were being discouraged in public school classrooms.)

Well, on March 27-28, 2006, it all came to a head when a group of four hundred religious conservatives met in Washington, D.C., to wring their hands over a supposedly much larger malaise of which these sorry incidents are only a part: a general "war on Christians." The conference sponsor was Vision America, a conservative evangelical organization founded in 1994 by the Reverend Rick Scarborough "to inform, encourage and mobilize pastors and their congregations to be proactive in restoring Judeo-Christian values to the moral and civic framework in their communities, states, and our nation." Attending this event were such leading lights of the religious right as Gary Bauer, Tom DeLay, Alan Keyes, Phyllis Schlafly, and Paul Weyrich.

And released at this summit was a manifesto of conservative religious claims and demands entitled the "Values Voters' Contract with Congress." It's a revealing piece of work that calls for legislation to: protect the Pledge of Allegiance, prevent judges from "ruling against acknowledgments of God" promote "religious accommodation in employment," maintain the status of marriage as a heterosexual institution, require parental involvement in the abortion decisions of all minors, affirm fetal rights, prohibit cloning, and restrict obscenity and pornography. There's more. But to take in the full breathless breadth of this document you'll just have to visit www.valuesvoter.org.

The point of my mentioning all this is to make it clear that the religious right is on a new offensive and, therefore, Humanists and their allies need to stay informed on breaking developments as well as grow in their understanding of the underlying historical, philosophical, and legal issues. Toward the former goal, the present issue of the Humanist has Rob Boston and Don Monkerud bring readers up to date on what's happening. And it turns out to be a little good news--that the Reverend Pat Robertson seems to be slipping in his influence and that a conservative religious initiative called covenant marriage has fallen on hard times. Toward the latter goal, a special collection of articles is provided by Kate Michelman, Joni Baird, Theodore Roszak, Thomas W. Clark, and James E Harris aimed at giving readers a more solid grounding in core principles. The overall purpose is to enable people to defend freedom from theocracy.

Of course the general category of religious fundamentalism includes more than just the Christian variety. Therefore, in our cover story, Daniel Consolatore unveils the real situation in Afghanistan, showing how the practices of the Taliban are far from gone. And our Up Front section features Carl Coon and Mel Lipman addressing the sticky problem of finding some nuanced middle ground between Islamofacism on one side and Islamophobia on the other.