The Freedom From Religion Foundation is urging its members (which would include me) to boycott the recently-announced Mother Teresa commemorative stamp. Ugh. As Fox News reports:
Freedom from Religion Foundation spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor says issuing the stamp runs against Postal Service regulations.
“Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can’t really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did,” Gaylor told FoxNews.com.
Postal Service spokesman Roy Betts expressed surprise at the protest, given the long list of previous honorees with strong religious backgrounds, including Malcolm X, the former chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Gaylor said the atheist group opposed Father Flanagan’s stamp but not those for King and Malcolm X, because she said they were known for their civil rights activities, not for their religion.
Martin Luther King “just happened to be a minister,” and “Malcolm X was not principally known for being a religious figure,” she said.
Gaylor said Mother Teresa infused Catholicism into her secular honors — including an “anti-abortion rant” during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech — and that even her humanitarian work was controversial.
I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to the FFRF’s concerns. I think secular humanitarians are underappreciated, and I have also been very critical of Mother Teresa and her charity. Moreover, I know and like the people at the FFRF. They often do good work—and no, I’m not saying that because they’ve given me scholarship money. 
But why incur all this negative press over a stamp? These rather petty complaints only serve to eclipse secularists’ more legitimate grievances.
To their credit, the FFRF isn’t litigating this issue. I think they realize that they either don’t have a strong legal case or it’s not worth the effort. Again, though, does a stamp really merit a press release, let alone a boycott? From at least a PR perspective, I vote “no.”
Tell me I’m wrong.
Anyone who says MLK “just happened to be a minister” must not have read MLK’s own writings very carefully. A cursory review of his letters, speeches and writings reveals the profound effect his religious experiences had on his motivation to fight racial injustice and the way in which his Christian faith informed every aspect of his life and mission.
Sadly, I think few actually read King these days. Doing so would reveal inconvenient truths about the man and the religious foundation of his humanism to secularists eager to co-opt his mission.
Anyway, regarding the Mother Theresa stamp: I say ‘get a freaking life’. Jon wonders why they would incur all this negative press over a stamp. The answer seems pretty obvious to me — the secular agenda is driven more by cranky ideology than principle. The obvious intentions of the leadership of these groups is to completely drive religion out of the public square. SHAFTers often claim more benign intentions, but aren’t they just putting lipstick on a pig?
Here is the deeper problem: I think it is true that you cannot separate Mother Theresa’s religious convictions from everything else she did. You can’t do that with MLK either. Frankly, you cannot do that with anyone – religious or not. All of our actions and choices are informed, at the most basic level, by our core convictions about the meaning and purpose of human life. For some, these convictions are religiously informed. For others, they are not. But should the govt be in the business of including certain core convictions and excluding others? NO. Including all perspectives – and indeed celebrating them when they are worth celebrating – is precisely what an open and lively public square looks like! The intolerance of the secularists who seem to think that only those who have the same convictions as they deserve a place in the public square is quite astonishing (not to mention ironic seeing as they are usually the ones beating the tolerance drum).
It is funny to think of someone as diminutive as Mother Theresa engaging in a “rant”, though she was certainly not spiritually diminutive so perhaps. Anyway, if you care to read her “rant”:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html
I’ve been grappling with this issue for some time. As you have pointed out in the past, greed, hate, lust, anger, and all other negative human qualities would exist with or without religion. It might be fair to say that people like the Ayatollah, Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, or King Leopold II all would have been unsavory people with or without their respective religions, despite their assertions to the contrary. There are other plausible explanations as to why they were the way they were, like the societies in which they were born and so forth. That said, I don’t know if it’s fair to get inside their heads. I feel the same way about people like Mother Teresea and MLK. Were they forged into good people because of their religion, or did they choose ideologies that affirmed their humanism that already existed? Are people shaped by their ideologies, or is it the other way around? It’s something I don’t have an answer to. If I’m not mistaken (and I very easily could be, please tell me if I am), that was one of the main differences between Hegel and Marx. Hegel thought our ideas shaped the world, and Marx thought that the world shaped our ideas. It’s something I don’t have an answer to.
Look at Nazi Germany. Did National Socialism turn good or ordinary people into cold-blooded killers, or were the German people, in the depths of despair and hopelessness, ripe for that kind of thinking before it even took hold?
Mike raises good questions. I would just say that I am apt to take people like MLK and Mother Theresa at their word — they say that their actions, mission and character were the result of their faith.
I don’t care about religious figures on stamps, 10 commandments in court houses, manger displays on public property, or In God We Trust on the money. What’s the big deal? These things have cultural significance. You don’t have to believe in god to recognize the good in (some) of the mythology that has been a part of our history as a country.
Of that list, I really only care about 10 commandment monuments being constructed and put in courts (the ones already there in courts I’d leave be). And I think “In God We Trust” was an unconstitutional addition to our currency, but it’s not an issue high on my priority list.
I don’t really have anything to add, but I loved the post and the comments so far.