Is Atheism the Last Unforgivable Sin of American Politics?

Even as federal and state courts and American governing institutions in general accept as given that all true Americans are believers, the number of nonbelievers in the United States steadily increases. And some of these, ordinary Americans going about their business, have been willing and visible challengers of laws that they believe treat them unequally. Very few of them in public life, however, particularly those who might want to win an election to office, have come forward to announce their nonbelief, as a matter of public pride, to a wide audience.

It was only after his retirement from the House of Representatives that the openly gay former congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, came “out of the closet” a second time in 2013, publicly declaring himself a nonbeliever on Bill Maher’s HBO TV show Real Time. A year later he appeared in one of the YouTube videos of well-known people asserting their nonbelief, a project funded by Todd Stiefel’s Openly Secular Coalition. Frank, consistently chosen by the Washington press corps during his 32 years in the House as both the smartest and funniest member of Congress, defines himself as a “nontheist, who does not believe in God,” but declines to call himself an atheist, “who is someone who assumes he knows there is no God.” Frank’s affirmation of nonbelief was a coup for the organized atheist activism that has roiled America since 2000. He embodied the movement’s call for atheists to go public, to copy the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender movement’s pride-filled coming out of the closet. Atheists insisted that a willingness to speak openly of an unpopular identity was central to the dramatic turn-around in American attitudes to gay people. Who better, then, to represent atheists out of the closet than Barney Frank, the first member of Congress to come out as gay?

While Frank need no longer worry about the electorate and its biases, others who are interested in winning elections certainly risk a great deal if they declare themselves to be atheists. This is true even though the number of nonbelievers in our population is growing at an unprecedented rate. Estimates of the number of Americans who today identify as “nones,” nonbelievers or seculars, range from 15 to 23 percent. To stick with polling data associated with the low estimate: 15 percent translates into 45 to 50 million nonbelieving Americans, a number, we have noted, higher than the combined total of Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Jews, and Muslims. Like Frank, who represented part of Boston and who lives now in Maine with his husband, nonbelievers are clustered disproportionally in the Northeast and the West. States with more than 25 percent of their population declaring themselves “nones” in 2014 are, in descending order:

Vermont, 37%
New Hampshire, 36%
Massachusetts, 32%
Maine, 31%
Alaska, 31%
Oregon, 31%
Montana, 30%
Colorado, 39%
Nevada, 28%
Arizona, 27%
California, 27%
Idaho, 27%
New York, 27%.

Only four states count fewer than 15 percent identifying as “nones,” and they are all in the South: Mississippi, 14%; Tennessee, 14%; Louisiana, 13%; and Alabama, 12%.

Like Frank, most “nones” are politically liberal, though there are conservative nonbelievers—for example, the libertarian followers of Ayn Rand, who died in 1982. One atheist activist estimates that maybe 20 percent of the total of nonbelievers are devotees of Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Her championship of the militantly God-rejecting philosophy called Objectivism was conveniently overlooked by her acolytes in the Trump administration, like Speaker Ryan, Secretary of State Tillerson, and the president himself. Like Frank as well, more nonbelievers are men than women. Strikingly, even though Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded the American Atheists in 1963 and led it for many years, most leaders of atheist and secular organizations today are men. (An important exception is the mother-daughter team Anne and Annie Laurie Gaylor. The former in 1978 founded the Freedom from Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin; the latter still leads it.) Frank is of white European background, a group far more represented among “nones” than Hispanics and blacks. Being highly educated, with an undergraduate and a master’s degree from Harvard, he also fits the nonbeliever profile. Like many in the movement, he is culturally, but not religiously, Jewish.

Frank does deviate from the profile of the typical nonbeliever in his age. The “Atheist Awakening” is being driven dramatically by the young. One 2016 Pew Research Center study has 35 percent of millennials saying they identify as atheist, agnostic, or have no religion in particular. The political scientist Robert Putnam reports that between 2005 and 2011, among 18- to 29-year-olds, the “nones” rose from 25 to 33 percent, and within that cohort the number of atheists or agnostics rose from 15 to 24 percent. Compared to the latter figure, older Americans like Frank, who saw themselves as atheists or agnostics, rose only from 9 to 12 percent. Frank also deviates from the nonbeliever norm in that many of the most visible nonbelievers are scientists. They include Bill Nye, the popular “Science Guy” on TV and lecture circuits, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the 2006 book The God Delusion, which rose to number one on the nonfiction best-seller list. Nonbelievers today see astronomer Carl Sagan and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who actively served as president of the American Humanist Association from 1985 to 1992, as early visionaries of the secular movement.

As the magazine Nature in a 1998 article, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God,” claimed, “over 90% of the scientists in the National Academy of Sciences are non-believers.” And much is still made in the secular movement of the moment in 2001 when the New York Times science writer Natalie Angier outed herself as an atheist in a January 14, 2001, New York Times Magazine article, “Confessions of a Lonely Atheist.”

Not all atheists are in the sciences, but they tend to have a great respect for them. Speaking on the issue of the diversity among nonbelievers, the atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens told a reporter for the Washington Post in May 2007: “We’re not a unified group. But we’re of one mind on this: the only thing that counts is free inquiry, science, research, the testing of evidence, the use of reason, irony, humor, and literature, things of this kind.”

“The nonbeliever in America is never free of the seemingly unstoppable associations drawn between the American government and God, or between citizenship and religion.”

What unifies and infuriates most nonbelievers is having to participate in or just acknowledge the omnipresent rituals of American civil religion. The constant invocations of God may have deep roots in American history, but, as we saw, they were given new and top-down legislative force during the Cold War years. The issues have not always divided liberal judges from conservative judges. One legendary liberal on the Supreme Court, William Douglas, referred to God’s central place in American public life in making decisions about what kinds of state support of religion were constitutional. In 1952, writing for a majority in Zorach v. Clauson, a decision that allowed a release time program for schoolchildren to receive religious instruction outside of school, Justice Douglas noted that the First Amendment did not insist on a total separation of church and state, or otherwise: “Prayers in the legislative halls; the appeal to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive, the proclamations making Thanksgiving a holiday; ‘so help me God’ in our courtroom oaths—these and all other references to the Almighty that run through our laws, our public rituals, our ceremonies would be flouting the First Amendment. A fastidious atheist or agnostic could even object to the supplication with which the Court opens each session: ‘God save the United States and this Honorable Court.’”

Douglas concluded his list of practices exempted from religious establishment claims with the bold assertion that Americans “are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Eleven years later, Justice William Brennan, another revered liberal, while concurring in the court’s finding that Bible reading in public schools violated the Establishment Clause, nonetheless noted that the national motto “In God We Trust” was constitutionally permissible, because “we have simply interwoven the motto so deeply into the fabric of our civil polity.”

More predictably, the conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1989 gave the Supreme Court’s seal of approval to the embrace of God in a case involving Christian symbolism. In Lynch v. Donnelly, a 5-4 split decision that upheld the constitutionality of a Nativity scene on town property in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Burger described approvingly “an unbroken history of official acknowledgement by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life.” Moreover, “our history is replete,” he insisted, “with official references to the value and invocation of Divine Guidance in deliberations and pronouncements of the Founding Fathers and contemporary leaders.” Burger then energetically affirmed the constitutionality of a bundle of practices, in addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, at the core of official American civil religion, mentioning in turn Christmas and Thanksgiving as national holidays; congressional and military chaplains; the congressional prayer room; the national motto; and the presidential proclamation of a National Day of Prayer.

One could easily add to Burger’s list. Professor Steven Epstein, in a brilliant 1996 Columbia Law Review article, “Rethinking the Constitutionality of Ceremonial Deism,” offers many more governmental entanglements with religion that are unquestioned and accepted as reflexively as those in Burger’s list: prayers at presidential inaugurations; presidential addresses that invoke the name of God; the cry “God Save the United States and This Honorable Court” prior to judicial proceedings cited by Justice Douglas; required oaths for public officers, witnesses, and jurors; the use of Bibles with which to administer those oaths; and, finally, using “in the year of our Lord” (A.D.) to date public documents. Unlike Burger and the judges who concurred with him in the Nativity case, Epstein deems all of these practices unconstitutional endorsements of religion.

The nonbeliever in America is never free of the seemingly unstoppable associations drawn between the American government and God, or between citizenship and religion. Some of them have to do with the words presidents and other public officials use on solemn public occasions that all Americans are supposed to share. Many others are more than mere conventions but have the force of law. Congress made Christmas a national holiday in 1894 and Thanksgiving in 1941. In 1952, at the urging of Reverend Billy Graham, Congress passed legislation requiring an annual National Day of Prayer, which in 1988 was given the specific date of the first Thursday of May. And we have seen how in 1954, at the urging of Reverend George Docherty and the Knights of Columbus, Congress put God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

There are, to be sure, efforts of resistance by nonbelievers, from the “fastidious atheist or agnostic,” to borrow Justice Douglas’s phrase. Some are personal and symbolic. Barney Frank, who after his retirement wanted Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to appoint him to fill the few months left in Ted Kennedy’s Senate term after his death, publicly stated that if this happened he would take the oath with his hand placed on a copy of the United States Constitution rather than the Bible. He didn’t get the appointment. Most efforts at resistance are public and, as we have seen and will see more of below, usually involve lawsuits against governing bodies claiming the unconstitutionality of the particular entanglement of government and God. More often than not this resistance is repelled and repudiated by courts which insist that government invocation of God is not state sponsorship of religion but the solemnization of public occasions, as if there were no secular ways to give solemnity and gravitas—like taking the oath of office with a hand laid on the Constitution. The courts’ other defense of the governmental invocation of God is to maintain that through repeated use, “rote repetition,” religious language loses its religious significance and is merely and only “ceremonial.” Lost sight of here is the inherent contradiction; how can religious language both give solemnity and also be insignificant?

The practices of American civil religion, the examples of “ceremonial deism” listed by Justice Burger and Professor Epstein, are strong and resilient because most Americans do, indeed, take their religious content seriously, “rote repetition” notwithstanding. Imagine the public furor if the Supreme Court were to rule that the national motto “In God We Trust” was unconstitutional, even though it was in national history a late addition, a Cold War replacement of the motto “E pluribus unum.” Despite their growth in numbers, nonbelievers face a perhaps insurmountable task in overthrowing American civil religion, especially if, as is likely, courts start using Justice Steven Breyer’s reasoning in Van Orden v. Perry (2005). Breyer usually sides with the liberals, but in this case his quiet but well-noticed concurrence allowed a statue commemorating the Ten Commandments to remain standing on the Texas State Capitol grounds. Arguing that the First Amendment’s purpose was to avoid “religiously based divisiveness,” he observed that the monument had been challenged only once in forty years and that “as a practical matter of degree this display is unlikely to prove divisive,” whereas a court decision to remove it, he noted, “might well encourage disputes.” Courts, he is suggesting, should in matters of religion that many regard as inconsequential leave things as they are and not encourage the religious divisiveness that would emerge among Americans if cornerstones of its civic religion were removed. We agree with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s rejection of Breyer’s argument that courts should allow government sponsorship of God in order to avoid national crises as “unfortunately ad hoc, favoring majority beliefs and making a virtue of convenience.”

Unable to chip away at the omnipresence of God in official political discourse, nonbelievers are marginalized, even stigmatized, as well, by their fellow citizens. This was true in the past and it remains true. No surprise then that candidates for public office would be silent about nonbelief. Atheists remain the most disliked religious minority in America. Of the respondents to a Pew Research Center survey question on attitudes to specified religious groups in 2009, 49 percent scored atheists negatively, while the unfavorable response to other groups was dramatically lower: Muslims, 32%; Mormons, 26%; Hindus, 21%; Buddhists, 20%; Evangelical Christians, 17%; Jews, 11%; Catholics, 11%. A 2011 Gallup poll that asked, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be atheist would you vote for that person?” found that only 49 percent of Americans said yes. Responses for other similarly well-qualified nominees: black, 94%; women, 93%; Catholic, 92%; Jewish, 89%; and Mormon, 76%. An earlier iteration of the “willingness to vote for your party’s nominee” in 1999, which included homosexuals among the choices, ranked them at 59 percent, higher than atheists at 49 percent.

Nor would a self-declared atheist fare well as a suitor asking for parental approval before reaching the altar. When asked into what group they would least like their children to marry, nearly half of Americans list atheists first, significantly higher than Muslims, African Americans, and Jews. So, too, when asked to name “the group that does not at all agree with my vision of American society,” 40 percent of responders put atheists on top, followed by Muslims, 26%; homosexuals, 22%; conservative Christians, 13%; recent immigrants, 12%; Jews, 7%; African Americans, 5%. (All this data showing atheists as unlike other Americans and disliked significantly more than Muslims was assembled well after 9/11, but before Trump’s election.)

The aversion bears questioning. We suggest that undergirding this dislike and distrust of nonbelievers are three foundational features of American sociocultural belief. First, is the conviction that one can’t be a good person if one is not a believer. Nearly half of Americans believe “morality and atheism are mutually exclusive,” and that “it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values.” True, many of the founders believed that as well, but that opinion no longer stands up. The stereotype of the immoral atheist is belied in numerous cross-national studies that show murder rates are lower in more secular nations than in more religious nations, as well as studies showing that on a personal level atheists and secular people are, as sociologist Phil Zuckerman notes, “markedly less nationalistic; less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian.” It persists even in the face of evidence that horrible deeds are often done in God’s name and despite the reassurance of Pope Francis, who noted in 2013 that “even the atheists. Everyone” who does “good to others” is “redeemed by God.” And in 2017 suggested “that it was better to be an atheist than a hypocritical Catholic.”

The second pervasive belief is that one can’t be a good American if one is not a believer, the central tenet, as we have seen, of American civil religion. Thirty-nine percent of Americans in 2008 agreed “that not believing in God was very unpatriotic” and that ‘to be irreligious . . . is to be un-American.”

The third foundation of persistent dislike and distrust of nonbelievers is due to American anti-intellectualism. Many see atheists as cultural elitists—philosophers, scientists, and artists, who threaten the beliefs of ordinary people in, for example, life after death, because nonbelievers “think they know better than everyone else.” Nonbelievers often fuel this elitist reading of themselves, as when Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett suggested renaming them “the Brights.”

A long list of overt officially sanctioned historical discrimination against atheists and nonbelievers has resulted from their being so unliked and mistrusted. Well into the 20th century some localities have prohibited them from testifying in court, since it was assumed that their lack of fear of eternal damnation diminished their ability to tell the truth. In other cases atheists have been prohibited from serving on juries. A Pennsylvania court in 1987, a South Carolina court in 1998, and a Mississippi court in 2005 all made child-custody decisions specifically to the detriment of the nonbelieving parent. Numerous examples of discrimination against nonbelievers have been exposed in the military: one soldier claimed, as reported in the New York Times of April 26, 2008, that he was discharged for his atheism. And like the eight state constitutions that still insist that state officials believe in God, most of these scattered acts are clearly unconstitutional, but they happen all the same.