Ten years ago, thousands of atheists, humanists, and skeptics descended by the busload upon the National Mall in Washington to attend the Reason Rally, the largest-ever gathering of nonbelievers. “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it,” chanted the crowd, estimated to have between 10,000 and 30,000 people. For America’s growing non-religious movement, it was a jubilant coming-out-of-the-closet party.
...What happened to America’s promised atheist political revolution?
“They were delusional,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor who researches secularism and politics. He points to early “manifestos” written by leading atheist thinkers in the aughts, in which they predicted a force of more than 27 million non-believers who would take American politics by storm. “They see this data on the ‘nones,’ and they assume that all these people in that category are fellow travelers.”
Now, a decade after that first rally, the under-resourced non-religious voting bloc seems no closer to competing with the so-called Religious Right, which so many Reason Ralliers had sought to overpower. Growing atheist backlash against Christian nationalism has proven impotent in the face of President Donald Trump’s ascent to power, the January 6 insurrection, and a slate of pivotal Supreme Court decisions that undermine church-state separation. These verdicts include overturning federal abortion protections, allowing public funding for private religious schools, and gutting the Lemon test in its ruling in favor of a coach who prayed on the football field after games.
Critics say that today’s atheist movement is asleep at the wheel....
Observers say that the movement’s current impotence is in part due to atheist and humanist leaders’ inability in the 2010s to unite and mobilize the religiously unaffiliated. Some of these so-called “nones” identify as atheists and agnostics; but about one in five Americans identify as “nothing in particular.” The individuals—as they can hardly be called a “group”—have particularly low levels of social and political engagement.
“The demographic shift is shifting away from organized religion, but not to organized anything else, which makes it all but impossible to ask them to do anything,” Mehta said. “Because most of them are apathetic. They’re not atheists.”...
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Originally Posted by Chris
