Dear Friend,
Almost half of U.S. adults say religion is not an important part of daily life, according to the latest Gallup survey. And the number who do consider it important dropped 17 points in a decade, the largest decline measured in any country since 2007.
The shift in U.S. religious identity over that period is also striking: from mostly Christian to a country that looks more like our peers in Western and Northern Europe.
Except while religiosity was nosediving, religious nationalism was taking off. I’m no statistician, but that seems more like correlation than coincidence.
The research agrees. Experimental studies have found Christian participants are more likely to endorse Christian Nationalism when they feel their religion is threatened by demographic change. Other oppressive ideologies follow a similar psychological pattern: white supremacism often arises from perceived threats to racial identity; misogyny from sexual and economic insecurities.
Very basically, prejudicial paths like these tend to begin in an anxious place and end in authoritarianism — from “ack, everything is scary and out of my control” to “ah, the hierarchy is restored, and I’m safely on top.”
In Taking America Back For God, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry distill Christian Nationalism into a struggle “to preserve a particular kind of social order in which everyone… recognizes their ‘proper’ place in society.” Or, as I put it in an op-ed for The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Within this worldview, only a select few are entitled to wield power, and anyone who disagrees [is] subject to reprisal.”
The conviction that only they — the white, native-born, and Christian — have a legitimate or even divine claim to power is not just un-American; it’s an existential threat to our pluralistic and secular democracy.
Were it up to them, it’s clear the “proper place” for non-Christians like us is deep within society’s junk drawer, tossed there alongside all their other scapegoats — LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and on down Speaker Johnson’s list of “antifa types.”
Although it can feel lately like it is up to them, I’m here to assure you it is not.
We nonreligious, the religiously unaffiliated, and, as Gallup has shown us, the religiously aloof, are a force they can’t ignore. Nearly every item on the White Christian Nationalist agenda is broadly and deeply unpopular among voters. They’re legislating themselves out of public favor and into irrelevance.
White Christian Nationalists are even failing at their main mission: to establish a conservative Christian social order. Their hateful and hypocritical attempts to preserve something that never existed aren’t drawing people to religion, but driving them away. And a growing number of people are just plain fed up with the incessant intertwining of fringy theology and hyperpartisan politics.
Speaking on behalf of an organization that’s opposed that exact entanglement for over 60 years, I am delighted to welcome each and every newcomer, naysayer, and nonconformer to our fight to defend what Thomas Jefferson called “a wall of separation between church and state.”
They can, do, and will call us radicals. We’ve endured worse: blasphemers, heathens, heretics. Their predecessors said Jefferson was an infidel and a howling atheist. (In fact, he was a believer, just one who felt religion should be a private matter.)
They’re loud because they’re losing. Perhaps somewhere deep in their psyches they know that what we really are isn’t radical but representative of the American people and of the American promise. We’re carriers-on of the great freethinking American tradition and bringers-on of the future they fear most: one where freedom belongs to everyone, not just the self-anointed few.
But while religious extremists may be few (and becoming fewer), they do retain an outsized grasp on government that we cannot ignore. So, before this year is through, and during this time when voices of reason and resistance like ours are needed most, I ask you to please give generously in support of all we’re achieving at American Atheists.
A proudly howling atheist,
Nick Fish
President
American Atheists is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, nonprofit educational organization that relies on the support of members like you. Contributions are tax-deductible. Our Federal Tax ID Number is 74-2466507 and our Combined Federal Campaign number is 52217.
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