Atheist

Billed as a “Woodstock for atheists and skeptics,” the rally seemed to be a watershed moment for atheist and humanist political representation. But even as the ...

While closeted atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have long held political power in the U.S, as the stigma of identifying as atheist wanes, “they’re just not as scared to talk about it,” he said. The rise in religiously unaffiliated Americans has also pushed lawmakers, religious and non-religious alike, to offer their support to secular causes and communities. No, but that wasn’t the goal,” said Evan Clark, co-founder of Spectrum Experience, a Tempe-based political communications firm that has represented Wood and other humanist and atheist candidates. “We had trailblazed to the point that you didn’t need groundbreaking anymore.” And in 2012 the state voted Democrat Kyrsten Sinema into Congress, where she became the first member to list her religion as “none.” “As my secular humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences.” “This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration,” Mendez While these failures have crippled the movement’s political power, much of that has begun to change in recent years. “They see this data on the ‘ [nones](https://crcc.usc.edu/topic/religious-nones/),’ and they assume that all these people in that category are fellow travelers.” [Growing atheist backlash](https://religionnews.com/2022/06/21/poll-americans-belief-in-god-is-dropping/) 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. That political apathy hasn’t been helped by atheist and humanist leaders’ failures in the aughts and early 2010s. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans may be rapidly expanding, but they lack that core: Their identities are hard to pin down, their interests are disparate, and they are often politically disengaged.