“Godless communism” and its legacies

Abstract

Al erican Atheists, an organization founded in the 960s by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, finds much to protest these days: classroom and workplace harassment of the godless, the Boy Scouts' exclusion of atheists, government funding of faith-based organizations, President Bush's incessant God talk, and an administration that responds to religious fanaticism by whipping up different religious fanaticism. American Atheists president Ellen Johnson borrows a phrase from the Christian right, which had borrowed it from other groups seeking rights and respect: "We want what Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, said that he wanted for the religious right: a 'place at the table in the great discussion we call Democracy.'" Atheists today have an easier time than in decades past--one of O'Hair 's 1960s allies, Charles Smith, was jailed in 1928 for distributing atheist literature--but Johnson and her allies have a point. As late as 1930 the Supreme Court referred to Americans as "a Christian people." Seeking the presidency in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke of our "Judeo-Christian" heritage. In his inaugural address in 2001, President Bush widened the circle further by referring to "churches, synagogues, and mosques." In this way, as Conrad Cherry notes, civil religion increasingly manages to ~'embrace a plurality of values," yet it still hasn't made room for ~'agnostic or atheistic elements.'" Although atheist leaders like to cite polls showing that many millions of Americans have little to do with organized religion, the unchurched are not necessarily godless. A large poll, the American Religious Identification Survey, in 2001 estimated that a mere 0.4 percent of Americans call themselves atheists and 0.5 percent agnostics. And they tend to be skittish about voicing their beliefs, according to Alan Wolfe's One Nation, After All (1998): "People who talked about their lack of belief in God did so hesitantly, even defensively, rather than as self-proclamation .... Militant atheists--those who insist that reason and rationality constitute the only sensible guides by which to live--are very hard to find in America." Maybe they've been cowed into silence. When the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life asked Americans about their attitudes toward various groups in mid2003, atheists ranked at the bottom, with 34 percent of respondents feeling favorable toward them and 52 percent feeling unfavorable. In the same poll, 41 percent of respondents said they would have reasons to vote against an atheist presidential candidate, a higher proportion than the survey found for a candidate who was Jewish (14 percent), Catholic (15 percent), Evangelical Christian (20 percent), or Muslim (31 percent). All in all. there's ample evidence that, as Wendy Kaminer put it a few years ago, "'Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.'" In significant respects, I think, contemporary American attitudes toward atheists hardened during the Cold War 1950s. Get past what historian E.P. Thompson termed "the enormous condescension of posterity" and you'll find an era much like our own: a new and terrifying form of war, one that posed a particular threat to civilians; a suspicion that enemy operatives lurked among us; the necessity of balancing national self-protection with constitutional liberties; efforts to come to grips with religious diversity; and, especially, a spasm of vague but fervent public piety. During his years in office, President Eisenhower carried a silver coin, about the size of a half-dollar. The front bore a cross and the word God; on the reverse was an American flag above freedom. God and country, two sides of a coin. "I felt it was a strange, almost blasphemous combination of symbols," White House aide