As I write this, President-Elect Joe Biden has not received his first White House security briefing. When you read these words, Biden will be the president—which will leave many atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and freethinkers little short of ecstatic. But not so fast.

For all that a Biden administration will mark a huge step toward normalcy after the chaos, cruelty, and willful ignorance of the Trump years, secular Americans may yet find President Biden a (pardon the expression) mixed blessing. A devout Roman Catholic, Biden delivered an acceptance speech steeped in religious language, invoking God repeatedly—even reciting lyrics from a hymn, for crying in the sink—without a single acknowledgment that nonreligious Americans exist. (To be fair, twelve years ago Barack Obama said nothing about the nonreligious in his own acceptance speech. But he offered the first, historic presidential nod to unbelievers in his inaugural address.)

I haven’t heard Biden’s inaugural yet; you probably have. Maybe Biden will follow Obama’s lead. Let’s hope he’ll offer secular Americans more than a phrase. Maybe he’ll recognize us with a sentence or two. It would only be reasonable, given how rapidly the population of nonreligious Americans has grown since 2008. (More on that below.)

But there’s a larger reason for secular Americans of every flavor to be deeply, deeply concerned. Four years of Trump has made America’s legal system more hostile toward secular priorities in ways that will far outlive Trump’s presidency. The Orange One appointed almost 230 federal judges, making judges almost as prolifically as Pope Francis makes saints. Few judicial openings remain, and as everyone knows, Trump elevated three Right-leaning jurists to the U.S. Supreme Court, giving the court a 6–3 conservative majority without precedent in recent times.

It’s hard to imagine a judiciary more likely to regard church-state separation cases with disdain. Even before the nomination of now–Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, federal jurisprudence had all but neutered the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the bulwark behind which separation advocates had won impressive victories beginning in the late 1940s. In recent years, activist organizations have sought to bring more Free Exercise Clause cases and fewer Establishment Clause cases because of dwindling judicial enthusiasm for the Establishment Clause. CFI Legal Director Nicholas J. Little’s October/November 2020 op-ed captured the dismal denouement. It was titled: “R.I.P. The Establishment Clause.” Describing the aftermath of the high court’s wrong-headed decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, he wrote ruefully that “the Establishment Clause’s basic tenet—that taxpayer funds may not be raided to pay for religious schooling—is no more.”

That’s another way of saying that the principle Thomas Jefferson elucidated in 1779—“[T]o compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical”—has been summarily abandoned.¹

While the Establishment Clause lies a-moldering in the grave, judges and bureaucrats alike have leapt to distort the Free Exercise Clause, stretching it—taffylike—beyond all recognition. “Freedom of religion” increasingly connotes an imaginary right of Christians to do whatever the hell they please and demand unstinting public support for their doing so.

This is the payoff for decades of patient activism by religious-Right strategists, which firmly implanted the absurd notion that by enforcing a near-neutral secularism, church-state jurisprudence during the latter half of the twentieth century discriminated against Christians. As surely as pain follows a slap to the face, activists now insist that the way to protect “free exercise” is to defend majoritarian Christians as they gleefully:

• Recriminalize abortion;

• Refuse adoptions to LGBTQ persons;

• Deny accommodations to same-sex couples (from hospital visitation rights to wedding-cake decorating);

• Decide which bathrooms transgender people may use and how they must identify themselves; and

• Claw funding from public schools that serve pupils of all religions and none, diverting those dollars to benefit private Christian academies, many of them often well-heeled.

And so on … and on.

We have no reason to doubt that the conservative judiciary that Trump so doggedly cobbled together will defend the legality of abuses such as these and worse.

In the process, not only nonreligious Americans but all Americans who happen not to be Christian face renewed relegation to second-class citizenship. Think what life was like before Everson v. Board of Education (1947); we may well be headed back to that.

Moreover, President Biden’s options to remedy the situation will be limited. With so few judicial vacancies remaining, reseeding the federal bench with moderates or liberals will be an achingly slow process. The playing field Trump has tilted so intensely will resist rebalancing for many years to come.

And yet … and yet …

Today’s America is different in a way that should be hugely relevant. As religion scholar Paul A. Djupe and political scientist Ryan P. Burge wrote on their Religion in Public blog: “The most momentous change in American religion over the last 25 years has been the growth of the religious nones from 5 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 2019.” Nones tell pollsters their religious preference or denominational identification is “None of the above.” They aren’t all atheists or humanists—experts vary as to how large a fraction of the None population comprises the outright nonreligious. But though the cohort is amorphous, it’s growing quickly; after a year of stasis in 2018, the Nones grew by a heartening 3 percent in 2019.²

In a delicious irony, some observers suggest that persistent overreach by the religious Right helped accelerate the Nones’ growth. Fundamentalists’ obsessions with abortion and homosexuality have been driving some of their children away from their churches for forty-odd years now; the Christian far Right’s recent sycophantic embrace of Trumpism further opened the throttle on that process. Here’s Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman: “By treating Mr. Trump, political conservatism, and Christianity as inseparable, Republicans have driven non-Christians away from the GOP and nonconservatives away from religion.”³

But back to the Nones, who ought to be on the threshold of significant political clout. We’re 34 percent of the population, after all. That’s way bigger than any other politically potent religious minority group—consider that the influential Jewish-American community composes less than 3 percent of the national population. With more than eleven times that census, the Nones seem poised to achieve at least modest political sway—if our heterogeneous ranks can better organize and unify.

Yet even today’s inchoate “None vote” is having some impact. Philosopher, blogger, and FI contributor Jonathan M. S. Pearce reported in November that “[p]rior to the 2016 election there were only five elected officials serving in state legislatures who publicly identified with the humanist and atheist community. After the 2016 election that list grew to 17, and after the 2018 election to 47. Once the newly elected officials are sworn into office in 2021, there will be 63 nontheist elected officials at the federal and state level.”⁴ That may reflect in part declining intolerance toward nonreligious candidates on the part of the general electorate. But surely this result also reflects the rising number of nonreligious voters.

Nor is this flight from faith a uniquely American phenomenon. “‘Since 2006, there has been a remarkably sharp trend away from religion’⁵ across the globe, writes University of Michigan professor Ronald Inglehart in Foreign Affairs. Based on surveys of how important people say God is in their lives,” Chapman writes, “he and colleague Pippa Norris found that between 2007 and 2019, the vast majority of countries grew less religious. Only five became more religious.” As it happens, America’s rejection of religion is the world’s most rapid. ⁶

So whatever happens, we won’t quite go back to pre-Everson days. But harbor no illusions: the deck will be stacked against us. The federal judiciary will likely spend decades ignoring the Establishment Clause and treating the Free Exercise Clause as an excuse to privilege Christian majorities ever more obscenely. That’s a Trump legacy that a fairer president and a Congress containing a lot more “Nones” will have little power to blunt.

Moreover, it never pays to assume that demography is destiny. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Democratic Party strategists dreamed that America’s growing non-White minorities—soon enough, a non-White majority—would translate into a huge advantage for Democrats.⁷ Of course that assumed that members of non-White minority groups will always vote blue. In the 2020 election, significant numbers of them did not, making Trump’s loss smaller than many expected and stanching a hoped-for “blue wave.” Instead, the House of Representatives actually lost Democratic seats; as I write, it’s still unknown what the party balance in the Senate will be. Chalk this up largely to Hispanic voters, who turned out to be far more ideologically diverse than smug White pollsters anticipated. So this is no time to think “Hey, Nones are 34 percent of the population, maybe 50 percent by the end of this decade. We’ll twist America around our little fingers!” It is a time to take stock of which common concerns are truly shared by which slices of that most heterogeneous cohort called the Nones—and to get profoundly serious about organizing.

At the same time, we must gird ourselves for a decade—or more—of bigoted and destructive court decisions punishing every American who has the temerity not to worship Jesus.

Hail and Farewell

After seventy-nine years, the American Humanist Association (AHA)’s flagship publication, The Humanist, has ceased publication as “a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern.” Longtime editor Jennifer Bardi was terminated in October. The title will now publish on a less frequent schedule, focusing on promotion of the AHA and its activities. Free Inquiry now stands alone as the sole nationwide humanist journal of ideas published in the United States. The Humanist was launched in March 1941; during the middle and late 1970s, it was edited by philosopher Paul Kurtz, who would later found the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (now the Council for Secular Humanism) and the Center for Inquiry.

 

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