This Fourth of July, those who identify themselves as non-believers, or humanists, or atheists — or a whole host of other names which signify a nontheistic worldview — have much cause for celebration. After eight years in the Bush wilderness — and an even longer period of ostracism by the Washington political establishment — a rising demographic of like-minded Americans and a new president are guiding us back to our roots as a secular nation.
“We have generally been a pariah group in America,” says Woody Kaplan, Advisory Board Chair of the Secular Coalition for America. “Pretty much unrecognized by the political establishment. Yet there’s almost no religious group in America as large as us…. We were that third rail that politicians failed to touch.”
Indeed when the Obama Administration invited the Coalition to the White House for a meeting in May it marked a stark departure from recent history.
“Joe Lieberman famously talked about the constitution providing for freedom of religion but not freedom from religion — and questioned the possibility of non-believers to be ethical human beings,” Kaplan says. “Suffice it to say we were never invited as an identity group into the Bush White House. But interestingly enough… we were only invited into the Clinton White House under the rubric of core civil rights or civil liberties interests, and not as an identity group of nontheists.”
