From the very start, Americans have given voice to the idea that there exists a special relationship between God and America, as God�s New Israel, or even as God�s "redeemer nation." It is America�s "myth of origin," whose roots are commonly traced to John Winthrop�s 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," wherein he explained that the Massachusetts Puritans had entered into a covenant with God, whereby they had undertaken an "errand into the wilderness" to become like a "City upon a Hill," providing a "model of Christian Charity" for the world.
This covenantal idea provided the background for most of American history wherein the term "atheist" was applied not only to those who denied the existence of God, but also to those who questioned the basic tenets of what at the time were seen as the commonly held beliefs upon which their divine covenantal relationship was based. In one of the earliest recorded examples of such usage, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation charged fellow English colonist Thomas Morton, who had seized control of Mount Wollaston, renamed it Merry Mount, and lived a life of "great licentiousness," with "maintaining a school of atheism."
If the dissenting Protestant churches of the British colonies supported the American independence movement by lending it "moral sanction," the securing of independence dramatically changed the status and future course of religion in America by its radical move to religious disestablishment. Churches became "voluntary associations," which led to competition, rather than conflict, among the various denominations. Furthermore, although disestablishment was welcomed by some, those accustomed to religious establishments feared that disestablishment would likely lead to secularization and the decline, if not the demise, of religion in America. For many, the arrival of deism portended just such a fate.
Deists, proponents of what is often referred to as a "religion of nature," grew out of the Enlightenment�s emphasis on reason, natural philosophy, and experience. This challenged the long-held view that God played a direct and immanent role in the world. Instead, deism maintained that God created the world and the immutable and absolute natural laws by which the world is governed. Thus deists did not deny the existence of God, but they were critical of any literal acceptance of revealed religion, especially its more miraculous or supernatural elements, which seemed inconsistent with natural law. Among the most prominent figures often charged with being deists are Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Jefferson�s unorthodox beliefs served the needs of his opponents during the presidential elections of 1800 and 1804, when they referred to him as "Mad Tom the Atheist," but far more vicious were the attacks on Paine, "penman of the American Revolution," mostly for his book The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, and 1807).
Paine is commonly referred to as the first prominent American to be labeled an atheist, and even a century after his death, President Theodore Roosevelt in Gouverneur Morris (1888) referred to Paine, author of the influential Revolutionary tracts Common Sense and The Crisis, as a "filthy little atheist," this despite the fact that Paine was a believer, if an unorthodox one. When he died in 1809, Paine was refused burial in any consecrated cemetery and was laid to rest on his New Rochelle farm.
James Turner has argued that for Americans of Paine�s day, the idea of not believing in God, or some sort of supernatural deity, was not only rare, but "a bizarre aberration," as it required one "to abandon not merely the best but the only really coherent scientific explanation of the world" (Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, 1985). What occurred by the mid- to late nineteenth century was an alternative explanation that threatened to undermine the principal proofs of God�s existence dominating Western thought for centuries, namely a plausible scientific explanation for the origins and development of life on earth. As a result, the United States joined other Western nations in what has been referred to as a period of "classical Western atheism."
By 1859, the idea of evolution in nature from simple to complex forms was well established and supported by the leading men of science. What Charles Darwin added, in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man (1870) was the theory of natural selection, which called into question the argument from design and the special divine creation of man. To those not ready to fully embrace Darwin�s idea and abandon the divine origins of the universe, Thomas Henry Huxley offered yet another, and in some respects more appealing, alternative, namely agnosticism. Huxley�s agnosticism restricted knowledge to the phenomenal realm, thereby arguing that any object that could be termed part of the transcendental or noumenal world, including God, was beyond the limits of human knowledge. Huxley�s was an epistemological position, not an antireligious one, as it did not deny God�s existence, but it too was perceived as hostile to religion.
Some liberal Christians sought to reconcile Darwinian evolution and the Higher Criticism with revealed Christianity. Most, however, did not, which led not only to heighten criticism by religious leaders, but also to the most vocal attacks on Christianity to date�certainly in the United States. In 1871, for example, John William Draper, English-born visiting professor of medicine at New York University, published The History of Conflict between Religion and Science, which went through fifty printings, in what bordered on a polemic intended to "liberate us from the tyranny of religion." Some twenty-five years later, Cornell University president Andrew Dixon White bolstered Draper�s work with A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1896).
In the second-half of the nineteenth century, American atheists and agnostics advanced their cause for the first time through organizations such as the Free Religious Association, organized in 1867, and the Ethical Culture Federation, founded in 1876. But perhaps the greatest asset to both was the "Great Agnostic" or "Pagan Prophet" Robert Ingersoll. In his public lectures, especially "Why I Am an Agnostic," published in 1896, Ingersoll reasoned, "[L]et us admit the limitations of our minds, and let us have the courage and the candor to say: We do not know."
Ingersoll challenged the use of oaths in court, military and legislative chaplains, reference to God by public officials, and placing "In God We Trust" on the nation�s currency. All his efforts were highly unpopular, but he nevertheless maintained an impeccable public persona and a respected place among the nation�s attorneys and Republican Party leaders. Ingersoll�s efforts notwithstanding, at the close of the nineteenth century atheism and even agnosticism were still minority positions.
American involvement and success in the Spanish American War and American entrance onto the world stage necessitated an expansion of the nation�s sense of mission to incorporate its divine right to influence the course of world events. America�s new importance also coincided with a period of mass immigration, and some immigrants� beliefs were called into question and even deemed "godless." Especially vulnerable to this charge were "atheistic immigrants," such as Emma Goldman, who in her well-publicized essay, "The Philosophy of Atheism" (1916), opposed belief in an "eternal, all-powerful and benevolent God" as "a threat to the sanity, prosperity, and peaceful cooperation of humanity." In 1919, in the midst of the nation�s first Red Scare, Goldman was deported.
Much better known by later generations is the homegrown Clarence Darrow. That Darrow was influenced by the Robert Ingersoll was something Darrow readily admitted. He recalled having heard Ingersoll speak when he was still quite young, and at a memorial service for Ingersoll, in 1900, Darrow paid homage to Ingersoll: "His acts mark him as one of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen."
Darrow established himself as a first-rate attorney and as a defender of unpopular causes, including his defense of socialist Eugene V. Debs, but it was his role in the Scopes trial that is significant in relation to the representation of atheism in the United States. When the Scopes trial began in 1925, evangelicals were still struggling with challenges posed to traditional Christianity by science and the Higher Criticism. Some have argued that the showdown in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, was the evangelicals� last stand in maintaining their predominant culture-shaping position. When William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, offered his services to the prosecution, Darrow joined the defense.
The trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in a circus-like atmosphere. Bryan won, at least in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion Bryan and his cause were largely humiliated. When, in the midst of his cross-examination of Bryan, he was asked to explain his line of questioning, Darrow explained that he was attempting "to show up Fundamentalism; [and] to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education system of the United States." Bryan countered that his goal was "to protect the Word of God from the greatest atheist and agnostic in the United States."
Darrow was capably assisted in the publicizing of the Scopes case by one of the best known reporters and religious skeptics of the day, H. L. Mencken. Mencken, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, reported favorably on Darrow�s defense and very critically on Bryan�s prosecution. Five years later, in 1930, Mencken expanded his thoughts on religion in his Treatise on the Gods, which he described as a "full-fledged attempt at deflation" of the powers of organized religion.
Although a case could be made for the utter destruction of World War I or even for the intellectual and cultural impact of nonscientific applications of the theory of relativity calling into question the validity of absolute truths, the event that most directly impacted atheism in twentieth-century America was the Russian Revolution. In brief, the Soviet leadership�s attack not only on capitalism, but also on religion, provoked the first assault on godless communism in America, or, as referenced earlier, the first Red Scare. Another response was the rise of modern American fundamentalism. The World�s Christian Fundamentals Association, formed in 1920 at a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention, was intended "to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith" against the Antichrist. Nevertheless, in the midst of this reassertion of fundamentalism, atheists and agnostics continued to defend and even advance their cause.
In 1925, nonbelievers organized the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (AAAA), the most explicitly antireligious movement in America to that point. Indeed its only creedal requirement was a formal profession of atheism. The first decades of the twentieth century also witnessed the appearance of a "new humanism," as proponents termed it. For some, it reflected an intellectual "humility" or agnosticism. For others, it was a more positive, or assertive, position, often associated with British biologist Julian Huxley�s "scientific humanism." In 1928 a group of self-described "nontheistic humanists" or "natural humanists" organized the Humanist Fellowship, which became the American Humanist Association (AHA) in 1941. The AHA was less explicitly antireligious than the AAAA, and for that reason in large part, it attracted a larger and much more prominent membership, led by philosopher and educator John Dewey. Among its most important contributions to the free thought movement was The Humanist Manifesto, which it published in 1933 (with a second manifesto in 1973). The Humanist Manifesto contained fifteen theses, the most important of which, for our purposes, was the sixth, which rejected theism and other theologies that involved a supernatural God, and suggested that people could be moral and give expression to the virtuous without reference to supernaturalism.
The period from the end of World War II to the 1980s was a study in contrasts, as public religion reached its high mark in America and secularists made their greatest gains in maintaining, even advancing, the separation of church and state. The result was the seemingly improbable reenergizing of both evangelical religion and secular civil libertarianism, as well as American atheism. On the one hand, the Cold War rekindled and stoked to new heights the fear of godless communism, prompting a new revival of religion as well. Public expressions of faith included the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and the adoption of "In God We Trust" as the nation�s motto in 1956. At the same time, in 1961 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution extended the full protection of the freedom of religion clause to proponents of nontheistic humanism, or secular humanism, as Justice Hugo Black termed it in a phrase that has stuck ever since.
Furthermore, beginning with Everson v. Board of Education (1947) the Supreme Court decided a series of cases (McCullum, Zorach, and Engel), that culminated in divorcing government from religion in public schools. Justice Hugo Black set the tone for these decisions by declaring in Everson, "The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable." On June 17, 1963, the Supreme Court handed down its last ruling in that series, Murray v. Curtlett and Schempp v. School District of Abington Township, which had been joined; and in an eight to one decision, the Court ruled that the laws in both Maryland and Pennsylvania providing for teacher-led prayer and Bible reading in the public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Murray and Schempp caused a public uproar. And whereas the Schempps all along insisted they were Unitarians, not atheists, Madalyn Murray O�Hair seized the limelight, proclaimed herself not only an atheist but the atheist in America, and announced that her crusade against established religious had only just begun.
For the next thirty years and more�on television and radio, in the press, and through her many books, as well as in hundreds of public appearances�O�Hair led a public crusade on behalf of American Atheists (her organization) against discrimination aimed at unbelievers and a long list of what she perceived as violations of the separation of church and state. Among these, taking a page from Robert Ingersoll, were the use of the phrases "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the printing of "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency, the tax-exempt status of religious organizations, and even the public reading of the Bible by American astronauts in space.
What set O�Hair apart from her predecessors, like Ingersoll, other than her unqualified embrace of atheism, was her public personal behavior. In an age when so many "reformers" behaved badly, O�Hair�s rude, sacrilegious, and profane behavior and comments confirmed in the minds of many that such behavior could come only from being an atheist, thereby posing a threat to all that was "good" or even "holy" about American life.
O�Hair�s public persona served her well, however, in that it allowed her to keep atheism in the national spotlight�at least until the more conservative Reagan years, when the spotlight began to fade. As her prominence faded, so too did her organization. Following her murder in 1995, American Atheists would continue to survive, but with far less visibility, while other groups such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State stepped forward, but, as their names imply, with a less clearly defined commitment to atheism.
Any significant resurgence of atheism in twenty-first century America has been hampered by the evangelical movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the response to the events of September 11, 2001, and the heightened religiosity, or at least public expressions of faith, that followed.
A spike in activity among atheists has come in the form of what is referred to as the "new atheism." Its principal proponent, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, explained in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) that whereas Paley�s argument for intelligent design made sense at the time, Darwin showed that what appeared to be design came about not from design but from a blind, purposeless process. Thus, atheism was a necessary consequence of evolution. The "religious impulse," he argued, is part of the cognitive system that has evolved, enabling man, as a species, to survive. But, as such, it is "a misfiring of something useful" that needs to be discarded and replaced by scientific naturalism.
The "new atheists" have taken on the argument that religion is the prime source of virtue, or good behavior, without which civil society cannot survive. They argue that virtue, or virtuous behavior, arose because it helped our ancestors survive. Altruism is, therefore, not divinely inspired but simply the result of an accidental genetic mutation that programmed our forebears to behave more generously and cooperatively than others.
Carl Sagan was among the earliest advocates for the "new atheism," which came to include Steve Weinberg, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and perhaps most vociferously Christopher Hitchens. What provoked the "new atheists," or at least provided the stage upon which they trod, was the revived, equally vociferous intelligent design movement of the 1990s. But as creation science and even evangelicalism have retreated, at least publicly and perhaps temporarily, so has the "new atheism." Today, by most estimates atheists constitute between 2 and 4 percent of Americans.
Pluralism Project at Harvard University: Atheism
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Atheism in America" (by Bryan F. Le Beau), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=851 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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