Do Atheists Need To Come Out?

Julian Sanchez wonders if the rise of politicians like Rick Santorum is related to the increasing awareness that atheists are among us:

Previously faith could more or less be taken for granted—maybe the candidate makes a passing reference to the church they regularly attend—and that’s all there is to it, really, because of course everyone’s a believer of one stripe or another. Increasingly, isn’t so—that there are actually quite a lot of unbelievers, many of them effectively operating in stealth mode. This was probably always the case, but outside the academy and a few urban enclaves, nobody was terribly vocal about it—you certainly didn’t have anything like a visible public “movement.” Suddenly, if you’re someone who thinks of faith as a minimal prerequisite for decency, what was previously tacitly understood has to be signaled with extra vigor.

He thinks this might be a reason for "closeted" atheists to come out:

[T]here’s a case for being a little more vocal—for coming out secular—at this particular historical moment, in the interest of hastening the journey across the valley between invisibility and normalcy.