Herb Silverman, founder of the Secular Coalition for America, steps back to appreciate the recent progress of nonbelievers:
Some groups are primarily interested in lectures and book clubs, some in socializing, some in good works, some in protesting, some in political action, and some in all of the above. There are also many virtual atheist groups, who enjoy discussions even though they never meet. … However, the movement has become larger than formal organizations alone, perhaps because of the increasing number of “nones,” those who don’t identify with any religion. According to a recent Pew Survey, this demographic has risen to 20 percent, and even higher among millennials.
Emily Suzanne Clark surveys the historical advance of atheism in the public square:
The first [landmark] moment was the revolutionary deism of the late eighteenth century and into the early American republic. Thomas Paine and later tributes to Paine were more of a diffuse threat to Protestant hegemony than an organized force but these later tributes testify to the lingering influence of Paine.
In the earlier colonial era, there was both a legal and a social privileging of belief, namely Christian belief. One need only think of Paine’s influence and how his lack of “proper” belief and his association with the French Revolution cost him his reputation. The bridge between this first period in public atheism to the next could be easily seen in the visual culture tributes and memorializations to Paine, specifically in Watson Heston’s cartoons in the Truth Seeker. One particular cartoon contrasted Paine as the defender of liberty and a tyrannical John Wesley; while one stood for American patriotism, the other was a symbol of corrupt power.
The second moment was the liberal secularism of the late nineteenth century. This group imagined themselves vis-à-vis the idea of America as a Christian nation. The National Liberal League and the American Secular Union advocated for a secular republic in which religious freedom applied to the irreligious as well as the religious. These groups vocalized a number of demands including the taxation of churches, the end of religious chaplains in public spaces, the removal of the bible from public schools, and the repeal of Sabbatarian laws.
The Dish 