My latest column on the Guardian is up: “We atheists can use growing clout to beat evangelicals at their own political game“.
Trying to organize atheists politically is often compared to herding cats. The conventional wisdom is that, while evangelical Christians and other religious groups march in lockstep and can be counted on to vote as a bloc, atheists are all cussed individualists who argue constantly and will never speak with anything like a unified voice, so there’s no point in politicians trying to appeal to us. But some influential atheist groups have come to think that this picture is too simplistic – and as I discuss in the column, they’re putting their money where their mouths are:
Until a few years ago, the suggestion that politicians might actively court atheists’ support would have been ludicrous. Atheists were rare, isolated and widely despised. What’s more, even among ourselves, we had a reputation for being fractious and quarrelsome, impossible to organize.
But the landscape has shifted. In the last decade, the non-religious demographic has seen dramatic growth all across the country, to the point where they now outnumber every individual Christian denomination in America and are comparable to the number of white evangelicals as a whole.
Of course, even if atheists are more numerous, it doesn’t mean much if all we do is squabble and argue with each other. Unless we can organize and act in concert, we won’t be a political force. But here, too, non-theist groups are betting that that the picture is starting to change and that there can and will be an identifiable “atheist vote” in 2016 and beyond.