Reply To: Political Acceptance of Atheism

[SteveInCO]

Note: this reply assumes a United States context.

I know many people are saying yes, and have been for years (in other words, they weren’t waiting for this SCOTUS decision, in the least). Really the two situations don’t depend on each other, though they are similar in form; both groups have been (and still are) treated with contempt, contempt that has at times turned deadly. Given that the enemy of both groups is the same bunch of knuckleheads, there’s a tendency to put links there that don’t belong. The two causes are allied but not congruent.

Apparently the numbers of people willing to just declare they don’t belong to a church has been increasing by leaps and bounds; I’m hearing numbers pushing 40 percent now. How much of that is actual atheism, as opposed to Xians turned off by the fact that with churches comes politics, or mystics and deists, or just something not Xian, is harder to pin down but the last number I read was approximately 7 percent actual atheists (I expect that number to grow). I don’t know the percentages of LGBT (Back when I first noticed LGBT issues being talked about a lot, I heard claims anywhere from 2 percent to ten percent, both extremes being politically convenient for someone) but it ought to be within a factor of three of the atheist number.