Why won’t the U.S. accept its atheists?

From the outside, keeping your views to yourself may not seem such a problem. But this is only if you think that it’s easy to live hiding who you really are from almost everyone around you, even close family. Take Matt Elder, who lives in Festus, Missouri (pop. 11,602). When I met him in a downtown St Louis diner, he came across as a cheerful, friendly guy, not someone living under a kind of persecution. “They’re not going to cut me off or throw me to the wolves,” he says of his Christian family and in-laws. But if Elder is typical of the trying-to-keep-their-heads-down atheists scattered around the Bible Belt, then his story shows that none of them has it easy.

Elder says with a smile that when he goes out wearing his black T-shirt with its large scarlet A – the symbol of the atheist Out Campaign inspired by Richard Dawkins – “you’ll see mothers bring their children a little closer and step a little quickly away”. Elder is not militant and tries to be as accommodating as he can without being a hypocrite. “I would go to church with my wife about every week, just for community. But now, I don’t go because there’s really weird conflicts.” Weirdest of all is his regular appearance on the weekly prayer list. “There are times when people stand up and say stuff out loud to every­one else, and my wife did that while I was there.” I asked him what she said, and his paraphrase was: “My husband no longer believes in God and I’m scared for him and my family.” No wonder Elder feels that now at the church “there’s a target on my back”.

To dismiss this as no big deal would be to underestimate the role of churches in small-town America. “Life pretty much revolves around the churches,” says Johnson of her experiences in Texas. In her local Rains county (pop. 9,139), there are 31, of which 17 are Baptist. If you don’t belong to one, you aren’t part of the community, and there are few secular alternatives.

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Churches are also the main hubs for volunteer work, which is much more central to life in the welfare-state free America than it is in Europe. As another of America’s leading public atheists, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, put it to me, “The sad truth is that in many parts of the country, if you want to join forces with your neighbours and do something good, and you look around for an organisation that will help you do that, that’s the churches.” Matt Elder, for example, used to go on mission trips to help build houses for poor people in Mexico, and “would go again in a heartbeat”. But now it would just be too difficult. “You don’t quite belong as you did. It’s kind of a lonely feeling.”

Psychotherapist Marlene Winell, who practises in Berkeley, California, specialises in “recovery from harmful religion” and advocates religious trauma syndrome as a psychological diagnosis. “There are so many places in the US that are just saturated with religion. Everything is interwoven – their families, their schools, their business – so that if you were not part of the club, part of the group, you get ostracised and people go through really horrible experiences of not belonging any more.” If that sounds like the experience of leaving a cult, perhaps that’s because, as Winell argues, “in its raw form, fundamentalist Christianity that believes that the Bible is the word of God is basically a giant cult.”

It was certainly the case that when I talked to several atheists together, sessions ended up feeling like self-help groups. In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state.

That separation reflects the strange historical paradox of American religiosity: why is it that religion is both at the heart of the nation and legally excluded from its centres of power? The answer is that religious freedom was the reason why the puritan Pilgrim Fathers boarded the Mayflower in 1620 in the first place. They were followed by other nonconformists wanting to escape countries whose established churches made it difficult for people of other denominations to thrive. It was precisely because the religious rights of individuals were deemed so important that most were determined to ensure that the United States government should have no role in determining the beliefs of its citizens. The only mention of religion in the 1787 Constitution was the clause “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In 1791, its first Amendment declares “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

The strict separation of church and state has not, however, stopped many seeing America as a Christian nation. Many Christians campaign for both prayer and the teaching of creationism in schools. One of the most famous legal fights over the latter was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial”, in which a Tennessee biology teacher, John Scopes, taught evolution in violation of state law. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court deemed such laws unconstitutional because they breached the first amendment. Other legal disputes are still being fought over monuments such as crosses and the Ten Commandments on publicly owned land.

Despite what looks like a clear constitutional ban on religious discrimination, atheists face problems in many areas of public life, including the military. A woman in the Marines, who has to remain anonymous, says that although chapel and prayer were technically optional, “it was frowned upon” to opt out. In Iraq, chaplains would come into the bunkers and say “bow your heads and pray”. Everyone on the base would receive a prayer through a daily email. Her real problems came at the end of her first tour of duty. “We killed a lot of people,” she said. When she got back she had “a really hard time dealing with it” and “got really bad into alcohol”. But when she asked for help, she was sent to the chaplain, even though she said she didn’t believe in God.