It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. There would be no government church, no state religion, and, except for being signed in the Year of our Lord 1787, no mention of God in Americas founding text. Religious freedom was formally established in the Constitutions First Amendment. The Godless Constitution, as Moore and Kramnick called it in a previous book, was mostly the product of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who fought to keep God out of the document. But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power.

It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense had sold half a million copies the year that the United States declared its independence, died an outcast because of a later pamphlet he wrote on religion. Attacking the King of England was fine, but when Paine, in The Age of Reason, set his sights on the King of Kings, he was derided as a loathsome reptile and a filthy little atheist. It didnt matter that Paine, like Jefferson, actually identified as a Deist, or that his text opens with the blunt declaration I believe in one God; his criticisms of Christianity were so scandalous that he was written into history as a nonbeliever.

Such is the slippery label of atheist in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly reject it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons. Some atheists try to claim as one of their own everyone, dead or alive, who has ever thought twice about religionand theres a bit of this slippage in Moore and Kramnick, where the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called nones) are all equated with the unbelieving. Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree.

For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public. In the nineteenth century, Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, charged a dollar a head to the thousands who gathered to hear him critique Christianity; believers and skeptics had months-long exchanges in the pages of newspapers; and debates between the likes of the secularist J.Spencer Ellis and the theist Miles Grant packed venues the way that Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham do today.

With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. Blasphemy laws were enforced against those who insulted God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. A former Baptist minister turned freethinker named Abner Kneeland was arrested in Massachusetts for an article that he wrote explaining why he no longer believed in a monotheistic God; not even the prominent Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing or the former Unitarian pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom rose to Kneelands defense, could spare him jail time. In New York, a man named John Ruggles was sentenced to three months for insulting Jesus; in Pennsylvania, another man, Abner Updegraph, was fined for calling the Bible a mere fable that contained a great many lies. (Laws against blasphemy, though rarely enforced, still exist in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming.) All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. (Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.) One Jewish merchant took his case all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, only to be denied an exemption because, in the words of the court, Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.

Few, if any, of those prosecuted for violating Sabbatarian or blasphemy laws actually identified as atheists, but that didnt stop their critics from denouncing them as such. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. Elizabeth Cady Stantons agnosticism and Ernestine Roses atheism were held against the early suffragists, and after eight allegedly godless anarchists were convicted of killing eleven people during Chicagos Haymarket affair and President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist who had rejected Catholic teachings, atheism became linked, in the popular imagination, with domestic terrorism. Public attacks on religion, Moore and Kramnick write in their account of how atheism became un-American, were presumed to lead to the advocacy of other dangerous ideas.

That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. It wasnt politics or economics, some said, that distinguished America from its enemiesit was religiosity. From the root of atheism stems the evil weed of communism, the Catholic congressman Louis Rabaut declared, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Two centuries after the Founders wrote a godless constitution, the federal government got religion: between 1953 and 1957, a prayer breakfast appeared on the White House calendar, a prayer room opened in the Capitol, In God We Trust was added to all currency, and under God was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause. They succeeded, albeit at a price: the courts upheld references to God in pledges, oaths, prayers, and anthems on the ground that they were not actually religious. The phrase ceremonial deism was coined by a Yale Law School dean in 1962, and in the decades since it has been used by court after court to explain exceptions to the First Amendment. Like saying God bless you when someone sneezes, the courts concluded, these under Gods and In God We Trusts are innocuous; they belong to the realm of patriotism, not prayer.

Not surprisingly, neither believers nor nonbelievers believe this. Every such ruling is a Pyrrhic victory for the devout, for whom invocations of God are sacred, and no victory at all for atheists, for whom invocations of God, when sponsored by the state, are obvious attempts to promote religion. Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren. Lawsuits to end the recitation of the Pledge in public schools began almost as soon as the words under God were added, and while ceremonial deism long thwarted those challenges, nonbelievers have lately begun to pursue a different strategy. Instead of arguing that the Pledge violates the First Amendments establishment clause, they have started arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendments equal-protection clause, because it presents an occasion for nonbelieving children to be ostracized. David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts.

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