When the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, it highlighted a profound contradiction in the culture of America as a nation built on the separation of church and state. In a period of change, religion could nonetheless be added to civic duties rather than stripped from them in the name of democracy, science or modernity. The pluralism of religions in the US, despite controversies over doctrine, status and conversions, also creates a fundamental division between believers and nonbelievers.

These general views were intensified in the Cold War by the identification of atheism with “godless communism.” Even those rebelling against American civic religion often have turned to alternate spiritualities based in Asian religion, “nature,” feminism or reinterpretations of a Judaeo-Christian deity in terms of science, cult personalities or imagery. This “prescriptive relationship between religion and the everyday lives of the populace” (see religion) fosters a widespread intolerance towards atheism. Meanwhile, atheists are forced to deny shared civic practice, political invocations of deity, social rituals at tables and holidays and constant minutiae of American piety on a daily basis.

Atheists, in general, have been silent nonbelievers, lacking the institutional support or public symbols adopted and even flaunted by American believers. Even dividing lines can be unclear. One may see the fish symbol labeling Christian cars mimicked and altered into a four-legged beast tagged Darwin, but this may indicate opposition to scientific creationism rather than a declaration of atheism. Moreover, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Protestants have objected to Protestant pieties in schools or manipulative affirmations in sports and politics without denying religion per se. American flexibility within belief systems also makes atheism more difficult to delineate—are Buddhists, Taoists, Unitarians (not to mention polytheists) somewhere beyond the pale of American belief in a monotheistic god? Atheism may be presumed in discourses of science or social reform on the left (as more than one horror movie has said “but you are a man of science—surely you don’t believe in all this superstitious mumbo-jumbo!”). Yet, even here, silence covers a range of beliefs and compromises without creating public declarations of alternatives. In political life, meanwhile, invoking some god and showing up at some ritual events are normative, whether or not politicians confess to any beliefs or responsibilities associated with them. “Angels” are often normalized as jewelry and brica-brac without religious significance, except to those who would choose to actively object, which would seem to many to be petulance rather than belief.

Among the most vilified are those who have crusaded for constitutional guarantees, such as Madalyn Murray O’Hare who successfully argued for the removal of prayer from schools in the 1950s. Similarly, the American Civil Liberties Union, which deals with a range of constitutional issues, has been branded atheist for countering strategies of the Christian Right to introduce “prayerful silences” into schools.

Electronic communication has opened a new space of expression and communion among Internet infidels. Societies like the Rocky Mountain skeptics, the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, the Skeptic Society (with its journal Skeptic) and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have flourished on the web. While the editor of The Skeptical Review argues for dramatic changes since the religious establishment can no longer control and “suppress” information, the pervasiveness of civic religion makes the future of atheism difficult to read.