Myrtle Beach—“We’ve asked speakers to leave us with hope,” announced Annie Laurie Gaylor. The co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation was well aware that this Hilton ballroom’s worth of atheists had come to the group’s annual convention in a dour mood. And with good reason. For them the very future of America was at stake. “Our secular values must prevail if democracy is to be preserved,” Gaylor said. “Freedom depends on freethinkers.”

Freethinker, in this context, is a self-designation. It means someone who not only has no religious beliefs but actively opposes them. The Foundation is the largest freethinkers’ organization in the country, coordinating a national office and local chapters in many states. Its more than forty thousand members work in service of two goals: a rigid legal separation of church and state and the promotion of non-theism in public life.

I traveled to Myrtle Beach last October to see how the organization was getting on with those goals. The Foundation was established in 1978, but it gained national visibility in the early Aughts as it rode the tailwinds of the ascendant New Atheism. That movement, much like the old atheism, opposed God and religion. It primarily differed in its stridency, personified in the so-called Four Horsemen: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. They made a deep, inspirational impression on me and many others. But that was nearly twenty years ago. Two of the horsemen, Hitchens and Dennett, are dead. The other two, Harris and Dawkins, are increasingly alienated from the movement they once led. No one has emerged to take their place. Why not?

Part of the answer is that atheists feel threatened by America’s ambient culture. On the convention’s opening day, Dan Barker, the group’s other co-president, presented a slide in which the Statue of Liberty had been replaced by a woman dressed in a red robe and oversized white bonnet in the style of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Speakers alluded to the novel throughout the weekend because for them a hierocratic dystopia is not a speculative proposition: It is happening right here, right now. The convention’s organizers went so far as to station guards by the ballroom entrances, locking doors the hotel normally left open and intermittently taking the stage to assure attendees that here they were protected from the outside world.

The perception among freethinkers is that the country is openly hostile to atheism and that they must hide their non-belief. Steven Lowe, an older Southern man, put it in stark terms. “Atheism felt taboo, something I had to hide,” he said. “Honestly, coming out as an atheist in my sixties was like coming out as a gay man in my twenties.” Coming to a convention such as this one made him feel safe, affirmed.

Lowe was right that the majority of Americans do not incline toward his camp. Barker informed me that the average age of his members is sixty-six point six—a joke, perhaps, but probably not far off from the truth. As I made my way through the crowd of several hundred the first evening, I saw many gray hairs and grim faces. The attendees were also overwhelmingly white.

I was not the only one who noticed. Later, I caught up with Mandisa Thomas, a singer in the Godless Gospel Choir. (“The natural world is all that I can see,” they sang. “The natural world is good enough for me.”) She told me about her work as founder and director of Black Nonbelievers, an organization that provides support to black freethinkers who feel isolated and in need of fellowship. Then she paused and gestured out at the crowd.

“These atheist spaces are so white,” Thomas said. “In America, we need to destigmatize atheism, particularly in black communities. If you’re atheist, you’re seen as a traitor rejecting your black identity. But people need to know you don’t have to live in silence, you don’t have to live in fear, you don’t have to go along with what religious people want.”

That non-comformist spirit is one keenly felt by everyone involved. It is the main reason the Foundation retains its notoriety. The group’s lawyers spend much of their time policing post offices, jails, courthouses, and schools for using language sprinkled with religious inflections. Their overriding concern is that religion is still a requirement to participate in American public life, even after its practice has become ceremonial at best for most American public figures.

The sort of work they engage in often appears mundane. A few days before the convention, for example, the Foundation filed a lawsuit against South Carolina. The convention’s host state had denied a local atheist the right to serve as a poll watcher during the election in 2024. His offense was straight out of a Mencken column: He refused to take an oath that ended with the words “so help me God.” Both sides were preparing for a drawn-out legal fight.

While such disputes may be interesting to a First Amendment lawyer, they admittedly lack the flair of a Christopher Hitchens debate. And, as the weekend wore on, I became acutely aware that the group has little interest in spreading the gospel of unbelief beyond the courtroom. No one I spoke to expressed any interest in serious proselytization. I was surprised, especially considering the boldness with which the Foundation presents itself in its brochures.

“The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion,” the Foundation’s mission statement reads. It then lists a number of “firsts,” which it claims to have originated from people without belief: prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally ill, advocacy for capital punishment, abolitionism, the right to choose contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

These are sweeping claims. And even if the group’s view of history were correct, it would still have a lot more explaining to do. If atheists deserve the credit for all these things—many of which are the prerequisites for modern liberal society—then why are so many people still religious? And if there is no ultimate meaning to their actions, why did they do them? If not from God, from where should we derive our moral views? What should guide us? These are the questions the debate over the existence—or non-existence—of God raises. They couldn’t be more important. But no one attempted to answer these questions. No one even mentioned them. Nor did anyone address the obvious counter-arguments that religious leaders had contributed to many of the sweeping social changes the freethinkers value and that atheists have been guilty of some of the cruelest acts of organized violence. Just as being religious doesn’t automatically make you holy, being an atheist doesn’t automatically make you a better person. What you think and how you act still matter.

The New Atheists were famously unafraid to ask these questions, but I soon learned just how far they have fallen out of favor. When I asked Gaylor and Barker why they aren’t more assertive in spreading their unbelief, they said that the way to popularize atheism is not to follow the example of the New Atheists, whom they take as too brash and confrontational. “We think religion has retarded human progress,” Gaylor said. “We espouse this; we don’t go advocate it.” Barker agreed. He told me that while he finds religion “harmful,” he also thinks that most people are smart enough to recognize its deleterious effects for themselves. Atheism will ultimately win out, he added, simply because it is true.

“The other side is like a wounded animal that knows it’s dying,” he said. Soon America would be thoroughly secular, like Denmark, and “atheism will rise up among Americans organically. That’s why we don’t bother fighting with people about their beliefs and instead challenge them about what they do that causes harm.”

I observed to Barker that there were few beliefs more deeply held—or more varied—than those defining what counts as harm. Not so, he shot back. Reason could empower us all to access an innate sense of morality that would lead different people to the same moral conclusions. “It’s instinct,” he explained, telling me that even a child could understand basic fairness. Gaylor put it slightly differently, but she held the power of reason in no less esteem. “We ground our ethics in consequences,” she said. “Is an act good? The question is whether it does harm.”

And yet the Foundation’s recent history shows how belief in such consequentialism is not enough to achieve consensus. In 2024 the Foundation published an article by Jerry Coyne, a biologist the group had once honored for his commentary on evolution and intelligent design. Coyne argued in his article that to define a woman as anything other than a being defined by sexual traits was to “impose ideology onto biology.” Obviously, given the social and political currents of the time, this was a controversial statement. Some within the Foundation complained that Coyne’s writing was transphobic. They pressured Barker and Gaylor to remove the article from the Foundation’s website. When the two complied, they initiated a whole new round of controversy. Coyne resigned from the Foundation’s honorary board. Two of the group’s most prominent members, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, soon followed. Faced with embarrassment, the Foundation dissolved the board entirely.

Some members—it’s unclear how many—saw the suppression of Coyne’s work as a betrayal of the group’s commitment to reason and renounced their membership in protest. “It was a tense time,” said Sara Tetzloff, the Foundation’s marketing director. “We got some feedback from members that was essentially: ‘How dare you?’” But, she added, the controversy did not deter the remaining members from believing that removing Coyne was the right thing to do. “They felt that it’s time to be an ally,” she said, “even if you question the science, because younger members feel like this is the right side of history.”

It was this idea, that history has a right side and Foundation members are safely on it, that really animated the conference. What it meant to be on this side could be gleaned from the list of topics speakers covered: immigration, taxation, abortion, inequality, graft. Certainly important topics for public debate—but not related in any way I could see to the deeper point of atheism: winning the contest between belief and unbelief for the latter camp. On no subject did anyone stray from the consensus that prevails on the cable news channel M.S. NOW. This was no coincidence, since many of the faces at the convention have appeared on the network: Mary Trump, Jamelle Bouie, Steven Levitsky. Their remarks precisely conformed to its familiar liberal template. If the speakers mentioned non-theism at all, it felt shoehorned in, an afterthought.

I asked Gaylor if there was room in the Foundation for atheists whose sense of reason had brought them to different conclusions than those of the less compromising wing of the Democratic Party. She rejected the idea that the group’s positions—even its sponsorship of the “No Kings” rally held that day—were in any way partisan. “We are not political,” she insisted. “You heard nothing about who to vote for. You heard advocacy for abortion rights.”

That comment, I think, encapsulated the real belief the weekend was offering: that promoting abortion rights could be apolitical in the same way that individual morality could be innate and universal. It was the hope that one could hold political and moral views while remaining above ideology. It is a vain hope. And it seems to me like an evasion of what makes atheism so powerful for those who embrace it. In its most high-minded mode, atheism allows its adherents to admit that if the universe has a moral order, it is unknowable to us. And in that void, it is your terrible labor and awesome duty to choose your own morality and stand by that choice. If you want other people to make that same choice, you have to go out and persuade them.

But the Foundation doesn’t see it that way. “Atheism is not a positive thing,” Barker told me, “but a mere absence of theism.” Or, as one attendee put it, with atheism there’s nothing to spread. So much for hope.