A number of things are going on here, but one part of it is a holdover from mid 20th century Cold War anxiety about Communists. During the McCarthy/HUAC era when Soviet-backed Communists were feared to be infiltrating everything (similar to the paranoia about Muslims today), atheism was considered one sign of a Communist. That was when "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, among other things.
Another root of it has to do with religion in the schools. Up until the 1960s, many, maybe most American public schools had collective prayer and Bible readings as part of the curriculum, First Amendment be damned. Many communities were so unanimously Christian that nobody saw anything wrong with this, or if they did, they didn't speak up about it. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair successfully sued in the early 1960s to get many forms of coercive prayer removed from public schools, which was the root of much of the continuing debate over school prayer. She became the leader of American Atheists (and a very public firebrand) and was a major focus of paranoia by religious conservatives who saw encroaching atheism actively trying to remove Christianity from American public life. (She also kept picking fights with other atheist groups, unfortunately.)
Even after she was murdered in 1995 (by an office manager for American Atheists in the course of robbing the organization), she was still the focus of endless e-mail rumors about how she was campaigning to get this or that aspect of religion banned.
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Date: 2006-09-30 03:54 am (UTC)Another root of it has to do with religion in the schools. Up until the 1960s, many, maybe most American public schools had collective prayer and Bible readings as part of the curriculum, First Amendment be damned. Many communities were so unanimously Christian that nobody saw anything wrong with this, or if they did, they didn't speak up about it. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair successfully sued in the early 1960s to get many forms of coercive prayer removed from public schools, which was the root of much of the continuing debate over school prayer. She became the leader of American Atheists (and a very public firebrand) and was a major focus of paranoia by religious conservatives who saw encroaching atheism actively trying to remove Christianity from American public life. (She also kept picking fights with other atheist groups, unfortunately.)
Even after she was murdered in 1995 (by an office manager for American Atheists in the course of robbing the organization), she was still the focus of endless e-mail rumors about how she was campaigning to get this or that aspect of religion banned.