“‘Godless Communism’ and Its Legacies” by Stephen Bates, in Society (March–April 2004), Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, N.J. 08854.

Why are so many Americans so hard on atheists? In a poll last year, a majority (52 percent) took a dim view of those who deny God’s existence, and—in the crucial symbolic test—more than 40 percent said they would not vote for an unbeliever for president. WQ literary editor Bates, who is writing a book about secularization in the United States, contends that Americans are suffering a hangover from the 1950s.

During that Cold War decade, he says, “a common enemy seemed to draw God and country closer together.” Many Americans believed that what differentiated the Soviet Union from the United States was not the communist state’s totalitarianism and terror, or its denial of basic freedoms, or even its command economy, but rather its rejection of God. Senator Joseph McCarthy warned in 1950 that the “final, all-out battle” would be between “communistic atheism and Christianity.”

“If Cold War communism imperiled religion, then religion needed to be part of the counterforce,” says Bates. The 1953 presidential inauguration of Dwight D. Eisen­hower featured a parade float depicting scenes of worship and a prayer composed and recited by the new chief executive (who was “the spiritual leader of our times,” at least according to the Republican National Committee). Ike scheduled the first “National Day of Prayer” for July 4, and declared belief in a Supreme Being “the most basic expression of Americanism.”

Before about 1950, few besides clergymen advanced religious arguments against communism. When Look magazine in 1947 gave its readers nine characteristics by which to identify an American Communist, disbelief in God was not among them. But after the Communists won China in 1949, and the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb that same year, religious anticommunist rhetoric “crossed over to the secular culture.”

Today, the phrase “godless communism” seems as antiquated as the Edsel, and Americans are more tolerant of religious diversity. “Yet the antipathy toward atheists endures,” at least in part because atheists are assumed to be aggressively hostile toward religion. It may well be that they should seek to soften their image by adopting a new name. But the term “Brights,” recently adopted by some high-profile disbelievers, Bates notes, is hardly likely to do the trick.