Can the American Secular Movement Listen to Its Better Angels?

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Editor’s notes: Shortly before press time, Chrissy Stroop received notice that the Freedom From Religion Foundation will be honoring her with a Freethought Heroine award in October. This award was not offered in exchange for favorable treatment or other consideration in this article, which had already entered copyedits at the time of the notification. Also, Gmail might clip this post due to its size. In case you’re unable to see the whole post, click here to read it on browser.

I’m trying to assess the state of the secular movement in the United States, and I want to believe Kat Grant when they tell me “progress is slow, but it is happening.”

Grant’s optimism is noteworthy in light of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s choice to publish a disinformation-packed anti-trans screed on their Freethought Now blog last December as a cruel rejoinder to Grant’s own pointed post debunking reductionist biological definitions of womanhood. FFRF published the bigoted response in that spirit of “free inquiry,” “debate,” and just plain cranky contrarianism that old-fashioned atheists romanticize—and which often drives younger and marginalized nonreligious folks away from humanist, atheist, and so-called freethinking organizations. Grant worked for FFRF for almost three years. And if an advocate like Grant—who was harassed mercilessly during the FFRF blog brouhaha—tells me they’ve seen “a ton of improvement” in secular institutions over the last few years, that means something.

The effectiveness of secular organizing and lobbying matters more than ever these days, since the United States finds itself in the ever-tightening grip of a fascist regime backed primarily by right-wing Christians.

Mostly evangelical Protestants and traditionalist Catholics, these Christians’ theocratic desires are being implemented as policy under the duumvirate of our unelected billionaire doofus-in-chief, Elon Musk, and our official president Donald Trump. Trump, of course, is the same man who in his first term illegitimately stacked the Supreme Court that went on to overturn Roe, achieving a goal the Christian Right had doggedly pursued for decades. Trump, who is now responsible for the brutal detention of Muslim students who dare to so much as write op-eds opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, also moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as a nod to evangelical apocalypticism in 2018. Conservative, mostly white evangelicals now have even more representation and influence inside the White House than they had during Trump’s first term, when they already had a level of access that was unprecedented at the time.

In a perverse dialectic of sorts, America’s theocratic forces have grown more malignant and powerful even as the country has rapidly secularized since the 1990s. Well over a quarter of Americans are now nonreligious, although many of these unaffiliated “nones” retain some spiritual and/or religious beliefs, and would not call themselves atheists or agnostics. Meanwhile, the Christian population’s decline has slowed over the last few years, probably in part due to the reactionary turn of America’s algorithm-addled young men. But ever more Americans are raised nonreligious, which will eventually result in a further demographic shift away from religious affiliation. Despite that, nonreligious perspectives are rarely taken seriously in the legacy media or in policy spaces.

Effective nonreligious advocacy is vital in a country so steeped in Christian privilege. And I want to be clear—national secular institutions including FFRF, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, Black Nonbelievers, the Secular Student Alliance, and others do good work, for example calling out church-state separation violations (often putting a stop to them without the need for litigation); filing amicus briefs and litigating major cases; and educating the public about relevant history, issues, and concerns. Some have also invested more in their partnerships with local affiliates in recent years. 

Many leaders of these local organizations, which confront the Christian nationalist onslaught on the front lines of state and local conflicts, are amazing people who “get it” on matters of social justice. And in recent years, both nationally and locally, secular organizations and advocates have proven more willing to work in coalition with religious and interfaith leaders and groups who share their values to oppose the theocratic threat as it’s become increasingly urgent. FFRF, for example, produced an important report on the theocratic nature of the January 6 insurrection in collaboration with the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty—a liberal Baptist group that advocates for the strict separation of church and state.

All that notwithstanding, it’s still fair to ask whether major secular institutions can be expected to meet the needs of contemporary nonreligious Americans when too often they act like dinosaurs—and not the sleek, fast, scary-smart dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, but the plodding, pea-brained ones I read about as a child in my mom’s old college textbook on natural history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but can women, immigrants, people of color, and queer and especially transgender folks expect secular advocates and organizers to have our backs as the broligarchy and the theocrats move to put more and more of our civil rights on the chopping block?

Certainly there is a segment of the American secular movement—one backed by plenty of money and influence—that opposes trans rights, robust antiracism, and any sort of “woke” feminism. In addition to representation on YouTube, in Quillette, and among the so-called “intellectual dark web” of has-been celebrity intellectual assholes (some of whom were uncomfortably close to billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein), these “anti-woke” atheist tendencies are embodied in the Center for Inquiry, a major national organization that merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science in 2016.

If you’re the kind of person who reads The Flytrap and you’ve followed Dawkins’s career in recent years, the mention of his name probably leaves a very bad taste in your mouth, and for very good reason. From the weird misogyny and weirder Islamophobia of elevatorgate and “Dear Muslima,” to his colonizer racist obsession with Ahmed Mohammed—a then fourteen-year-old Muslim boy who was arrested in 2015 for bringing a homemade clock to his Irving, Texas school to show his teacher—to his current raging transphobia, Dawkins is an insufferable Oxford reactionary.

Dawkins and his ilk do not remotely represent the views of the average American nonbeliever, and it’s unfortunate that many still see him as perhaps the face of atheism—but the influence of Dawkins and his American colleague, the race-science-promoting Sam Harris, still looms uncomfortably large over the secular movement. 

All that is on my mind as I chat with Kat Grant. Still, I can’t help but find their energy, passion, and relative optimism infectious, particularly given how spectacularly FFRF recently failed them—and all transgender Americans.

In some cases, it’s clear that secular organizers do have the backs of transgender and other marginalized Americans. Most of the grassroots activists and organizers I spoke with for this piece take an expansionist view of church-state separation advocacy that entails fighting for social justice in arenas ranging from school boards and libraries to statehouses.

Bonnie Cleaveland, the former president and current vice president of Secular Humanists of the Low Country, tells me her Charleston-based group is more focused on activism than ever before, “and it’s not just secular activism now, it’s really standing up for our democracy.”

Cleaveland is American Atheists’ state director for South Carolina, and American Atheists stands out among national secular organizations for having shifted over the last decade or so to a very vocal stance that social justice concerns, very much including trans rights, should be considered church-state separation issues and should therefore be part of secular advocacy. In 2019, the group also published a massive Secular Survey, the results of which indicated that young atheists, agnostics, and humanists want secular institutions to actively advocate for LGBTQ rights. (Full disclosure, a few years before the pandemic, Secular Humanists of the Low Country flew me to Charleston to deliver a paid lecture; I have also given paid virtual talks for American Atheists.)

Still, even secular organizations that have established clear stances in favor of diversity, inclusion, and the civil rights of marginalized groups often uncomfortably rub shoulders with toxic atheists, for example collaborating with CFI to put on events and maintaining ties to the likes of Dawkins in order to continue capitalizing on his waning celebrity. It’s this situation that has made trans rights a controversial flashpoint among some secular advocates. It also explains what happened to Kat Grant. 

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Case of Kat Grant 

Kat Grant’s history with FFRF is a story that’s been covered primarily in atheist blogs and reactionary outlets (including Breitbart, which I will not dignify with a link). This is no doubt in part because major media outlets very rarely cover the secular movement, but the lack of coverage may also have something to do with the fact that a nonbinary trans person is at the center of the story. For that matter, even those who took the right side in their coverage didn’t bother to dig deep by talking to the principals. That’s a shame, because Kat Grant is a fascinating person. 

I hadn’t connected with Grant before, but during our conversation in late March, Grant surprised me several times. I didn’t know we were both Hoosiers, nor did I expect someone who’d been caught up in a relatively recent internet shitstorm—one that included death threats against them—to be such an open book.

Most surprising of all, though, was when Grant told me they were Catholic. “A disorganized Catholic,” they clarify, “in the sense that I don’t belong to a parish, I don’t give money to the church; it’s about 60 percent culture, 40 percent faith.” Grant, who has expounded further on their current relationship to Catholicism on their blog, relates that they went to Catholic school through sixth grade, didn’t get confirmed, and left the faith altogether around eighth grade, only eventually to reclaim their Catholic heritage. I can sympathize with Grant’s position. After all, I grew up evangelical, mostly in a north suburb of Indianapolis, and the anti-Catholic sentiment was strong enough in my childhood community. But Grant, by contrast, described growing up in a small southern Indiana town where they endured KKK protests against their school and getting called a “rosary rat.”

 FFRF, Grant’s erstwhile employer, is a secular watchdog with an effective legal team, and it’s often successful at shutting down church-state separation violations that come up on its radar. The nonprofit’s mission is “to keep church and state separate and to educate the public about nontheism.” Their personal theology notwithstanding, Grant, who is firmly committed to church-state separation, initially thrived at FFRF, where they found the seasoned lawyers on staff to be “incredible mentors.”

 As a law student at Indiana University, Grant hoped to do First Amendment work. FFRF provided a path to that goal amid the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused some institutions to rescind offers and cancel programs, leading to a nationwide dearth of legal jobs that still affects Grant and their cohort. Grant began working for FFRF remotely, as a paid intern, and returned in 2022 as a full-time lawyer on an Equal Justice Works fellowship.

Friendly, down-to-earth, and matter-of-fact, Grant relates to me the kind of work they did for FFRF—everything from educating the staff about transgender and LGBTQ inclusion and how to write about queer people; to writing amicus briefs and testifying against anti-trans bills; to responding to complaints about church-state violations submitted by concerned citizens via FFRF’s website. In the latter capacity, Grant handled a variety of complaints, including all LGBTQ rights related complaints and “unofficially, everything involving marching bands or choirs.” As it turns out, some public schools’ musical ensembles have a tendency to put on “old-fashioned tent revival” themed shows that can cross the line into technically falling afoul of the First Amendment. Who knew?

That example may seem relatively trivial, but schools, Grant explains, were also where the majority of the LGBTQ-related complaints they dealt with came from—like cases of teacher discrimination, and of administrations allowing bullying on religious grounds or banning gay-straight alliances or similar organizations while allowing a Bible club. Grant tells me they were successful in getting the schools to stop in the vast majority of cases, which is heartening to hear in times like these.

But even as Grant loved working at FFRF, tensions began to brew between them and FFRF’s mercurial co-founder and co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor. For example, with Dawkins getting in on the anti-trans grift, Grant raised an objection to FFRF continuing to platform him. Grant got the impression that Gaylor had agreed to stop doing so, but Dawkins was soon being filmed for an FFRF production again. According to Grant, Gaylor then maintained she’d never said FFRF would stop giving Dawkins a platform.

While discussions were underway at FFRF about possibly creating a permanent position for Grant, by the middle of 2023, Grant was already thinking they probably couldn’t stay on when their fellowship ended. But things really came to a head at the end of 2024.

In November of that year, Grant published their “What is a Woman?” essay on FFRF’s Freethought Now blog. Pithy, punchy, and playful, Grant’s essay deftly poked holes in strictly biological definitions of womanhood. They noted how many women don’t menstruate or don’t have a uterus—or for some intersex women, even an XX genotype—and drew attention to the lingering impact of western colonialism and Christian missionaries’ enforcement of a gender binary on societies that recognized more than two genders. 

“I knew it was gonna piss people off, and I did that intentionally,” Grant explains. But Grant wasn’t prepared for their boss to allow Jerry Coyne, a relatively high-profile anti-trans atheist, to publish a response on the same blog. At the time Coyne, along with fellow atheist bigots Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, sat on FFRF’s honorary board—which is to say they had nominal, non-governing roles and were only really there for the kind of star power such boards tend to lend to organizations.  

Nevertheless, Coyne couldn’t let the perceived affront of “What is a Woman?” go, and he leveraged his influence with Gaylor to insist that FFRF let him respond. She acceded, though in fairness Grant notes that Gaylor did so reluctantly, and over the winter holidays in the hopes that Coyne’s reply would not receive much attention. Gaylor only informed Grant of this decision on Christmas Eve, a couple of days before Coyne’s post went live. Grant objected, to no avail. They tell me that Gaylor offered them a chance to read the post in advance, but as the decision to publish it had been made, they didn’t see any point in taking her up on the offer.

Despite the timing, Coyne’s post did not go ignored. Once the internet took notice of the anti-trans tantrum on Freethought Now, two things happened. First, the harassment and backlash against Grant for their original essay intensified, causing them to feel increasingly unsafe. Then, pro-social justice atheists, humanists, and allies expressed outrage that FFRF would give space to a crusty fossilized dick like Coyne to spout the false and harmful claim that transgender women are disproportionately likely to be sexual predators and the bad-faith argument that “gender activism” has nothing to do with FFRF’s mission.

The backlash against FFRF from the secular community was so swift and severe that Gaylor quickly backtracked, taking down Coyne’s post. FFRF then issued a mealy-mouthed public apology, signed by Gaylor and fellow co-president Dan Barker, that included the squirrely phrase “mistakes can happen” and the unfortunate sentence, “Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such.”

 Nowhere did Gaylor take direct responsibility for the decision to publish Coyne’s diatribe—a decision that by all accounts she personally made—nor did she publicly apologize to Kat Grant. Grant tells me Gaylor did privately apologize to them, however, and profusely. “Even though she was not publicly accountable, she was accountable to me,” Grant explains. As a result, Grant feels comfortable continuing to work with FFRF by contributing to the organization’s blog.

The “anti-woke” wing of the secular movement, of course, took umbrage at this series of events. Coyne even complained about having FFRF’s disclaimer appended to his essay before throwing a lengthy hissy fit about it being taken down. He, Pinker, and Dawkins resigned from the honorary board, which FFRF was, according to Grant, already working on dissolving. Meanwhile, CFI was happy to republish Coyne’s bigoted rant in its Free Inquiry magazine, as well as another essay accusing FFRF of “regrettable dogmatism.”

Grant continued to receive death threats for months after these events. Despite all of this, however, Grant has plenty of praise for the good work that FFRF does and for its generous worker benefits, while allowing that “there’s a huge need for a leadership change.”

Grant told me that Gaylor’s “both sides” approach played a role in their decision not to pursue staying on at FFRF as a full-time attorney. When I reached out to Annie Laurie Gaylor for comment, I received a hastily sent and frankly bizarre reply, the most salient part of which reads as follows:

There was no note of apology or regret in Gaylor’s email, which did not even mention Kat Grant by name, though I’d asked for comment directly about the Freethought Now debacle and explained that I had spoken with Grant. Grant is, in my view, generous in their assessment of Gaylor overall. Even so, they described Barker and Gaylor, like some other movement leaders, as “learning that many of their friends are terrible people, and they’re still working through the cognitive dissonance of that”—figuring out how to separate their personal friendships from their professional work, and where to draw boundaries. 

That cognitive dissonance has urgent implications for the secular movement nationwide.

The Battle for Unapologetically “Woke” Secular Advocacy

In the immediate aftermath of the whole, and wholly avoidable, brouhaha involving FFRF and Kat Grant, most national secular organizations, including FFRF, signed on to a statement of unequivocal support for trans rights that reads, in part:

I particularly like how the statement frames the discriminatory and bigoted legal attacks and the hostile climate transgender Americans face: “For the more than 1.5 million trans Americans, this is the reality they are forced to live every day. It is not merely some academic debate.”

But I still have to ask, do all the signers of this statement really understand that? And if they truly will refuse to stand by when “those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science” join with the Christian Right in its anti-trans panic, then why do they continue to work with CFI, which of course could not, and did not, sign the statement? Why the seeming inability to take a stronger stance when the call is coming from inside the house?

For the most part, it’s a good thing that the larger secular organizations are able to strategize and coordinate through their membership in the Secular Coalition for America. But if SCA’s board is unable or unwilling to expel CFI for its unscientific bigotry and reactionary values—values that are antithetical to those of member institutions such as Black Nonbelievers, FFRF, American Atheists, and the Secular Student Alliance—then what, exactly, does that membership mean? I reached out to ask SCA what criteria constitute membership in good standing and whether any discussions might be underway regarding the possible sanctioning or expulsion of CFI, but as of press time they had not provided a comment.

Unfortunately, it’s not just FFRF that’s still willing to collaborate directly with CFI.

Nick Fish, the president of American Atheists, is widely admired for how he’s transformed the organization since taking the helm in 2018, after the board unanimously ousted David Silverman over credible allegations of undisclosed conflicts of interest and egregious sexual misconduct, including sexual assault. Fish has overseen a diverse team that has moved the organization away from Silverman’s outdated approach of in-your-face godlessness and toward an understanding of secular advocacy that includes fighting for civil rights. American Atheists’ former vice president for legal and policy, Alison Gill, is an out trans woman who did much while working at American Atheists, with Fish’s support, to promote trans rights advocacy as a part of secular advocacy, arguing that the only justification for denying trans rights is religious. (Incidentally, Kat Grant not only relayed that they admire AA and Fish, but also told me that Gill “laid a ton of the groundwork for what I do.”)

An elder millennial who came to issues-based secular advocacy after working on Democratic political campaigns, Fish minces no words in describing contemporary attacks on trans people as “a clear moral panic that is entirely being manufactured and ginned up to justify increasingly extreme actions against a vulnerable community.” He also understands that nonreligious Americans are disproportionately queer, and that queer Americans, and especially trans and nonbinary Americans, are disproportionately nonreligious. It’s clear that under his leadership American Atheists would never publish anti-trans disinformation out of misplaced both-sidesism, and he sees FFRF’s initial calculus as a misprioritization of what secular advocacy should be. “We’re about policy, about doing things? We’re not running debate societies here,” he tells me, noting that, for example, no major secular institution sees the need to publish articles in favor of abortion bans.

Asked about CFI, however, Fish states there are “good people doing good work” there and adds that “it’s frustrating to see column after column of them accusing partners of betraying Enlightenment values.” This raises two questions in my mind. Firstly, is CFI really a “partner” institution to the current incarnation of American Atheists in any meaningful sense? Secondly, could western atheists and humanists perhaps finally start questioning this widely taken-for-granted, unequivocal affiliation with “Enlightenment values,” given that the European Enlightenment did very little to temper white liberal racism and colonialism—indeed, that it often provided new rhetoric in which to justify the mistreatment of othered people?

To my disappointment, Fish, who is somehow every bit as much a pragmatist as he is an idealist, affirms that he will work with any individual or organization on an issue where they have common ground—even CFI. He bases this stance on the challenging realities of being “a hardscrabble group” fighting the juggernaut of religious authoritarianism. 

Not every organizational leader in the secular space takes the same position, however. Mandisa Thomas, the founder and president of Black Nonbelievers, for example, tells me in no uncertain terms that her organization will not work with bigots. “Anybody who’s ever been anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans, if you don’t stand for racial justice, then we don’t want you.”

To be sure, the issue of where to place boundaries in coalition building and collaborative efforts can be a thorny one in an institutional context. But putting that issue aside for now, there’s still the second question about “Enlightenment values” and European colonialism.

Can American Secularism Shake Off Its Supremacist European Baggage?

Born in the U.S. to immigrants from India, Kavin Senapathy’s extended family consists mostly of cultural Hindus, though there are a few true believers in the mix, as well as a handful of atheists. Senapathy herself—a science writer and progressive parenting advocate who participates in the secular speaking circuit—was raised nonreligious in the relatively progressive town of Madison, Wisconsin. Atheism was something they largely took for granted, Senapathy tells me, coming to the online skeptical community only later through adjacent concerns that led them to Rebecca Watson’s Skepchick blog.

That trajectory, along with their lived experience as a person of color whose family came to the United States from a former British colony, give Senapathy a clearer view of the American secular movement than most people in it have. “None of my atheist elders that I look up to, that I looked up to growing up, came to atheism by reading the works of white men,” Senapathy relates as we chat and giggle about the absurdity of Richard Dawkins. I find them delightfully irreverent precisely toward the things that English-speaking atheists tend to be too precious about and, yes, reverent toward. To me, that is refreshing.

Being an atheist is still “not a huge part” of Senapathy’s identity, they tell me, “because even though to me justice and science are very important, atheism isn’t really a necessary or requisite part of that.” After all, “There are so many atheists who believe lots of bullshit. And there are lots of religious people who are pretty good, solid critical thinkers.” Here, Senapathy is getting to the heart of what’s wrong with the condescending antitheism that pervades western atheism.

“A lot of atheists would like to believe that the fundamental route to evil is religion or theism, and I really think that lying under all of that is the real root of evil, dehumanization,” Senapathy maintains. It’s an important insight, and it’s easy to connect the dots between atheism—or uncritical devotion to the European Enlightenment—as a post-Christian, proselytizing, supremacist western identity on the one hand, and on the other the dehumanization of trans people that the likes of Dawkins, Coyne, and the leadership at CFI are actively fomenting.

Senapathy has a history with CFI. They used to speak at CSICon, starting in 2017. “It was even easier to gaslight yourself back then,” Senapathy tells me, but even that first year they were struck by how they were the only nonwhite speaker in a lineup of at least twenty. Senapathy’s face appeared at the top of a CSCICon brochure, above Steven Pinker’s. “In retrospect it was absolutely tokenism,” Senapathy says, and over time they became more uncomfortable—not only because of the annual conference lineups, but also over concerns like the 2018 issue of Skeptical Inquiry magazine with the theme “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism,” with a stock photo of a Black man on the cover and not a single nonwhite contributor.

Eventually, Senapathy was able to speak with CFI president Robyn Blumner about their concerns. When Blumner asked for suggestions to improve, Senapathy suggested inviting more nonwhite people to speak at future CSICons, including one or two from formerly colonized countries. According to Senapathy, Blumner found this suggestion offensive, spouting something to the effect that “we can’t have these people up there airing their grievances.”

By this point, Senapathy had done work for Skeptical Inquiry and was the cohost of a CFI podcast, but nevertheless began speaking out about their concerns on Twitter and Facebook. Knowing this was likely to get them let go from CFI, Senapathy refused to go quietly and even walked out of a 2019 SCICon conversation between Dawkins and Stephen Fry when Dawkins brought up “the regressive left” and Fry whined about having to hear about “patriarchy and cisgendered white privilege blah blah blah” before rambling nonsensically about “being English and Shakespeare and Isaac Newton and J.K. Rowling and everything, the one thing they all have in common is empiricism.” Because nothing says empiricism and Englishness like a bigoted has-been author of mediocre children’s fantasy novels, I guess.

In the aftermath of Senapathy going loud about CFI’s racism, CFI’s board has become slightly less lily-white. But according to Mandisa Thomas of Black Nonbelievers, Blumner’s views on race remain reactionary. As evidence, she points to a recent Free Inquiry article by Blumner called “Secular Humanism and the Color-Blind Society,” which starts off with the misappropriation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote and gets worse from there, citing a Pamela Paul column on the first page and attacking “the identitarian Left” for “critical race theory dogmatism” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) loyalty oaths,” whatever those are.

The sophomoric takeaway is, essentially, that antiracism is the “real” racism. Thomas brought the article up with Blumner, offering feedback, but says Blumner “didn’t really seem to listen or even care about the fact that there was so much in the way of journalistic integrity that was lacking.”

Blumner did not return an email request for comment regarding Senapathy and Thomas’s descriptions of her behavior.

In a sense, it’s a good thing that secular reactionaries like Blumner and Dawkins have shown their true colors in spectacular fashion over the last decade or so. There is no more room for the plausible deniability these bigots used to glean from hiding behind a stance of “classical liberalism.” At the same time, their continuing influence is a hindrance to the secular movement realizing its full potential as a force for good. To be truly effective, the movement must shake off the heavy baggage it carries from the legacy of “enlightened” European colonialism and the influence of the British-dominated “New Atheism” represented by the likes of Dawkins, Fry, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

I hold out no hope for CFI, but other institutions are making marked improvements, even if they are still influenced by a too often unrecognized colonialist mindset.

Institutions do not typically change quickly. To some who have seen how the sausage is made, that’s a reason to keep one’s distance. But to someone like Kat Grant, the frustrating nature of incremental improvement is not a reason not to work from the inside to make advocacy institutions better. In Grant’s view, “when we get this new generation of people in power, we’re gonna see change happen quite a bit faster.”  

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by s.e. smith.