Our present technological moment feels disorienting. Rather than hope and fascination, I feel a profound sense of anxiety and dread.

White Christian Nationalists’ decades-long campaign against public education has been persistent, sophisticated, and well-executed. They have targeted the core of its curriculum and the financial lifeblood of the institution itself.

Public protests and demonstrations don’t just show that the administration’s actions are profoundly unpopular; they show the people in tiny Idaho towns or in rural communities in the Bible Belt that they aren’t alone.

We’ve known a second Trump Administration would present new—and profound—threats to our values and to our democracy. They’re proving us right every day.

Whether it was a failure to convince voters that the catastrophically unpopular proposals within Project 2025 were, in fact, the agenda for a second Trump Administration or that voters simply didn’t care, the fact remains that the Christian nationalists’ plans are already being put into action.

Atheists are among the single most politically engaged religious demographic in America. And yet, politicians continue to either ignore us or engage in outright antagonism toward our community.

It’s crystal clear that our community is at a crossroads. American society is undergoing a massive cultural shift and religion has lost much of its power. People distrust religious figureheads, question religious orthodoxy, and abandon religious institutions.

It’s willful blindness to pretend that this wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation and cultural outrage isn’t just a retread of religious extremists’ decades of bigotry. 

When the people we trust and rely on tell us that our actions have caused them harm, we should listen to them, sincerely try to understand their concerns, and work to do better in the future.

Navigating mortality is rarely easy. Religious dogma makes it even harder.

Emboldened by the religious extremist majority on the Supreme Court, Christian nationalists and their political allies are coming for our most personal and fundamental rights.

The ideological capture of our institutions isn’t just happening at the Supreme Court or the federal judiciary. And while it commands the most attention and most coverage from the media, it isn’t the gravest threat we face.

Why is the United States the only wealthy Western democracy that relies so heavily on the largesse of churches and religiously aligned charities to help people put food on the table?

Often framing their objections to masks and vaccines in terms of tortured religious beliefs or an incoherent vision of individual liberty, religious extremists are allowing their “culture of life” to kill countless Americans

Having an administration that is receptive to our concerns, and a federal judiciary that isn’t, means stepping out of the courtrooms and into the nitty-gritty of policymaking.

The physical and emotional tolls of the past year come at a price.