Changing Tacks in the Biden Era
On May 14, leaders from American Atheists and our partners throughout the atheist community held an introductory meeting with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. This is the first time since 2013 that representatives from our organizations have met directly with the White House.
The fact that staff from the Biden-Harris Administration engaged with our organizations just months after entering office speaks to a major improvement in public perception of atheists in politics. We’re no longer seen as quite the same albatross around the neck of a lawmaker.
This meeting also marks a fundamental shift in the way we will interact with the federal government—and the White House—as compared to the previous administration led by Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
During the Trump era, whenever the administration gave special treatment to religious organizations over secular ones or privileged the views of the religious over our own, the tools at our disposal to hold the federal government accountable were relatively blunt and became increasingly high-risk.
Federal lawsuits, often a preferred tool of our community, increasingly ran the risk of setting bad precedent thanks to Mitch McConnell’s and Senate Republicans’ tireless work stacking the federal bench with ideologues who deliberately disregard the Establishment Clause. Or the cases could simply be thrown out on standing, often by Courts of Appeal, potentially wasting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And when policy changes or new rules from agencies like the Departments of Education or Health and Human Services were proposed, our comments, testimony, and advice were frequently ignored while staffers plucked from Christian nationalist organizations like the American Family Association or Alliance Defending Freedom led campaigns to cement religious exemptions and loopholes into every area of federal regulation.
The simple fact is this: For the past four years, there was often very little we could do to stop bad federal policies from going into effect, and using the courts to roll them back was—and remains—an uphill battle.
But with an administration that is much more likely to share our concerns that religious exemptions from civil rights laws have disastrous effects on marginalized communities and religious equality, we now have an opportunity to undo some of the damage.
The Biden-Harris team’s willingness to meet with our organizations within the first months of the administration shows a readiness to engage and collaborate. It is an opportunity we cannot waste.
Having the ear of allies—or even just slightly more sympathetic politicians—is often a much easier pathway to stop bad legislation and rule changes than years (or more) of litigation after the fact. It’s also an opportunity to actually advance positive change rather than simply playing defense.
This isn’t a new or profound realization. It’s a model we’ve put into practice at the state level after shifting our focus there throughout the previous administration. It’s what has allowed us to stop more than 90% of the negative legislation we tracked in state legislatures last year and to advance laws in multiple states that have protected Americans from religion-based harms including child marriage, female genital mutilation, conversion therapy, and religious exemptions from nondiscrimination laws.
While there’s something about litigation that appeals to our community’s sense of how things should work, the reality of the legal system is that having the best arguments, facts, and legal precedent sometimes isn’t enough. Even with all of these things (not to mention common sense) on our side, federal courts ruled time and time again in the past year that houses of worship are entitled to almost complete immunity from COVID-19 restrictions—and, more broadly, any government regulation.
Or consider the unprecedented giveaway of taxpayer money to houses of worship as part of the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program and its accompanying lack of oversight. Or the inclusion of loopholes and exemptions seemingly designed to ensure individual parish churches affiliated with the cash-rich Catholic Church could still get money as part of the program.
Now that this money has left the treasury, there’s little we can do in the courts to get it back. Rather, by working directly with the administration, we can prevent such abuses from happening in the first place.
While the federal court system may not be a reliable tool to advance our interests at this time, we’re now able to access the levers of political power with allies in the White House and in Congress. Thankfully, the necessity of our engagement with the political branches of government coincides with our community’s rise as a powerful constituency.
From this initial meeting, it’s clear that the White House is receptive to our concerns and that there is, at the very least, agreement on the general principles of equality under the law for all Americans, increased visibility for atheists and other nonreligious Americans, a commitment to religious pluralism rather than Christian supremacy, and protection of the constitutional separation of religion from government.
This is just the first step of broader engagement with this administration. Thanks to our groundbreaking U.S. Secular Survey and the reports from that survey, we can point to specific and measurable harms caused by discrimination against the nonreligious in employment, educational settings, and access to social services, especially in highly religious communities in the South and Midwest. These data demonstrate the importance of our insistence on greater protections from religiously motivated discrimination in social services.
There’s much more that can be said about how we should use the federal courts in the future, but for now, having another tool available in the fight for our values is a welcome change from the past four years. And our ability to use that tool is a sign of the power our community will gain in the coming years.
