Alfredo Garcia at Religion & Politics offered a report recently from Reason Rally 2012.  The rally welcomed 10,000 non-theists to the national mall to celebrate and recognize freedom from God.  As Garcia notes,

life remains hard for non-theists in the United States. There is, of course, the cultural stigma—of being nontheistic in a nation where more than 90 percent of people believe in a higher power. There is only one openly atheist member of Congress, Rep. Peter Stark from California (who had a video appearance at the Reason Rally). Atheists are viewed more negatively than any other U.S. religious group, with less than half of Americans (45 percent) holding a favorable opinion of them. It can be a lonely existence. With no single umbrella organization to bring non-theists together, individuals can feel isolated, compounded by the fact that the various non-theist organizations are often fragmented in their approaches.

There are a couple of lessons here for those of us trying to understand Fundamentalist America.  The first is that conservative religious folks tend to over-emphasize the power and influence of atheism.  Bogeys like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Robert Ingersoll, and the American Humanist Association have been used by generations of fundamentalist activists as warnings of the growing power of anti-God “forces.”

Second, we can see that the real divide in America’s culture wars isn’t between conservative religious people and atheism.  The atheist side is a small percentage.  The real contenders are between conservative and liberal religious people.  The central issues are between contending visions of the role of religion in public life.  In this fight, atheism punches far above its weight.  That is, many religious people in America support the notion that the public square must be resolutely secular.

Finally, as Garcia insightfully notes, though small, the atheist community has long struggled with the stereotype of the aggressive iconoclast:

It’s the image of the atheist out to pick a fight, the unbeliever who is constantly seeking the next debate. As [Paul] Fidalgo from CFI [Center for Inquiry] put it, O’Hair was an “extremely polarizing” figure who “gained visibility for American Atheists but may have been integral in forming the image of atheism in the U.S. as arrogant.”

And, indeed, as Garcia reports, the reliable Richard Dawkins told the assembled crowd that they must go forth to “ridicule and show contempt” for religious people.  Perhaps the menace of atheism–from the viewpoint of Fundamentalist America–comes from this aggressive, arrogant, in-your-face sort of attitude more than from any sense of growing political clout.