The volunteer atheist army standing up to Trump

Nick Fish is a civil rights activist and president of American Atheists, an NGO which fights for the civil liberties of atheists and for the total separation of government and religion. He spoke to us about how atheists, humanists and democrats are coming together to resist the influence of white Christian nationalism under Donald Trump’s presidency.

Much of the dangerous legislation that’s being pushed by white Christian nationalists is targeting schools and young people. Could you give us a sense of the aims there and the scope of that threat?

We have to put this in context of a long history in the United States. The same people, the organisations and funders, who are behind the attacks on our public school system today are the same organisations that were pushing segregation academies [in the 60s], that were creating parallel structures so that their children didn’t have to go to school with black children.

And you can look at the backlash [today] to “critical race theory” or “wokeism” or whatever words they want to use … When you look at what’s actually being taught in schools, it’s things like “treat everyone with dignity and respect” or “here’s exposure to people that experience the world slightly differently than you might, because of racism, classism, different ways that people move through the world, and let’s understand that and let’s celebrate those differences.”

So when we talk about “white Christian nationalism”, every word in that term is important.

What’s happening on the ground under Trump?

There are two sides that we’re seeing right now. First is the gutting of public schools and public institutions, making it impossible for them to continue with the work they do, so that you can turn around and say, “See, this doesn’t work. That’s why we need to privatise, to redirect money into private schools, into religious schools.”

The second part is to push religious indoctrination into public schools, so that religious teachers can sort of convert those schools from inclusive spaces that educate everyone into exclusionary, divisive institutions. It flips religious freedom protections on their head, so that instead of protecting the freedoms of young people, a teacher who is acting as an agent of the state can say that they have a freedom to indoctrinate students. A core part of the white Christian nationalist agenda is perverting the definitions of religious freedom to mean that the government can impose religion on you.

How is this being resisted?

The defunding side of things is very unpopular. We have been able to find a lot of common ground around [opposing] the privatisation attempts, the attempts to defund public schools, the attempts to create these voucher schemes where you can take the money that would otherwise go to your student in a public school and use it underwrite the cost of tuition at a private institution, usually a religious one. These voucher programmes fail whenever they’re put to a vote by the people.

Part of [the battle] is storytelling, making sure that people know what it’s like to be in a school where you’re being ostracised, where you have prayers being piped in over the loudspeaker every single day – where atheists, yes, but also religious minorities, or people who are just a different sort of Christian, say they feel uncomfortable. [And parents say,] “This is not the type of education that I want for my kid.” So we have to create space for people of different faiths and people who are non-religious to stand together on this issue, making it clear that this is not some sort of partisan left versus right issue; this is not atheist versus Christian. It is everybody who wants robust public schools that prepare kids for the future and that include and educate everybody, versus those who don’t.

Before the election, Trump seemed to promise that he wasn’t going to further attack reproductive rights. Does the general public now think that he’s going too far on these issues?

There are big chunks of the American electorate who didn’t take Donald Trump seriously. But we don’t need to look any further than Project 2025 [a deeply conservative set of policy proposals] that was put out by the very same people who are now staffing this administration at the level below cabinet officials – the deputy secretaries, the assistant secretaries, and so on. Those are the people that care an awful lot about banning abortion or contraception. Donald Trump doesn’t care about that, except in as far as he’s carrying out a promise to a constituency that he relied on to get elected.

But these other people have made it their life’s mission to enact this agenda, and Project 2025 was a crystal-clear roadmap of what they were going to do. Trump denounced them before the election, and said they wouldn’t have any part in his administration, and the media sort of uncritically repeated this. But you know, we’re not far into this administration and I think we’re going to see more extreme boundary pushing, attacks on democracy and flouting of norms.

But we’ve also seen challenges to some of these presidential executive orders.

Yes. At the federal level, it’s important to remember that a lot of these executive orders only have power within the bounds of current law. They all say something at the end like, “all of this must be implemented consistent with current federal law.” That includes things like Supreme Court decisions indicating that the Civil Rights Act protects LGBT people – trans people included – from employment discrimination, for example. So a lot of these executive orders were [little more than] fancy press releases. We’ve seen a few examples of policies being implemented, such as a ban on military health benefits being used to pay for gender affirming care. Obviously, that’s devastating for people that need that sort of care, but it’s not a wholesale ban on or wholesale attack on the existence of trans people in the way that some of these white Christian nationalist groups would want to see.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing some institutions comply [with these federal executive orders] despite the fact that they don’t have the force of law. But the rights that can be attacked at the state level are much more expansive; legislation is much more likely to pass at the state level. And so what we’ve got right now is the unfortunate reality that a person’s right to exist in public very much depends on their postal code. We’ve had examples of volunteers with us at American Atheists being unable or unwilling to travel to a place like Florida, because Florida passed a law that forces people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth in state-owned facilities. That includes airports, so a trans person using a bathroom that matches their gender identity can be arrested. These laws are intended to be confusing, to encourage people to live in terror.

Under the previous Biden administration, the federal government stepped in from time to time and sued states to protect civil rights. But now states know that the Trump administration is not going to push back in any meaningful way. They can pass new laws all the time, and they do. So in a state like Florida, or Texas, or Arkansas, it’s a deluge. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose. We [American Atheists] are tracking almost 700 bills right now that impact church-state separation, and many of them are attacks on public education, trans people and abortion.

How do these attacks fit into the broader white Christian nationalist agenda?

It’s about enforcing very strict hierarchies. Who is destined and ordained by God to be ruled? That’s all of us. And who’s ordained to rule? That’s them, white Christian males. A huge part of their ideology is enforcing those very strict hierarchies. And this is a movement that is incredibly well funded. American Atheists and our allies all combined maybe have a budget of somewhere between $25 million and $30 million. The other side, that’s what they spent on Project 2025 – the report itself and the broader “presidential transition operation”, as they called it. So the fact that we’re fighting sort of to parity, and that we’re winning as often as we are, is a great testament to the fact that our agenda is a lot more popular, whereas they need to lie, cheat and steal to get anything done. Like with these book bans, for example. The Washington Post looked at people that were filing objections to books in public schools and found that the majority across the nation were filed by a dozen people, because they’re just getting paid by these billionaires to sit around and fire off these complaints.

Meanwhile, we rely on our volunteers – people who work a full-time job, have kids, and then come home and work with us another three, four hours a day, because they care and they’re dedicated. We have probably close to 100 volunteers that are engaged with us on a weekly basis, engaging in high level work. And then with action alerts, and people submitting testimony or calling their members of Congress or their state legislatures, we have thousands and thousands of people. Our members are very politically active. So [if a community group or teachers’ union is trying to protect their public schools] we can say, “Hey, we’ve got this really great group of people that want to help you.” Write letters, be block captains [residents who serve as local leaders], whatever it might be to fight school privatisation.

American Atheists have called for atheists to be bolder and more vocal. How is the community feeling under Trump Mark 2?

It’s interesting, because I think it emboldens people. It’s this bigger thing, because of the level of stigma that atheists face in the United States. And so people who affirmatively declare, “I’m an atheist”, often it also means, “I’m really upset about the way that our government is going.” Atheists are the most politically engaged demographic in the US. According to the Cooperative Election Study, they’re more likely to donate to candidates, put up political signs and attend protests.

But then there are people who have unplugged completely. So they may not attend church or have a belief in a higher power, though they might be kind of spiritual. And they’re disengaged because of dissatisfaction with institutions. Government institutions – “I’m paying more to live, I can’t get ahead at all in my workplace” – but also religious institutions. They’re just dissatisfied with everything. The larger category of “nones” [any person who identifies as “no religion” in surveys] still kind of leans a bit left, but the participation rates are lower [than atheists]. It’s a much bigger cohort of people. And that’s the big question: What can we present to people as a compelling alternative – to not only religious nationalism, but populist nationalism?

And there’s no easy answer to that question, but I think humanism – presenting an inclusive vision of freedom and civic engagement for those folks, for everybody – is at least a start. Recognising how we’re all intertwined, how we’re all linked to one another, that our fortunes are all bound together, and that we don’t have to think of this as a zero-sum game.

These people are not thinking about politics. They’re listening to podcasts or YouTube channels to decompress, and some of that is being used to sneak in this anti-immigrant, quasi-religious nationalism, like the Jordan Peterson style thing: “Who to blame for your problems? Here’s the easy solution.” It’s very appealing for especially disaffected younger white men who may culturally identify as Christians, who are raised as Christians, but who for example don’t go to church. The gender gap in politics has never been bigger in the United States [with women leaning more to the left and the Democrats and men to the right and the Republicans]. And it’s really, really big among Gen Z voters.

How are atheist and humanist organisations coming together to protect secular culture in the US?

It seems like [the various atheist and humanist organisations in the US] have never been closer in terms of our ability to work together and get things done collaboratively, which is a great position to be in. It’s also about global cooperation. American Atheists is going to be hosting a World Humanist Congress in partnership with Humanists International in 2026, where we’re going to be talking about the threats of religious nationalism and presenting humanism as a positive alternative to that. And I think it’s a great opportunity for us to learn from one another, and to show that we’re not going to be intimidated by the actions of the Trump administration.

We are going to stand up for our values as atheists and humanists, our vision for a positive world. And part of the point of this event and having it in the US is bringing in other civil society and human rights groups to show how all of these things are connected; that it’s not just about atheists and humanists versus religious people. It’s people who care about universal human rights in stark contrast to the people who don’t. And that’s the big struggle we’re facing right now.

This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.