The Freedom From Religion Foundation is condemning President Trump’s attack on America’s nonbelievers in the wake of a Christianity Today article calling for his removal from office.
On Thursday, Dec. 19, Christianity Today, an evangelical Christian magazine founded by Billy Graham published an editorial calling for Trump’s removal from office: “But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
In response, Trump went after the magazine on Twitter. In a pair of early morning tweets, Trump wrote:
A far left magazine, or very “progressive,” as some would call it, which has been doing poorly and hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years, Christianity Today, knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call and would rather.....
....have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!
By “ET,” he presumably meant “CT,” an abbreviation for Christianity Today.
Trump used the occasion to blast nonbelievers. He seems unaware that the “Nones” are a rapidly growing segment of the American population. An October Pew study found that the “decline of Christianity continues at a rapid pace” and that 26 percent of all Americans are religiously unaffiliated. Those “Nones” now outnumber both Catholics and Evangelicals, making the largest American religious demographic, ironically, the nonreligious. More specifically, 9 percent of the country is atheist or agnostic. That means there are about 30 million atheists and agnostics in America — more than Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons and Muslims combined.
“American nonbelievers represent a full spectrum of diverse social backgrounds. We come from every social category: race, sex, gender, profession, socioeconomic class and, yes, political persuasion, imaginable,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Fearmongers make ‘Nones’ the enemy, perpetuating an unjust stigma.”
Studies have shown that there is indeed a stigma attached to nonreligion in America, but it also appears that that stigma is lessening, in part due to efforts like FFRF’s Out of the Closet campaign.
“Trump is attacking more than one-quarter of the country,” says FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. “He’s defended white supremacists and banned Muslims and fostered anti-Semitism. It’s only natural that he would come after us, too.”