Reviewing a history of atheism in the 19th-century U.S., titled Village Atheists, alongside a biography of H.L. Mencken—once called “America’s village atheist”—Crawford Gribben addresses the relationship among unbelief, religious enthusiasm, and religious liberty in the United States. While some atheists thought greater tolerance of their unbelief would or should go hand-in-hand with greater tolerance of religious minorities, others did not. Take, for instance, the widely popular anti-religious cartoonist Watson Heston:

Heston was well aware that some of the faithful shared his concerns about the nation’s dominant religious culture. After all, Adventists, Mormons, and Jews were also shut out of full civic participation. However, his sympathy for these outcasts was ambivalent; it was not just his “Hebraic portraits” that were “coarse, derogatory, and predictable.”. . . His visual ridicule left little middle ground between the hegemony of unenlightened zeal and those [like himself] who wished to disrupt it.

Despite the mid-20th-century successes of atheists and skeptics, unbelief has remained on the defensive till today:

[T]hings changed very quickly after the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional the exclusion of atheists from public office (1961), and after the consequent battles for free speech against restrictive notions of blasphemy that precipitated the culture wars and did so much to contribute to the bifurcation of American politics. But the seeds of this decline had been sown generations before, and cold-war paranoia proved unable to retard the continual decline of religious privilege, so that in 1966, only five years after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the prohibition of atheists in public office, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled, “Is God dead?”

But modern-day believers and unbelievers may both be exaggerating their marginality. Even as debates rage about bakeries and bathrooms, most Americans continue to agree with the Psalmist that, “the fool has said in his heart there is no God.” A Pew survey in 2014 found that voters would look with more negativity on a presidential candidate’s atheism than on drug use or marital infidelity.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.