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.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.