Boston - Zachary Bos doesn’t believe in God, but he’s willing to let
President Barack Obama audition for the role. It was a statement inclusive enough to give Bos’ inner skeptic pause, coming as it did after the Bush administration’s evangelical style of politics and foreign policy. But placing atheism alongside the world’s major religions didn’t go quite far enough for Bos. “My informed and reflective reaction is, ‘This is good progress.’ But it’s not very good company, is it?” Despite being mentioned in the same breath as established religion, Bos is willing to allow Obama a good-faith trial period of governance. “I’ve got expectations of Obama,” Bos said. “I made a deal with him. Said I: ‘I have surveyed the field of candidates, and I believe you’re the one who won’t betray the values you’re professing, and the values I’m endorsing with my vote.” 
A college dropout and self-proclaimed autodidact, Bos is part of America’s vocal atheist minority, a segment of the population that makes no apologies for openly challenging the spiritual status quo. Bos and his fellow atheists face an almost Sisyphean endeavor : 78% of Americans believe in God, according to a July 2008 Gallup poll. Yet national attitudes are shifting in the atheists' favor.
67% of the American population believes religion is losing clout in American life, according to a December 2008 Gallup poll. And an increasing majority of Americans– 52% - think religion should stay out of politics, according to an August 2008 poll by the PEW Research Center for People and the Press. |
“I think what we’re seeing is a kind of denunciation of religion as the source of a lot of political policies that people don’t approve of,” said Dr. Jon Roberts, a history professor at Boston University. “It’s simply a function of the fact that they’re fed up with the kind of polarized politics that fervent religion on both sides seems to give rise to.”
Roberts, an intellectual historian an author of The Sacred and the Secular University, said that Obama’s mention of non-believers in his speech was the President’s way of “trying to include everybody in the fold.”
Bos agrees, pointing to his own organization, the Boston Atheists, as proof of the changing America embraced in Obama's speech.
"We speak Spanish, German, Russian, Dutch. We’ve got boys and girls, folks. We’ve got people who are involved in academia, and people who are plumbers and contractors. We run the gamut.” He added, "If I say that I'm an atheist, you know absolutely nothing about me. You don’t know my hair color, my gender, my skin color." |