Secular humanism and atheism beyond progressive secularism

"Freethinkers," including both atheists and secular humanists, have always been a minority in American society--and not a very popular one. There are still laws in several states preventing non-theists from holding office. Just as evangelical Protestants up until one hundred years ago held a largely optimistic view of the future and the end times (known as postmillennialism), secular humanists and atheists also expected that a progressive, secular "kingdom" would emerge as societies threw off a primitive theistic mindset and matured into educated adulthood. As historian Sidney Warren (1966:231) writes of these movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: "Freethinkers never doubted the correctness of their position, for they viewed history as a continuous struggle between the forces of light and darkness. They were, they felt, carrying the torch of reason in an otherwise religious world of bigotry and superstition." As secular rationalism gained ascendancy in many American institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the expectation of a comprehensive secular revolution was widely shared by organized humanist and atheist leaders and thinkers, as well as by scientists and educational leaders (Smith 2003). Secularism, understood as the dominance of naturalistic and scientific thought over supernatural explanations of reality, was seen as the future for America. We call this view "progressive secularism."