Lori Lipman Brown is an attorney, educator and former Nevada state senator who left Las Vegas for Washington D.C. in 2005 to become the director of the Secular Coalition for America, “the only organization in the nation whose primary purpose is lobbying Congress on behalf of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheistic Americans.” Brown has quickly become a visible spokesperson for her organization and its cause, is widely and frequently quoted in national media and often appears on television news programs. She recently spoke with NVToday about the coalition, the unique nature and challenges of its mission and the differences between working in Las Vegas and working in Washington.

After the attacks of 9/11, many nontheists noticed an increased level of religiosity in government. Congress members sang God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol and the President ratcheted up his attempts to divert government funds to religious groups. The increased religious rhetoric led to even more disdain for nontheists than previously experienced and we were deemed to be unpatriotic and immoral by virtue of nothing more than our beliefs.

Herb Silverman, a college math professor from South Carolina who had fought a seven-year legal battle to become a notary public (and overturn that state's unconstitutional religious test for public office) asked the leader of every national nontheistic organization he could find to come together to hire a lobbyist to be a voice for nontheists in Congress. Four groups agreed to do so: Atheist Alliance International, the Institute for Humanist Studies, Internet Infidels (aka Secular Web), and the Secular Student Alliance. As an all volunteer organization, they produced a website, filed an FCC complaint against televangelists raising money via free airtime that was supposed to be set aside for educational programming, and supported Daryl Lambert when he was thrown out of the Boy Scouts of America for being an atheist. They also raised enough money to hire one staffer/lobbyist/director for one year -- that was me, and I started on September 19, 2005. Prior to my hiring, a fifth organization joined the coalition, the American Humanist Association.

We don't have individual members, although we have hundreds of individual donors, and thousands of individuals who receive our e-alerts. Our member organizations have grown; we now have a total of eight member organizations with the addition of Freedom From Religion Foundation, Society for Humanistic Judaism, and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. Our member organizations have individual members totaling over 20,000.

D.C. is bigger. Nevada (even as it grew from my arrival in 1976 through 2005) has always functioned politically as something of a small town. Someone can arrive, spend a week meeting a dozen key people, and they are in the loop. It took me about six months to feel comfortable on the Hill; and a few months longer than that before members of Congress started recognizing me and my organization.

The breakdown of how many legislators are idealistic versus opportunistic; how many are honest versus shady; how many are sincere versus engaging in gamesmanship -- seems to mirror my experiences in Nevada. Both there and in Congress, I'm pleasantly surprised that most of the elected officials I've met are truly there to do a service, and to take care of the needs of the American people.

Keep in mind I’m meeting with people who I think I can convince. There are a lot of pretty extreme folks up there who may or may not sincerely believe in the kinds of extremist rhetoric they espouse, but those aren’t the ones I’m meeting with. I’m meeting with pretty level-headed folks.

Dispelling the myths and stereotypes. And dealing with the extensive amount of revisionist history that is being pushed. There are actually people who believe the founders chose to make the United States a Christian Nation even though both the U.S. Constitution, and the Treaty of Tripoli easily prove otherwise.

Many Americans believe that you cannot be moral or ethical without a belief in a god or gods. They also believe that if we don't share their belief, then we threaten their own religion. I think most religious people are secure enough in their own beliefs not to think that my believing differently creates a problem. Most unfortunate perhaps is the fact that surveys also show the majority of Americans won't vote for an otherwise qualified candidate if they discover that the person doesn't have a god-belief. There's a misperception that someone who shares the voter's religion will also share their values and their views on issues that come before the elected body. Obviously this is not necessarily the case. I may better represent the values of some evangelical Christians better than our current president, who identifies as one of them.

Never. Remember, the most powerful man in Congress is Harry Reid.

Congressman Stark would not have mentioned his beliefs if he hadn’t been asked (the Secular Coalition for America asked) because he doesn’t think it's relevant to serving in public office. So I would definitely not characterize his honest answer to our question as an act of defiance. I think it is a sign of progress that a member of Congress honestly responded that he does not believe in a supreme being or beings.

Of course, Representative Stark does not live in parts of the Bible Belt or parts of the south where we hear reports of children being ostracized, harassed, or even assaulted if their families identify as atheist. Or parts of the country in which a parent is targeted by police for trumped up assault charges because his daughter refuses to pray with her public school basketball team before a game. Or Lawrence, Kansas, where a college professor was severely beaten after comments he made about a Bible as mythology course he planned to teach. There are still parts of the country where the prejudice against nontheists is so intense that being honest about not believing in a supreme being or beings could be downright dangerous in or out of the political realm.

I feel pressure to be extremely ethical, generous, and caring, but not because of my job. I was raised to stand up for justice for all minorities (not just those of which I'm a member). I'm a humanistic Jewish atheist, and I take the ethical mandate of tikun olam (heal the world) very seriously. Believing that this is the only life we have (no afterlife), it is especially important that I do everything I can to make this world as good as it can be. Believing that no outside entity will miraculously help those in need, I feel we humans have to do so. And believing that everyone gets this one life, I want to leave future generations the best world I can.

That said, I do feel it is important to help dispel the myth of the required amorality of nontheists, and I will not hesitate to refer to my own volunteer work with homeless families or the way I treat the people around me to make that point.

There is huge diversity amongst nontheists as well as among theists, but I have not seen more or less ethical, moral behavior from theists or nontheists.

This is exactly why we do not take a position on abortion. We do however support embryonic stem cell research because attempts to protect blastacysts at that stage are based on theological notions of a soul being imbued at the moment of conception.

Occasionally some of our supporters disagree with us on an issue, but I’ve often supported groups with which I don't agree 100 percent of the time. For example, we opposed the anti-same-sex-marriage amendment last year on the grounds that, while religious organizations are free to choose whom they will marry, we do not believe that a theological definition should be imposed on the civil contract of marriage. One of our supporters, an atheist, told me that he had very strong beliefs about gender roles and he believed civil marriage was for the purpose of men taking care of women, and therefore he saw it as a non-religious argument about gender roles.

In any event, I don't believe it does us any good to engage in infighting. We are already the most hated minority group; we need to come together even though we are a diverse population encompassing every political, ethnic, age, etc. realm. We can disagree on some specifics, but that should never interfere with the larger goal of eliminating the prejudices and unfair treatment. That's what the Secular Coalition for America is all about: bringing diverse nontheist groups together to support each other and make us all stronger politically. I also work well with nontheist groups that are not members of my organization, as well as theistic allies. They are also essential in our struggle.

You parallel your movement to the gay rights movement. As you continue to make progress do you expect to see a crop of “non-threateningly non-theist” television characters spring up?

The analogies I've been noticing are in the political realm. I hadn’t really thought of cultural portrayals, but yes, it would be nice to see more positive nontheist role models amongst television characters.

I'm hoping that seeing three people of the stature of U.S. Presidential candidates admit to what amounts to a disdain for biological science -- will scare the business, tech, and scientific communities into working even harder for separation of church and state. Many have already seen the problems in terms of America becoming less competitive because as a nation we are woefully science-ignorant.

What do you think is behind our science-ignorance? Do you think that’s religiously connected?

Well, the surveys that show just a really scary proportion of the population actually think that evolution is just a guess, and scientific theories don’t mean anything -- it’s just such a high percent. I think that’s part of, in addition to the revisionist history that’s being pushed, there’s a group of people who don’t hide the fact that they’re theocratic. I mean, I’ve actually seen on someone’s car a magnetic sticker about we should be a Christian nation, vote for theocracy. It wasn’t a joke. And there’s a lot of the science ignorance in some of the home schooling venues. I don’t know if you saw the documentary Jesus Camp?

The scariest part of that entire movie to me wasn’t the part where they’re over there with Bush’s cut-out, it was the part where the home school parent asks the son, “What do we know about science?” and he picks up his bible and he says something like, “Science doesn’t know anything, everything we need to know about science is in this book.”

And so, there’s a whole group of people out there who are raising their children to believe that science can’t determine anything. That what they read in a bible is fact, is nature, is history, is science.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I’ve even heard people equate science as if it were religion, when of course the scientific method is completely different from theology. You actually do experiments, you look for proof, you work experientially.

And I understand that most religious people presumably still read the bible not as anti-science, but as something literary or metaphorical, or even if they’re looking at it literally they understand that in literature there’s compression of time, and six days could be six billion years… But there are a lot people out there, apparently [laughs]- judging by the surveys showing what people now believe, teaching their children this other reality as science, and so these results … three people running for the United States presidency believe in literal creationism?

There’s also a fear amongst even high school science teachers to really teach one of the basic tenets of biological science, evolution, for fear that they’re going to have all kinds of hassles when they do. And it’s pretty easy to find the folks behind that [hassling] -- the Discovery Institute and such.

…I don't think religion will play as big a role in the 2008 election as it did in 2004, because the American people have seen what many of them consider sacred being used for political gain, and I think it is disturbing both to nonreligious and also many religious people. Also, in seeing how our current president behaves, perhaps people will note that claiming religiosity does not necessarily mean that you will behave ethically or morally.

Vouchers, faith-based initiatives and their abuses and lack of oversight, attempts to permit religious discrimination in hiring for federally funded programs, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (a law which privileges religion over everyone else in zoning, land use, and prison perks), federally funded sex education being fact-based rather than theology-driven, access to legal pharmaceuticals, military chaplains proselytizing.

The only issue that had a specific Nevada connection was the long delay in allowing Wiccan veterans to have their proper headstones in veterans’ cemeteries (this became a Reno issue). Although my organization represents nontheists, we are sensitive to all the ways in which our military has marginalized non-Christians generally. Of course for our constituency the one that cuts to the core is the lie, "there are no atheists in foxholes" as if nontheistic Americans don’t serve their country and die in combat as well. Or at the very least, that nontheistic soldiers would suddenly give up their core beliefs in an emergency. We have met many atheist veterans who were in combat emergency situations, and they didn't suddenly believe in any gods.

Enforce the United States Constitution. There are still states which have unconstitutional religious tests for public office. Last year we fought off two bills designed to keep Americans from enforcing the Establishment Clause in court. Elect people who understand the importance of this separation not just to nontheists, but to theists as well.

One was called the Public Expression of Religion Act, which was trying to make it too expensive to ever enforce an establishment clause case. The other was called the Pledge Protection Act. It basically said: you can never bring a case challenging the recitation of the pledge of allegiance in public schools. And due to the language of it, the changes that have been made in the fifties, to insert under god, between one nation and indivisible…

Oh yeah, definitely. They were, of course, connecting “commie” and atheist”…and it [the Pledge of Allegiance] was written shortly after the Civil War by a man who was pretty secular, himself. You can imagine the meaning of the words, “one nation, indivisible,” coming shortly after the Civil War. And then to be so bold as during the 1950s and the McCarthy witch hunts to actually divide our nation based on who believes we’re under god and who doesn’t, right there in that part of the pledge where we’re supposed to be indivisible, is especially harsh. Especially since we actually have heard of students being harassed for not saying “under god” in the pledge at their schools. Not here in DC, but Kansas, parts of the panhandle, Florida, Texas. There are parts of the country where things are a lot worse than anyplace I’ve ever lived in.

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I don't think I will see a nontheist president of the United States in my lifetime -- I'll be 49 next month. But I hope that one day a candidate’s religion, or lack of religion, will be irrelevant in a campaign, and voters will choose their representatives based on issues that matter to them.