Distrust of atheists is strong in the United States. The General Social Survey consistently demonstrates that as a group, Americans dislike atheists more than any other religious group. According to various studies, nearly half of the country would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist, some 40% of the public does not believe atheists share their view of American society, and only 60% of Americans would be willing to vote for an atheist in a presidential election.
There is one field, however, where atheism is often assumed: science.
These scientists espouse a frequently derisive rhetoric on religion and the religious public. Dawkins, for example, has argued that religion is a form of “mental illness” and one of the world’s “great evils” comparable to smallpox.
Drawing on quantitative surveys with 1,293 scientists who identified as atheists, 81 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted from 2013 through 2016 and context material collected since then, we found that scientists’ views of religion are much more diverse than the image conveyed by new atheists.

Today’s America is facing moral and political divisions that especially challenge our Christian communities. During these times of increasing uncertainty, we need to be aware of dangers that could affect our families and the future our faith.
However, a clear-eyed look beyond our American borders reveals another and even more urgent reality: internationally, Christians are facing immediate, dire, and dangerous circumstances.
“The Guardian,” a politically liberal British publication, published a worrisome statement in a January 2021 article:
“More than 340 million Christians—one in eight—face high levels of persecution and discrimination because of their faith, according to the 2021 World Watch List compiled by the Christian advocacy group Open Doors. It says there was a 60% increase over the previous year in the number of Christians killed for their faith. More than nine out of 10 of the global total of 4,761 deaths were in Africa.”
Of course, very few of those international Christians look like us, speak our language, or worship as we do. We may not immediately relate to them. Meanwhile, hidden in numerous Muslim countries, are millions of new converts to Christianity from Islam. Sadly, according to radical Islamism, their conversion is grounds for execution.
Random dictatorships and abusive regimes mistreat Christians for reasons of insatiable power and control. But today, surging dangers to Christians are due primarily to two specific causes:  radical Islam and communism.
For example, consider the country that is listed by Open Doors as the worst persecutor of Christians in the world: North Korea.
North Koreans are required to “worship” the Marxist-Maoist Kim family in a peculiar, quasi-religious system. North Korean Christians—estimated at some 400,000 people—face particularly horrendous persecution. Torture. Starvation. Rape. Slave Labour. Public Execution. All this for simply possessing a Bible or otherwise practicing Christianity.
China is another serious persecutor, and it cooperates with North Korea’s oppression by sending fleeing Christians back across the common border, likely to torture and death. No higher authority–God–is permitted in either country.
Under Xi Jinping, China is increasingly abusive to Christians. Meanwhile, we see what’s happening to China’s millions of Uighur Muslims—either kept or killed in brutal concentration camps or barely surviving incapacitating surveillance, including facial recognition software, DNA identification, phone tracking, and a social credit system. These technologies are also used to track, capture, and abuse Christians and other religious minorities.
And speaking of global menaces to religious minorities, Iran is another danger-zone. Iranian Christians – particularly converts from Islam – are identified as enemies of Iran’s Shiite mullahcracy and as threats to national security. Arrests and behind-the-scenes violence against Christians are rampant.
Yet an underground movement comprised of converts from Islam is growing miraculously, even while severely repressed. These new Christians have zero rights, yet their courage is astonishing.
At the same time, as “The Guardian” reports, African believers are at high risk across that vast continent.

Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, England – once the see of English martyr St John Fisher – and a champion of persecuted Christians in Islamic countries, has joined the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
“I write to let you know of my reception into the ordinariate established for Anglicans who wish to be in full commun-ion with the See of Peter,” Lord Nazir-Ali announced.
“I am doing so because I believe that the traditional Anglican desire to adhere to the fullness of apostolic, patristic and conciliar teaching can now best be maintained in this way,” he explained.
An Ordinariate priest told Church Militant that “Lord Nazir-Ali is the most high-profile convert from the Church of England to Rome for the last 100 years, probably since the con-version of the intellectual giant Msgr Ronald Knox.”
Such a high-profile conver-sion is a setback to ecumenism.
“Michael is one of the most prodigious intellects of our time, a heroic apologist for the faith, a bulwark against radical Islam, a laser-sharp cultural commenta-tor, a persuasive preacher, a pa-ssionate evangelist of the highest calibre, and a brilliant linguist and poet,” the priest said.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, will ordain the former Anglican pre-late to the Catholic priesthood October 30 at the Ordinariate pro-cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory at Golden Square in London.