Why Aren’t More Americans Atheists? - Nick Spencer - POLITICO Magazine

"...This political analysis of atheism also helps us understand the New Atheist spasm of recent years. In the last decades of the 20th century, history veered off script. The world stopped secularising, and some religious groups, most famously evangelicals in America and Shias in Iran—two groups not usually bracketed together—found a political voice that had heretofore been muted. The results were often troubling and sometimes grotesque, and all of a sudden the wells of moral indignation were overflowing once more. Today, atheism is resurgent, in America and elsewhere, confidently predicting God’s imminent death and uncritically retelling the creation myth of atheism’s progress on science’s back..."

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/why-arent-more-americans-atheists-109732.html#.U-O05mK9KSN