....This mean-spirited slur, similar to other caustic language we've heard from Buehrens, implies that atheists can never make meaningful contributions to any social reform effort. This is obviously false and historically ignorant: as I've mentioned before, American freethinkers have played a major part in the abolitionist movement, the battle for civil rights, the feminist movement - Margaret Sanger's motto, after all, was "No Gods, No Masters" - and many more.....
Buehrens isn't saying atheists can never make meaningful contributions to social reform in America, or play a major part. Historically, they/we did. But also historically, social reform made its greatest strides when religious impulses weren't
excluded from the discussion. The Progressive era in America was largely started by nonconformists, but it took off and made its greatest strides when books like
Social Christianity made the case for taxing the rich on theological grounds. Civil rights were championed by humanists from the turn of the century onward, but when their ideas were joined with the thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, that's when things really changed.
I think that's what Buehrens was trying to say, and probably what the book he's reviewing is talking about. (Anyone read THAT?)
BTW, the Unitarians have been nurturing to non-theists for a LOT longer than a few decades. What's happening in the last decade is a trend back to being accepting of "the language of reverence" and the development of a different kind of theism, instead of dismissing all possibility of that as "backsliding into superstition". There's a difference between accepting atheism as a valid life path and being anti-theistic, being a church that criticizes anyone with "supernatural" ideas.
