https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-13-everyday-bigotry-and-prejudice-the-freethinkers-beneath-the-spokespersons-between-the-headlines-and-below-equal-human-status/
You ask how we can talk to Christian fundamentalists when their worldview is so different from ours and they don’t accept evidence. I’ve found that we can’t reason people out of a belief that they didn’t come to through reason, but we still might be able to find some points of agreement. For instance, I might start with “Love your neighbor,” and point out varieties of the Golden Rule from Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Confucianism that predate Jesus. Another thing we could probably agree on is that all other faiths are wrong. I do say that every educated person should read the Bible, because it’s an important part of our culture. I also mention some secular books worth reading. If I’m asked for biblical quotes I like, I can mention Matthew 7:16: “By your fruits you shall know them.” I also like John 8:32: “The truth will set you free,” which it did when I became an atheist. If they tell me that they support blasphemy laws, I say I might, too, if the offended deity personally files charges.  

​https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-12/
 
Thank you for saying I have a secure place in American freethinker history. If true, it would be because I did two things. First, I ran for Governor of South Carolina in 1990 to challenge the state constitution prohibition against atheists holding public office. I didn’t become governor, of course, but in 1997 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled unanimously in my favor, nullifying the anti-atheist clause in the South Carolina Constitution. Credit for my Supreme Court victory belongs to my ACLU lawyers. I was just having fun giving campaign talks and writing about my experiences. Second, during my legal battle, I learned about and joined several national atheist and humanist organizations that all promoted causes I supported, like separation of religion and government and increasing visibility of and respect for freethinkers. However, each organization was doing its own thing without recognizing or cooperating with worthwhile efforts of like-minded groups. I thought that these diverse organizations would accomplish more by showing strength in numbers and working together on those issues to bring about cultural and political change. So in 2002, I helped form the Secular Coalition for America and became its founding president. 

​https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-11/
You refer to America as a plutocratic polyarchy at its founding. Let’s first define our terms.
A “plutocracy” is a government ruled or controlled by people of great wealth and income, while “polyarchy” means “rule by many,” and is a government ruled by more than one person (in your case, people of great wealth). A polyarchy may or may not be a democracy. A democracy is a government by all the citizenry who choose their leaders by voting for them in elections.The founding fathers chose not to have a democracy. Some favored a democratic popular vote for the president while others argued that Congress should pick the president. Their compromise is known as the Electoral College, a small number of people selected by the masses to vote for president because the founders did not trust the population at large to make the right choice. In modern practice, the Electoral College is a formality. Most electors are loyal members of the party that selected them, and wind up voting for that party. The Electoral College was also part of a compromise to satisfy small states. Each state had at least as many electoral votes as they had representative in Congress, which means that no state could have less than three votes. In a small state like Wyoming, each elector represents 70,000 votes, while in California each elector represents 179,000 votes.
 

https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-8-minority-religions-and-the-american-nation-state/
Religious freedom, guaranteed by the United States Constitution, allows individuals to practice and promote any religion or no religion without government interference. Our founders supported freedom of religion because they understood that such religious diversity would help our new country avoid the kinds of wars that had plagued Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people had been tortured and killed over religious differences. I view the existence of many minority religions as a “blessing.” Christians are wrong when they claim America is a Christian nation. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that America is a white nation. The majority of Americans are both white and Christian. However, America is not now, nor has it ever officially been, a white nation or a Christian nation. 

​https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-7/
Religious beliefs of American presidents are difficult to determine, perhaps indeterminable. We can learn what they profess to believe and what church they attend, but I am often skeptical about what they truly believe. Let’s look at the last two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, both of whom are professed Christians. Barack Obama had an atheist father and was raised by a secular humanist mother whose values he embraced. He used to say he was an agnostic, but he became a Christian when he ran for public office. At least Obama embraces some positive values of Christianity, like concern for immigrants and the poor, caring about your neighbor, honesty, and respect for the environment. What Christian principles does Donald Trump embrace, unless you consider it Christian to nominate judges put forth by conservative white evangelicals? I know he disagrees with Luke 6:29: “If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer your other cheek.” I couldn’t find a biblical passage that says, “Slap him back ten times harder.” Nor does Trump follow Luke 14:1: “He who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” Many of us wish Trump would heed Proverbs 12:15: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” Trump refused to disclose his tax returns because he claims they are under audit. He added, “Maybe I get audited so much because I’m a strong Christian.” Really? How much faith does that statement require? I think Donald Trump is an atheist because I can’t picture him believing in a power higher than himself. On the other hand, Trump might think that he is a god.
 

https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-6-african-american-history-black-history-is-american-history/

​​I should first acknowledge some positives for African-American churches. Aside from giving people hope, they have often been a center for civil rights activism and a place that blacks could gather in large numbers without being harassed. I live in Charleston, South Carolina, just three blocks from Mother Emmanuel AME church, now internationally known because nine African Americans were murdered there by white nationalist Dylann Roof. This church was once a secret meeting place for African-Americans who wanted to end slavery at a time when laws in Charleston banned all-black church gatherings. Some slaveowners and white Christian ministers in the nineteenth century read biblical verses to slaves as part of the worship services they allowed them to attend. They wanted to show that the Bible condones and supports slavery. The biblical curse of Ham (Genesis 9:25), one of the sons of Noah, was for Ham to be a servant to his brothers. This curse was used to justify slavery of black Americans on the ground that black Americans were descendants of Ham. 
 

https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-5-colonization-and-its-aftermath/
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I think most Americans agree that in the past both European settlers and later generations of Americans treated Indians (now called Native Americans) very badly. Treaties between the U.S. and sovereign Indian tribes were unequal or broken. The government sought to replace the population of Indian territories with a new society of white settlers. As white settlers spread westward across America after 1780, armed conflicts increased between the settlers and Indians. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the U.S. government to enforce the Indian removal from east of the Mississippi River to the West, even though many tribes had extensive territories in that area. As American settlers kept expanding their territories, Indian tribes were relocated to specially designated territories. This policy was known at the time as Manifest Destiny, the belief that the settlers in the United States were destined to expand across North America because of the special virtues of the American people and their institutions, including the Christian religion. This was nothing new. Beginning with Christopher Columbus, many Native Americans were enslaved and forced to convert to Christianity. They lost their land and were later forcibly put onto reservations, leaving the rich land they had lived on for Christian settlers ready to work for God and Country. 

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https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-4/ 
 
I agree with you that many eighteenth-century Deists might have been atheists had they been familiar with the work of Charles Darwin. However, Darwin’s theory of natural selection only explains that we have a variety of species, including human animals, because they adapted to their environment. Evolution says nothing about how life began. Many Deists would probably still have believed in a Creator who started the process, and then let nature take its course. Later scientific discoveries would probably have turned these Deists into atheists. We now know that our universe did not begin with a Creator, but with a “Big Bang” approximately 13.8 billion years ago. We still don’t know how life began, although abiogenesis is a reasonable hypothesis. This is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. It’s interesting that Bible believers refuse to believe this hypothesis about life arising from non-life, though they believe that the first human was made from dirt and the second human from the rib of the first. Did God run out of dirt?

​https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-3-idealism-above-realism-below/
 
The religious faith of our founders is irrelevant because they erected a wall of separation between religion and the government they created in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. However, since you ask, and since there is curiosity about the personal beliefs of our founders, here are some interesting tidbits. Many of our founders were anti-Catholic. John Adams called Catholicism “nonsense, a delusion, and dangerous in society.” Thomas Jefferson called Catholicism “a retrograde step from lightness to darkness.” (I agree with these founders and would add, as Thomas Paine did, all the other religions.) John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, drafted language for the New York Constitution proposing tolerance for everyone except Catholics who refuse to renounce papal authority. At the time of the American revolution only about 1.6 percent of the population in the colonies were Catholic. It wasn’t until the immigration waves of the nineteenth century that Catholics began arriving in America in large numbers. This led to the aptly named “Know Nothing” party, formally called the American Party, an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant party formed in 1850. I was raised in Philadelphia, home of the 1844 “Bible riots” where both Catholics and Protestants were clubbed to death over which version of the Lord’s Prayer should be recited in public school. Protestants won the political battle, and Catholics responded by forming Catholic schools nationwide by 1860.