Today, some 5 million Americans claim to be atheists — and they’re coming out of the closet. Throw in the agnostics, and you have 20 million godless. In this week’s WORLD, Gene Edward Veith notes that though the number of declared godless is increasing, their standing has not increased: A University of Minnesota poll last year found that atheists were America’s most distrusted group. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 62 percent of Americans would refuse to vote for an atheist running for president.

As a result, atheists allege a whole host of slights, hostility, and civil-rights violations. And so many atheists are trying to do what homosexuals did when they pulled off one of the biggest public-relations coups in history, in part by rebranding themselves as “gay.” Atheists are calling themselves “brights.”

When people start talking about their religion and some say, “I’m a Christian,” or “I’m a Muslim,” an atheist may say, “I’m a bright.” We can then anticipate “equal rights for brights” and measures forbidding discrimination against “bright Americans.”

The problem for atheists, though, is that the term may not do them much good. That they think of themselves as “bright” grows out of their self-image. If atheists think they are bright while the rest of us are stupid, their opinion will probably alienate the public more than their views on God.

Read the rest of Ed’s take here.