The numbers tell a grim story: Americans are turning away from God.

“Evidence is growing that Americans are becoming significantly less religious,” writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “They are drifting away from churches, they are praying less and they are less likely to say religion is very important in their lives. For the first time in Gallup polling, only a minority of adults in the United States belong to a church, synagogue or mosque.”

Indeed, Pew Research discovered that from 2007 to 2021, adults who identified with no religion nearly doubled, from 16% to 29%. At the same time, those who believe in Christianity fell from 78% to 63%.

Self-avowed atheist Kate Cohen recently penned an op-ed in The Washington Post, calling for more atheists in America. The problem is, even Cohen admits some truths about how atheists are still out of the mainstream of society. “Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists,” she writes. “They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not. Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!”

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the ideology Cohen tries to sell to her audience. And even with the decline of faith, Cohen’s point about Americans not wanting to vote for atheists has been abundantly clear, at least if we’re to believe respondents to a 2020 Gallup poll: “More than nine in 10 Americans say they would vote for a presidential candidate nominated by their party who happened to be black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish or a woman,” reports Gallup. But then: “Such willingness drops to eight in 10 for candidates who are evangelical Christians or are gays or lesbians. Between six and seven in 10 would vote for someone who is under 40 years of age, over 70, a Muslim or an atheist.”

Maybe it’s the long, bloody, and well-documented history of communism and Marxism, the political ideologies most closely aligned with atheism, that turns people off even to this day. Maybe those purges, those forced famines, those cultural revolutions, and those great leaps forward have taken folks aback.

“Communist regimes put Marx’s principles into practice,” writes Marion Smith in The Wall Street Journal, “starting with the first Marxist state. Between 1917 and 1921, the Soviet Union destroyed nearly 600 Russian Orthodox monasteries and convents. The leaders of the first communist country oversaw the killing of at least 300 Orthodox clergy. This bloodbath eventually became Soviet policy. The scholar Todd M. Johnson estimates that Soviet authorities sent 15 million Christians to their deaths in prison camps between 1921 and 1950. A further five million Christians perished in the following 30 years.” Smith ought to know. He’s the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington.

Far from singling out Christians, though, atheist regimes went after anyone daring to worship a supreme being. “The Soviet Union also targeted Muslim communities for mass deportation, killing, for example, as many as 46% of Crimean Tatars,” Smith adds. “Thousands of Buddhist monks also died at Soviet gunpoint. Where religion survived in the U.S.S.R., it did so secretly — or under the watchful eye and controlling hand of the state.”

Even today, the People’s Republic of China is an atheist state, and the government continues to persecute Christians and other religious groups. According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The communist Chinese government has created a high-tech surveillance state, utilizing facial recognition and artificial intelligence to monitor and harass Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falon Gong and other religions. Independent experts estimate that between 900,000 and 1.8 million Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Muslims have been detained in more than 1,300 concentration camps in Xinjiang.”

It all makes sense. Socialists and communists can’t afford competition, so they destroy it. People of faith, on the other hand, worship a higher being, not the government. They look for hope, strength, and inspiration not only beyond political systems but to another world beyond the one here on Earth. In his 1952 autobiography, Witness, former communist Whittaker Chambers asked the essential question in three words: “God or Man?”

In the end, Cohen boasts that atheism places political power in the hands of the godless to make change instead of relying on guidance from God, who she protests doesn’t exist anyway. Sadly, however, history is replete with atheists who used their newfound power to destroy those who dared to believe in an entity other the State.