Celebrity atheists

The Scientology cult uses celebrities to recruit followers (see also: Atheist cults).

Stratfor Advisory Services, which provide global enterprises predictive, customized intelligence assessments, wrote about violent ideologies and their recruitment methods:

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A few weeks ago I wrote about how uncannily similar today's jihadists are to the anarchists who came a century before them... For one, both types of terrorists rely on celebrity ideologues to recruit and radicalize new followers. Consider the modern jihadist movement, which has trotted out a procession of thought leaders to fill its ranks and fundraise.

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Charles Louis Richter declared in his interview with the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (ISHASH) about America and atheism:

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The turn of the century ended the golden age of nineteenth century freethought with two events: the death of Robert Ingersoll in 1899, and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. The lack of a widely popular voice for irreligion, combined with the murder of the president by an anarchist, led to a backlash against not only anarchism but also atheism. From that point, Americans tended to see irreligion in terms of whatever ostensibly foreign ideology seemed most threatening. So for the rest of the century, we see atheism and atheists associated with anarchism, fascism, socialism, and of course Soviet-style communism. By the late seventies, secular humanism became the buzzword for a whole suite of threats not only to religion, but to Americanism. It’s important to note that this phenomenon is not limited to the political or religious right; liberals also framed irreligion as un-American.

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