The Accidental Atheist: From Hippie to Humanist in Half a Century‪.‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the fall of 2006 the Secular Coalition of America announced that they would award $1,000 to the person who identified the highest-level atheist, humanist, freethinker, or other nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States. SCA Advisory Board Chairman Woody Kaplan, a civil liberties activist and former member of the ACLU's National Board of Directors, took some of the suggested names and interviewed close to sixty members of the U.S. House and Senate. "At the time, twenty-two of them told me they didn't believe in a god," Kaplan recalls. "Twenty-one of them said, 'You can't tell anybody." One of them said you could: Congressman Pete Stark."