Around the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. was one of the world’s most religious countries, but around 2007 something shifted, and since then America has become the eleventh least religious country. What happened? In the latest issue of Free Inquiry, Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the Richard Dawkins Foundation, argues that much of the credit belongs to the writers of new atheism; Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens, and of course our own Richard Dawkins. “The idea that atheism was a credible alternative to faith … had penetrated the public consciousness,” she writes. “A convincing case for walking away from religion was made at a time when the ground was prepared for it, and the idea was unleashed into the American zeitgeist.”