Buried in the article is something much more interesting than the headline: the book author is coming out as atheist. Well, not atheist, but "humanist".

There are zero admitted atheists in congress. A bunch are "unaffiliated", but this is the closest one is coming to saying out loud "no, I don't believe in God".

Christian nationalism has been a huge problem, and nobody has wanted to combat it via non-belief. Nearly everybody has at least paid lip service to religion, for fear of alienating large numbers of non-nationalist Christians.

Honestly, I dunno. Right now, the Christian nationalists are closely allied with an atheist technocrat set, including the President himself. Christian Nationalists have all sorts of excuses for his behavior, which strike me as very un-Christian. I don't think non-nationalist Christians have done a great job of getting ahead of that.

I don't know if a more explicit secular approach will attract any of the atheist technocrats away from an alliance with the Nationalist Christians. And I don't know if the conventional wisdom, to not alienate progressive Christians, is wrong.