Myth:
Atheists want the government treat everybody's religious views equally, but that's technically impossible. The Pledge of Allegiance can't say "under God" and "under no God" at the same time, after all, so it might as well keep saying "under God."
Response:
There is a growing belief among Christians that any real government neutrality when it comes to religion is impossible. If government must always favor one religion over others, it might as well be their religion that is favored because it’s the only true religion anyway. Even if we grant that no human institution is perfect and so neutrality will never be quite perfect, it doesn’t follow that neutrality can’t exist at all and that government must always favor religion — much less theirs.
This myth is pushed most often by Christian Reconstructionists or those heavily influenced by Christian Reconstructionism because they intend for their religion to be endorsed, promoted, and established by the government. They don’t approve of the constitutional prohibition of established religions, but they cannot eliminate this long-standing policy all at once — the job must be accomplished a step at a time, and the first is to get people to believe the lie that government neutrality is impossible.
Most think that the obvious answer to this issue is to simply remove references to religion entirely. Instead of trying to force a false choice between "under God" and "under no God," for example, just don't mention any gods at all. Isn't that the very definition of neutrality: not to take sides in a dispute? That's the correct answer, but promoters of the above myth get around this by getting people to believe a second lie: that atheism, humanism, and secularism are religions which are favored by the government when Christianity isn’t privileged.
Thus they argue that simply not mentioning gods at all is somehow the equivalent of "under no God." How and why this is wrong is dealt with in greater detail elsewhere, but it should suffice to say here that there's absolutely no basis for thinking that a failure to explicitly endorse Christianity, religion, or theism is therefore necessarily an endorsement of either atheism or any atheistic belief system. This is, however, a critical piece of this myth and something which people claim with all seriousness. For whatever reason, they really do believe that unless the state promotes their religion, then it is promoting atheism.
In fact, it might be argued that this belief is something that runs through their entire agenda. At every point they seem to think that the government is actively promoting atheism, godlessness, blasphemy, and infidelity simply because their doctrines and ideas aren't being openly promoted. The possibility that religion should be a private matter handled by private institutions, such as churches, is not something they accept as legitimate.
Unfortunately, many Christians don’t understand that this agenda exists or that it is a driving ideological force in the Christian Right. They are led to accept a few basic principles, like the idea that the separation of church and state only works in one direction (protecting religion from state interference, but not the other way around). Then, over time, they can be brought to accept the more radical message against basic religious liberty and civil rights.
Everyone loses when Christian Reconstructionists acquire power, but the first people to lose will be atheists and religious minorities — people who are generally poorly thought of already, so too few Christians will care when their civil rights and religious liberty are infringed upon. They may not realize until its too late that Christian Reconstructionism will take away their own rights too, because Reconstructionists only care about a very narrow, fundamentalist vision of Christianity.
