Appignani contends that atheists are one of the few minority groups in the country to still be widely ostracized by society. While other marginalized populations, such as women and LGBT people, he argues, are active in American politics, that’s still not the case for atheists. “If [someone said] ‘I’m an atheist and I’m running for Congress,’ they wouldn’t get elected today,” he said. As of 2016, around half of the American public said that knowing a presidential candidate was an atheist would make them less likely to support him or her—atheism was the least preferred of all the hypothetical traits the poll provided, including a history of financial problems and past marijuana use. Only one member of Congress identifies as religiously unaffiliated; one other has admitted he does not currently believe in God.

“That’s why I’m in the movement for critical thinking and secularism,” Appignani said. And he does seem like a member of a kind of movement: His foundation’s founding principle asserts that the planet will only survive if “non-acceptance promoted by faith-based ideology” is replaced by “rational scientific reasoning.”

But other conversations around the new chair, officially named the Appignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics, are much less dramatic, painting atheism not as a radical movement or persecuted ideology but rather as a rich—yet largely uncontroversial—academic subject. Chakravartty, who will begin his new role in July and will be placed in the university’s philosophy department, plans to teach courses in the history and philosophy of science and in secular ethics, among other topics. Ultimately the philosopher isn’t interested in disparaging religion but rather in taking a look at why some people believe in God and why others don’t, and in the more optimistic project of exploring what an ethical and contemplative way of life without God might look like. “The cardinal sin of a philosopher is to be dogmatic,” Chakravartty said.

This vision for the chair isn’t exactly in conflict with Appignani’s. But the distinctions between their descriptions of the chair—one that emphasizes a philosophical approach and one with far more emphasis on atheists as an identity group—is telling. Not only does it show how the interests of a donor can diverge from those of a university benefitting from that donation. It also shows how nonbelief itself has, throughout history, meant many different things—whether a mere indifference to questions of God’s existence, a staunch objection to the idea of a god in the sky, or something in between. This diversity of notions has long made atheism a difficult phenomenon to conceive of academically, and conversations about the chair reflect these complexities.

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Atheism has long meant different things to different people: Even a brief sketch of atheism’s past in the U.S. shows that controversy among non-believers over how to define atheism—is it an adversarial, political movement? A much quieter set of secular principles? Some mix of the two?—has been going on for centuries. The word “atheism” comes from the Greek term a-theos, or “not/without god.” The term is ripe for debate: Should “without God” mean “against the idea of God’s existence” or even “against religion”? If the latter, how does atheism conceive of religions that aren’t based on a belief in God in the monotheistic sense? Does atheism propose an alternative to religion? Or is it just an attitude of indifference?