For four decades, one side in the fight over religion’s role in American politics was clearly overmatched. You might say it didn’t have a prayer.

Secular voters watched helplessly as well-organized evangelical Christians helped to elect President Ronald Reagan and exerted unprecedented influence over George W. Bush administration policy. In the Donald Trump era, the president who won roughly 80 percent of the evangelical vote has named dozens of socially conservative jurists to lifetime appointments as federal judges.

Now, secular leaders are hoping to get back in the battle, starting by boosting participation by non-religious voters in the 2020 presidential, congressional and state elections. Events in Southern California could play an important part.

The Pasadena-based Secular Student Alliance, a national group that includes more than 300 college and high school chapters, is planning its annual conference July 12-14 at the University of Southern California. One scheduled topic: “Making an Impact On the 2020 Elections.”

“Where student groups can get involved is through the vote,” said Sarah Levin, director of governmental affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Secular Coalition for America, a group that advocates for religious freedom.

Levin, scheduled to speak to the students at USC, will talk up the basics of American political action.

“I’m going to encourage individual students to find a candidate who inspires them, get involved in the campaign, and make clear that they’re there because of their secular values.”

Advocates see reasons to think the current voting cycle, and the Trump era in general, offers an opportunity to make a serious voting bloc out of the often hard-to-define group of Americans who fall under the “secular” banner, which covers Americans who are atheists, agnostics, humanists, free-thinkers and skeptics, as well as others who believe in God but claim no affiliation with a specific religion.

Those reasons include:

Polls show that the number of Americans calling themselves non-religious is rising, while the number calling themselves Christian fundamentalists is falling, changes attributed to generational shifts.”We’re the fastest-growing religious identity in America,” Evan Clark, 30-year-old executive director of Atheists United Los Angeles, said of people with no religious identity.

Secular groups report a surge in activism in response to Trump actions, such as the Republican administration’s support for what conservatives call “religious liberty” but some critics see as a license to discriminate.

The political taboo against non-believers shows signs of easing.

In April 2018, California Reps. Jared Huffman and Jerry McNerney, both Democrats from Northern California, helped to found the first-of-its-kind Congressional Freethought Caucus. Huffman said it aims to “help spark an open dialogue about science and reason-based policy solutions, and the importance of defending the secular character of our government.”

“The good news is that acceptance is increasing every year,” said Levin, who sees a potential parallel with the way homosexuality became less of a taboo for politicians after the first few were brave enough to come out.

But for the non-religious to gain as much political clout as evangelicals, several obstacles remain firmly in place:

2016 and 2018 election returns showed the Christian voting bloc is more enthusiastic about going to the polls than non-religious people are. While polls say fundamentalists are 15% of the population, they cast 26% of the votes last year; non-religious people are one-quarter of the population, but they cast only 17% of the votes.

It remains easier to organize religiously like-minded people than their irreligious opposite numbers. The Faith and Freedom Coalition, led by conservative activist Ralph Reed, was able to spend $18 million in 2018 campaigns and has announced plans to spend tens of millions in 2020 to mobilize Christian voters in presidential and congressional battleground states.”It isn’t as easy to corral Nones because they aren’t gathered in well-marked congregations like white evangelicals are,” wrote James A. Haught, a senior editor at Free Inquiry magazine, using the shorthand for people who answer “none” when a pollster asks about their religion.

The taboo against non-believers is far from gone, and the lack of openly unreligious candidates might make it harder to excite secular voters.

Huffman and Freethought Caucus co-founder Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, are the only two members of Congress on a list of “non-theist” elected officials maintained by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Freethought Equality.

A Gallup poll this year showed 39% of Americans, including 28% of Democrats, would not vote for an atheist for president even if the candidate were a well-qualified member of the voter’s own party; that’s more than refuse to vote for a Muslim or a gay or lesbian candidate.

Youth factor

Secular leaders say one way to transform non-religious voters into a cohesive political force would be to help them realize they are a group in the first place. People might hold positions on religious discrimination, abortion rights and climate change that are consistent with others who don’t connect to a religious faith, but they might not see those positions, or their alliances, as connected.

Political scientists say non-religious voters’ low turnout rate goes hand in hand with the fact that they tend to be younger, in an age bracket that has been widely viewed as reluctant — some even argued lazy — about casting ballots. That perception took a dent in the 2018 midterms, when 18- to 29-year-olds turned out in record numbers for the age group.

The description fits Isaac Gilles, 20, a senior at USC who is co-president of the campus Secular Student Fellowship, which is meant to “provide community to non-religious USC students.”

Gilles calls himself a “secular humanist.”

“I was raised in a conservative Jewish family. I definitely associated with cultural Judaism, in that I feel it’s important to preserve a lot of the customs of the Jewish faith,” Gilles said.

“But where I get my beliefs about morality from is secular humanism, not believing in any sort of higher power but looking for man-made explanations for what it means to live a good life of meaning and purpose.”

Gilles also is political. He has served internships with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, in his home state of Connecticut, and with City Councilman Joe Buscaino in Los Angeles.

Believing rules should come from human organizations and not from a god, Gilles said he thinks it’s “a moral duty to vote” and help choose government leaders.

Although he voted in the 2016 presidential election, Gilles said, he was slow to see the value in voting for state and local offices, too.

He said many of his youthful peers might not vote at all because they haven’t yet figured out what they believe in.

Gilles is another scheduled speaker at next month’s Secular Student Alliance conference in Los Angeles.

Kevin Bolling, the group’s executive director, said the secular movement isn’t trying to upset American tradition. In fact, he said the goal is the opposite — to take the country back to its roots.

“We started as a very secular nation,” Bolling said. “That’s something special about this country, the separation of church and state. The First Amendment and the establishment clause (‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’) are very clear that the government shouldn’t support or discourage religion.”

Secular leaders say they face misconceptions about what exactly they do advocate.

One misconception, Levin said, is that non-religious voters automatically support Democrats over Republicans. Polls showed that three-quarters of white evangelical Christians voted Republican in 2018 — and more than 80% voted for Trump in 2016 — while three-quarters of secular voters backed Democrats.

Another is that people who don’t believe in God reject notions of morality. “People still have a hard time understanding how you can be non-religious and be moral,” Levin said. “We have beliefs. They’re just not religious or supernatural.”

Then there’s the idea that self-described free thinkers are incapable of rallying around common beliefs. In fact, Levin said, secular voters are more likely to agree with each other on some issues more than evangelicals are.

The Secular Coalition for America cites polls taken in 2015 and 2016 that show that the percentages of non-religious people who support legal access to abortion (73%) and same-sex marriage (78%) and oppose a right for businesses to refuse service based on religious beliefs (71%) are higher than the percentages of evangelicals who take the opposing views (63%, 64% and 56%, respectively) on those same topics.

The Secular Coalition’s efforts to create power connections between non-believers include an event called the SoCal Secular Leadership Summit, held last March in Temecula, the group’s Secular Values Voter “campaign to educate political candidates” about non-religious voters’ significance, and the multi-organization Secular America Votes registration initiative.

Levin said the Secular Coalition soon plans to launch an online candidate tracker designed to help voters gauge where presidential hopefuls of all parties stand on the separation of church and state, inclusion of non-religious people in the political process, and specific issues that are important to many secular voters.

Will it work?

Tom Hogen-Esch, a Cal State Northridge political science professor, has taught about evangelical Christians’ support for the Republican Party. The so-called religious right organized in the 1970s around opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion, he said.

It will be harder for non-religious voters to organize themselves into a political force. But Hogen-Esch said the same might have been said of the other side before 1979, when a Baptist minister named Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority.

“It may be that secular organizations are in the same place that evangelical groups were 35 years ago,” Hogen-Esch said. “They’re at the beginning of something much bigger.”