Americans are completely baffled by Trump’s penchant for making things up. He cites facts that don’t exist. He talks about events that never occurred. And he uses these opinions to inform his policy decisions.

Sane Americans are justifiably freaking out. It is frightening to have the most powerful country on earth dragged around by the whims of a petulant president. As Dana Bash observed, Trump “has a history of wanting his own personal truth to be everybody else’s reality.”

That is a delusional standard for what constitutes the “truth”—a standard that is usually reserved for despots and cult leaders, not the POTUS. It is refreshing to see both liberals (and some conservatives) demanding more robust explanations from our Dear Leader. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, extraordinary claims must require extraordinary evidence.

I hope you agree. The question then becomes: why has it taken Americans so long to worry about the dangerous relationship between personal faith and politics?

As an atheist, all I can say is welcome to the fight.

Seen through a non-believer’s eyes, Trump’s misinformation campaign isn’t actually that much of an aberration to the American political experience.

Trump’s fondness for fabrication is an unintended byproduct of allowing religious beliefs to be a primary justification for political decisions. Like Trump, the Christian Right has willfully propagated their own alt-facts to achieve desired political outcomes. And by doing so, American civil society has inadvertently given Trump the space—the permission to revel in fantasy and subject the world to his intellectual capricousness.