But unlike the Christian organizations, non-theistic organizations report facing much more resistance in getting their messages on billboards. CAM and GodSpeaks have both had ad space donated to them by billboard companies at the encouragement of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the trade organization that represents the nation’s billboard owners and operators. GodSpeaks’s landmark billboard campaign was only able to go nationwide, in 1999, thanks to the OAAA’s help in obtaining millions of dollars worth of donated billboard space that had become vacant due to a recent ban on outdoor cigarette advertising. On the other hand, FFRF, United COR, and American Atheists have all struggled to keep their ads up after getting billboard leases, with some even being taken down by the leasers in response to complaints by local residents, sometimes as soon as a day after first going up. So as CAM and ProLife Across America’s billboard presences have grown in recent years, atheist organizations have focused more on digital strategies, reporting that they draw more members that way.

2016 will be billboard evangelism’s biggest year yet and, if donations earmarked for these campaigns continue to rise, 2017 will top that. There’s no telling how the next four years under Trump could affect billboard-specific donations. CAM told me that Trump’s election isn’t likely to affect its messaging because it tries to stay away from political issues. Some of the less prolific non-Christian billboard advertisers, however, do see their messages changing to cope with the new political climate. Syed predicts that ICNA’s 2017 messaging will focus on building alliances with other minority groups and even reaching out to Trump supporters, a demographic he said the organization realized it hadn’t reached out to in the past. Still, the message of religious tolerance will remain paramount. “We consider American Muslims as part and parcel of America and we believe in the Constitution and we believe that it grants equal rights and opportunities to all Americans,” Syed told me. “We are not going to be fearful of any challenge that is going to come and we are going to face it with greater courage and greater strength than before.”

America’s billboards paint a national image that is deceptive on one hand, but telling on the other. The sheer number of evangelical billboards claim a disproportionate stake of the landscape, while the fledgling numbers of non-Christian ones belie an ever-growing number of Americans forced to prove and justify their existence. We will never know just how many converts like Gollish were helped along in their journey to Jesus by a billboard, or how many others were inspired by other roadside messages imploring them to acknowledge the reality of atheist and Islamic-American identities and communities. Either way, the intents of their broadcast messages are clear: to make us consider the presence of the divine and, less overtly, what American identity can be. Both make one think, as Gollish puts it, that “maybe there is something bigger than us.”

