Outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins said U.S. politicians should pay more attention to the growing secularist segment of the population.

“My impression is that they’re a lot more numerous than many people realize,” Dawkins said. “I think that may be a lesson politicians need to learn, that they don’t only need to suck up to the Catholic lobby and the Jewish lobby and Islam, that lobby. Maybe the nonbelievers lobby is a lot more powerful than they realize.”

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The evolutionary biologist said during an interview with Seth Andrews, host of “The Thinking Atheist,” that secularism was built into the U.S. constitution.

“(Politicians) shouldn’t be promoting religion as part of their government legislation,” Dawkins said.

Dawkins said he thought the established Church of England, ironically enough, kept religion out of British politics.

“The fact that we have an established church with the queen as the head of it sort of makes religion boring, and so it kind of doesn’t really catch on the way it does in America, where because it’s unconstitutional to bring religion into government, religion has become free enterprise and therefore can be made much more exciting, and you have megachurches and happy-clappy dancing in the aisles and things,” Dawkins said.

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