Can Militant Atheism Shape the Legal System?

Religion has now taken the centre stage of the public debate worldwide. It is frequently identified as both the cause of large-scale global conflicts and a main source of transnational solidarity. Over the last decades, however, there has been a decrease of religious people active in devout practices and an increase of religious nones and their variants (hard and soft atheists, agnostics, rationalists, humanists, secularists). This raises a number of questions as to when, where, and how the groups of atheists should engage with religious issues and the legal degree to which such engagement implies becoming ‘religion-like’. This is even more evident in contexts where the model for managing the State-religion relationship and even freedom of religion are characterised by overt or implicit endorsements towards traditional confessions that, as such, enjoy special protected legal status. One of the most prominent examples of that is given by the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalisti), which in the last years has launched judicial review proceedings against what they considered Italy’s limited ex parte Ecclesiae secularism. In this manner, and even with a tiny minority position, today’s Italian militant atheism is helping to shed light on the contradictions of the biased pro-religion interpretations of Italy’s constitutional order, including the supreme principle of secularism.