Hanging Out with the Godless

Outside the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, in downtown San Francisco, it was 72° and sunny on a Friday afternoon in early November, four days before the midterm elections. Three conservatively dressed Jehovah’s Witnesses were standing next to a sidewalk display of pamphlets, waiting patiently to offer “Help for Those Who Grieve” and to give you their answer to “Was Life Created?” Inside the Hyatt Regency were 1,000 of the Witnesses’ least likely customers. They wore T-shirts that said UNABASHED ATHEIST and ASK AN ATHEIST and ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES and CREDULITY IS NOT A VIRTUE. They had removed the Gideon Bibles from their hotel-room nightstands and placed them outside their doors, in the hallways. They were mostly, but not exclusively, white and mostly, but not exclusively, gray haired. (One man wore a cap identifying him as a World War II veteran.) They had come to San Francisco from Las Cruces, New Mexico; Mobile, Alabama; Waco, Texas; and Eugene, Oregon; from Kentucky, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska; and from Canada and the U.K. They were here for the 41st annual conference of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and which calls itself a “nonprophet nonprofit” dedicated to “protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state.” It was the biggest gathering ever for the FFRF convention, whose last appearance in San Francisco — one of the three “most godless” cities in America, according to a 2017 survey — had been in 1999, when only about 150 people attended, prompting the Christian Courier to snark: “How would you like to throw…