Atheists in church

[slartibartfast]

I think an openly atheistic person in a church based community would be very popular. People would see it as a challenge. Not sure the atheist would have a very good time tho. Would be hard being constantly told you are amoral and going to hell and not being accepted as you are.

This depends a lot on individual churches and their attitudes.  Some can be quite punitive and scornful but others are more accepting and encouraging.  For the latter, all unsaved people are just people who haven't found Christ yet and need some help getting there.  I think the former could be altogether different and perhaps abusive, so it wouldn't be an inviting or interesting atmosphere.  There are those churches where the preacher condemns people for the most minor offenses.  Also consider that there are many (who knows how many) closet atheists who are members of churches for various reasons.  I once knew one who participated on a forum such as this.  He was absolutely an atheist but also a long time member of his church somewhere in New Hampshire.  Of course, that's a pretty liberal area so I doubt there was any fire and brimstone at his church.

Yes - this seems like a topic in its own right - what proportion of church going populace is purely there because of fear of communal excommunication, judgement, loss of friends, but they are really agnostic at best, but happy to go along for the ride since it's how they were raised all their life - ie. not wanting to topple the apple cart, as you will. In my view the pressure in certain countries / wider communities would be very high to do this, especially in rural US where not being seen as a "good" Christian is almost like not belonging to the human race. When was the last time a US politician came out as anything less than openly Christian? It would be political suicide.

I am also sure the "Church" is very keen statistically to present the highest possible number of "believers" from both a credibility as well as a recruitment angle. The "several billion lemmings can't be wrong" mentality.