Here you are free to choose: Either end your speech with “God bless America” or end your political career. In fact, religious rhetoric is so compulsory in the United States that it’s anyone’s guess what candidates actually believe. Which gives atheists a puppyish kind of hope: We sniff around any candidate we suspect might be a closet nonbeliever. Surely Sen. Bernie Sanders, the non-practicing Jew from Vermont, surely he must be an atheist! Throw us a bone, Bernie!

All due respect to fellow atheists, but Sanders may be the one politician who would be forthright about this. He calls himself a socialist, after all. How much worse is atheist?

Don’t answer that.