The need for a secular student movement has never been greater. Secular students, whether self-described as atheists, skeptics, freethinkers, agnostics, brights, humanists, nontheists, or something else, wake up each day and face a world heavily influenced by religious fanaticism, ignorance and superstition. Examples are plentiful:

• According to a 1999 Gallup poll, 47% of Americans believe that human beings were created in their present form within the last ten thousand years.
• In 2003, U.S. General Boykin spoke to several churches, sometimes in uniform, saying that in the war on terrorism ―the enemy is a guy named Satan,‖ and clearly painted the U.S.‘s conflicts at the time as Christianity vs. Islam. Boykin‘s remarks hit the press in October 2003, when he was in charge of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and held the position of deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
  
• In 2003, the University of Minnesota's American Mosaic Project Survey found that 39.6% of people surveyed list atheists as a group that does not at all agree with their vision for American society. The survey also found that 47.6% of people surveyed would disapprove if their child wanted to marry an atheist. Overall, the survey found that atheists were by far the least trusted group in American society compared to Muslims, Homosexuals, Conservative Christians, Recent Immigrants, Hispanics, Jew, Conservative Christians, and White Americans.
  
• In December of 2003, Senator Joe Lieberman said that some people "… forget that the constitutional separation of church and state, which I strongly support, promises freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."
•  In March of 2004, George W. Bush addressed the conference of the National Association of Evangelicals. He thanked them and their 30 million members on behalf of the country for doing God‘s work. On the back of the program for the conference was printed ―"What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do For America? Anything We Want."
  
• A 2006 survey by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life asked, "What is your religious preference?" and 11% responded, "No religion, not a believer, atheist, agnostic." In this survey 56% responded as Protestant and 23% as Roman Catholics. The other categories -- Jewish, Mormon, Orthodox Church (Greek or Russian), Islam/Muslim, and Other Religions -- totaled just 8%. These results are similar to those of a BBC survey that determined there are more atheists and agnostics than there are Jews, Presbyterians, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Roman and Greek Orthodox combined in the United States.
  
• Gallup regularly polls U.S. voters on how minority status influences voting. In 2007, when asked if they would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist candidate of their party, only 45% said yes. This score is fully ten percentage points lower than the score an otherwise qualified homosexual received, and even further below the scores women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Baptists and Mormons received. In fact, no minority scored lower than atheists.
  
• In 2008, the Pope declared seven new deadly sins dealing mainly with bioethics and pollution. The man in charge of examining confessions for the Vatican, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, stated that, "You offend god... [by] carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos."

We at the Secular Student Alliance would like to see all of this change. The underlying purpose of the Secular Student Alliance is to bring about a society in which the ideals of scientific rationality, secularism, democracy, and human-based ethics flourish. Whereas many other organizations already exist to spread these values to adult populations, the SSA focuses on fostering these values among high school and college students. Our specific mission is to organize, unite, educate and serve students and student communities that promote these ideals. We are a national, democratic, membership organization. We provide:

• Logistical support to students who wish to start affiliate groups at their college or high school
  
• A community of like-minded young adults
  
• A vehicle for promoting secularism and humanistic values to young people
  
• A bridge leading to opportunities in the national secular movement
  

Student leaders like you founded the SSA in 2000. It is a youthful, independent organization with connections to veterans in the movement, such as the American Humanist Association, Atheist Alliance International, Secular Coalition for America, and many others. The members of the SSA believe that by educating our communities and ourselves we can make a better society — a society focused on reason, science, and human-based ethics.

In an article in the Spring 2009 New Directions for Student Services, authors Kathleen M. Goodman & John A. Mueller write that "Atheist students are often marginalized by higher education professionals, knowingly or unknowingly, to the point of being made to feel invisible on college campuses." They go on to suggest multiple ways of supporting atheists on campus, including encouraging the formation of atheist student organizations. The article, an invaluable resource for any student working to start a group on campus, is entitled "Invisible, Marginalized, and Stigmatized: Understanding and Addressing the Needs of Atheist Students," and is available online at www.interscience.wiley.com.