By James H. Toner, The Catholic Thing - Around thirty years ago, the redoubtable Father Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) asked and answered the question that is the title of this column. My present task is not to try to improve upon one of Father Neuhaus’s typically gleaming essays, but only to remind readers of it, and refer them to it... Father Neuhaus answered the question in the negative: atheists cannot be good citizens. The kinds of atheists he described thirty years ago, however, are no longer merely “present.” Rather, they dominate our intellectual and moral discourse.